Guides

Use cases

Real workflows people use GNO for — research, coding agents, client work, and more.

GNO started as a hybrid search CLI and has grown into a full local knowledge workspace. Here’s how people actually use it.

Obsidian vault, supercharged

Point GNO at your Obsidian vault. You keep editing in Obsidian, and suddenly you have BM25 + vector + reranking over your notes, a CLI for quick queries, and an MCP server your AI tools can reach.

gno init ~/Documents/Obsidian --name vault && gno index
gno mcp install --target claude-desktop

Memory for Claude Code

Install GNO as a skill for Claude Code. Your coding agent can query your notes, docs, and project files on demand without pasting everything into every prompt.

gno skill install --target claude-code
# Then in Claude Code:
# /gno query "how does our auth flow work"

Research + synthesis

Research corpus on disk, query via CLI, pipe results to jq or to a spreadsheet automation tool, and get cited AI answers from local models.

gno query "Q4 budget projections" --json | jq '.results[0]'
gno ask "what did we conclude about pricing" --answer

Due diligence and consulting

Index a client’s mixed-format document set (Markdown, PDFs, Office docs), share the workspace through the gno.sh publishing layer as an invite-only or encrypted space, and hand the reader URL to the client.

gno init ~/clients/acme --name acme && gno index
# Export a compiled artifact, open /studio, publish as
# invite-only or encrypted

Team wiki with git sync

Point GNO at a git-synced team wiki directory. gno daemon keeps the index fresh as team members push updates, and everyone on the team gets the same retrieval behavior in their local CLI and AI tools.

Personal memory layer

Index everything personal you write: journals, meeting notes, saved articles, receipts. One gno query later you remember things you’d otherwise have lost.