Unpack it and point it at a vault.
Every release builds one archive per platform and a SHA256SUMS file over all of
them, published on both forges. There is nothing to install and nothing to configure: the
archive holds a single binary, and the binary takes the path to your vault.
GitHub carries all three platforms. The homelab Forgejo runner has only a Linux container,
so git.ragtux.com carries the Linux archive — the same build from the same tag.
Pick your platform
Only the Linux build has been run on real hardware. CI compiles and links the Windows and macOS binaries, and the release job is the first thing that ever links them, but neither has been started on a GPU. If one of them misbehaves, an issue is genuinely useful — you will be the first person to see it.
Linux
x86-64 · .tar.gz
- Needs a Vulkan-capable driver; Wayland and X11 both work
- The reference machine: NixOS on Wayland with an NVIDIA GPU
- On NixOS, run it through the repository's
shell.nix, which supplies the X11, Wayland and Vulkan libraries GPUI loads at run time
Windows
x86-64 · .zip
- Untested on real hardware
- Not code signed: SmartScreen warns on first launch — More info › Run anyway
macOS
Apple silicon (arm64) · .tar.gz
- Untested on real hardware; there is no Intel build
- Not notarized: open it the first time with right-click › Open, or clear the
quarantine flag with
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine
Check what you downloaded against the SHA256SUMS file in the same release:
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS on Linux, shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS on
macOS, Get-FileHash on Windows.
Running it
Scoria takes a vault as its argument. A vault is a folder of Markdown files — if Obsidian
opens it, Scoria opens it, and it does not matter whether the folder has an
.obsidian directory in it yet.
tar xf scoria-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
./scoria ~/notes # open a vault
./scoria ~/notes --note "Welcome" # open it on a note
./scoria ~/notes --note "Spec#Parser" # open it scrolled to a headingThe manual's install page covers the command-line flags, and open a vault covers what happens on first launch.
From source
The repository builds with a stable toolchain pinned by rust-toolchain.toml.
The one thing to know is that gpui is a git dependency pinned to a Zed release
commit — the crates.io release is stale and crashes on NVIDIA — so build with
--locked and let Cargo.lock decide.
git clone https://github.com/ragtux/scoria
cd scoria
cargo build --release --locked -p scoria # on NixOS: inside nix-shell
cargo test --workspace # the library suites, including the ratchets
./target/release/scoria ~/notesTwo forges, one history
The repository lives on GitHub and on
git.ragtux.com, and a v*
tag pushed to both builds a release on both. Either is a fine place to clone from; issues
and patches are read on both.
MIT, the whole thing
Use it, change it, ship something built on it, commercially or not. There is no separate commercial license because there is nothing to buy. The license in plain words →
Before you open a vault you care about
Scoria reads a vault well and writes one carefully, but writing is the newer half and this is v0.1.0. Two habits cost nothing and remove the whole risk:
- Have a backup. A copy of the folder, or a git repository in it, or whatever you already use. This is good advice for any editor and better advice for a young one.
- Try it on a scratch vault first. Copy a handful of notes into a new folder, edit them in Scoria, then open the folder in Obsidian and see that it looks like nothing happened. That is the same check Scoria's own round-trip gate makes.