Ledge is a Markdown notebook that runs shell commands, code, SQL, etc from inside your own notes.
I built Ledge because I spend much of my day copy/pasting commands from my notes into the terminal. I was inspired by how much cmux helped me organize my terminals - but there was still a split brain between my notes and frequently run commands. I've been daily-driving it for the past few weeks and use it for deploys, API calls, smoke tests, etc.
Ledge runs your real shell just like a terminal app and can be hosted locally or remotely over SSH using ledge-server. I've been building it since July and have recently added support for all the major platforms: Mac (Silicon), Windows (WSL required), Linux, iOS, Android. Mobile devices require SSH access to a ledge-server and Android is still in beta and looking for beta testers (see link on website)!
It's built on Bun and Electrobun and is free and open-source. Feel free to review the code and contribute at https://github.com/ledgesh/ledge
Feedback is very much welcome. Any must-have features that are missing?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YufgfbUgEgI and xiki.org
For people who used these tools long-term: what held them back? UX/accessibility, or do people simply prefer keeping documents separate from the actual work?
we saw a bunch of issues with desktop, in no particular order
1. authoring runbooks is difficult, most people barely document their work let alone make it executable
2. keeping runbooks up to date is difficult, they are error-prone across systems
3. agents are now pretty good at a number of the tasks these ideas solve for, and are good at working around issues caused by docs becoming out of date/etc
all these tools are great for your own notes, but are very difficult to scale
1. Ledge's bet is it shouldn't feel like authoring at all. I've always had markdown docs chock full of commands and docs so making them runnable was the next logical step for me.
2. True. Keeping any kind of documentation up to date is difficult
3. Also true. I'm hoping Ledge's built-in agent support will bridge that gap and allow agents to help keep the docs up-to-date
And yes, a "Team" notebook is a challenge. Technically anyone with SSH access can all share a Ledge notebook. But that probably doesn't get us all the way there.
Thanks again for providing your thoughts. This by no means is a solved problem but I'm interested to see where it goes!
Feel free to get in touch if you are open to an exchange, you can find my contact details in the write-up.
Hasn't this guy heard of [old product that is a huge pain and no one likes]? Why would he ever make something that suits his own interests and preferences?
It seems like you think that pointing out that I'm sharing my attitude is some sort of gotcha, but I'm confused. Sharing one's attitude is the whole point of posting an internet comment, isn't it?
I wish Notion could just integrate these things together and make it work, or someone build an Obsidian plugin. More often than not it would be so convenient to do something like this.