How-To

Practical GNO recipes for keeping collections fresh, building personal knowledge bases, connecting AI tools, and recovering stale indexes.

Index a personal knowledge base, research archive, meeting notes, PDFs, or a Karpathy-style memory bank; installed skills search that index before they answer.

For second-brain work, create typed pages with gno capture --preset person, --preset company-project, --preset meeting, or --preset idea-original. Keep the current synthesis above ## Timeline and the evidence trail below it.

Installed skills also include recipes for brain-first lookup, capture/file, meeting ingestion, email context, source summaries, idea capture, and citation/provenance. Preview them with gno skill show --file recipes/brain-first-lookup.md. These recipes use local indexed context and user-supplied/exported external material; they do not add native Gmail, Calendar, Slack, webhook, cron, or background-agent automation.

Keep a collection fresh automatically

Use gno daemon when you want local file changes to become searchable without keeping the Web UI open.

gno init ~/Documents/Knowledge --name knowledge
gno index --models-pull
gno daemon --detach
gno daemon --status
gno daemon --stop

The daemon watches configured collections, syncs changed files, and embeds new chunks. It also exposes the resident MCP endpoint at http://127.0.0.1:3000/mcp and safe redacted status routes, without the browser or full REST API. Use --no-sync-on-start if you only want future changes handled. For git-backed folders, run gno update --git-pull or gno index --git-pull when you want remote commits pulled in.

The daemon picks up atomic saves and folder deletions on local disks. It can miss changes on network or removable drives; run gno update after reconnecting or remounting them.

When a deleted file comes back at the same path, the next sync restores it and records one change event, even if its bytes are identical. Unchanged text keeps its existing vectors; a changed title, body, or embedding model needs new embeddings. Run gno embed after gno update when embeddings are pending. Interrupted work resumes where it stopped. Sync also updates links from other collections that point at changed files.

Build a personal AI memory bank

1. Put notes, PDFs, docs, exports, and research into one folder or a few topic folders.
2. Add them as GNO collections with clear names.
3. Run gno index, then keep them fresh with gno daemon --detach.
4. Install MCP or skills so your AI assistant can retrieve from that memory before answering.

contentTypes:
  - id: person
    prefixes: [people/]
    preset: person
  - id: meeting
    prefixes: [meetings/]
    preset: meeting

gno collection add ~/Documents/Research --name research
gno collection add ~/Documents/Notes --name notes
gno collection add ~/Downloads/Papers --name papers
gno index
gno mcp install --target claude-desktop
gno skill install --target all --scope user --force

Connect your AI tools

Pick the integration by how you want the assistant to behave.

• MCP: automatic tool calls from Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Zed, Windsurf, OpenCode, Amp, LM Studio, LibreChat, and compatible clients.
• Agent skills: explicit /gno lookups with low context overhead.
• REST API: scripts, launchers, dashboards, and custom local apps.

gno mcp install --target cursor --scope project
gno skill install --target codex --scope user

Use GNO without living in a terminal

Start the local workspace, then add folders and manage indexing from the browser.

gno serve
open http://localhost:3000

Use Search for retrieval, Ask for cited answers, Browse for document navigation, Graph for relationships, and Collections for folder management.

Fix stale or missing results

1. Confirm the files are indexed: gno ls --collection notes.
2. Rescan changed files: gno update.
3. Refresh embeddings: gno embed notes.
4. Run the full path: gno index.
5. Diagnose system issues: gno doctor.

If you changed the embedding model, clear stale collection embeddings before rebuilding them:

gno collection clear-embeddings notes
gno embed notes

Research with filters and graph context

Combine filters when your archive grows beyond simple search.

gno query "learning loops" --collection research --tags-any ai,pkm
gno ask "what are my strongest notes on retrieval?" --since "last month" --answer
gno graph --neighbors gno://notes/llm-memory.md --include-similar
gno graph --from gno://notes/a.md --to gno://notes/b.md

Export a note for gno.sh

Local GNO stays private. When you intentionally want to publish a note or collection, export an artifact and upload it through gno.sh Studio.

gno publish export atlas --out ~/Downloads/atlas.json

Then open /studio, import the artifact, and pick public, secret-link, invite-only, or encrypted sharing.