EarlyTerms

QMD

Established · Emerged · 190 days old · Last reviewed

QMD is a local-first command-line search engine for Markdown notes, docs, and knowledge bases, built by Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke. It combines BM25 full-text search, vector semantic search, and LLM re-ranking, and exposes an MCP server so Claude Code and other agents can query a personal corpus instead of grepping files.

The GitHub repo tobi/qmd went public on December 8, 2025, crossed 22,000 stars by April 2026, and landed on Hacker News on January 20. Version v2.1.0 shipped tree-sitter code chunking and intent disambiguation on April 5, 2026. Lütke calls it "an on-device search engine for everything you need to remember".

💡

Mercury VP of Product Ryan Wiggins dumped 15,000 work docs and 3.5 million words into a folder, ran QMD to index the lot on his laptop, and wired Claude Code's UserPromptSubmit hook to call `qmd` on every prompt — producing a Second Brain that auto-injects five years of Mercury context without cloud sync or an API key.

Think of QMD as Spotlight for your second brain — but it understands what you meant, not just what you typed.

Search Interest

peak ~519/mo
updated 2026-06-14
~519/mo ~259/mo 0
2026-05-16 2026-05-31 2026-06-14
Term Lifecycle
  1. Nascent
    0–7 days
  2. Emergent
    8–30 days
  3. Validating
    31–90 days
  4. Rising
    91–180 days
  5. Established ← now
    180 days +

Why is it emerging now?

TL;DR

QMD turned four months old in April 2026 with 22.6k stars, an official v2.1.0 tree-sitter release, and a growing ecosystem of TUIs, Obsidian plugins, and Second-Brain templates that plug it into Claude Code — making Tobi Lütke's weekend side project the de facto local-RAG layer for agent workflows.

6 forces driving coverage — scroll →
tobi/qmd
mini cli search engine for your docs, knowledge bases, meeting notes
Dec 8, 2025 22.6k stars
tobi/qmd
v2.1.0 — tree-sitter code chunking and intent disambiguation
CLI output emits clickable OSC 8 terminal hyperlinks; code files now chunk at function/class boundaries.
Apr 5, 2026
Tobi Lütke @tobi
The QMD industrial complex grows stronger
Apr 15, 2026
Tobi Lütke @tobi
So many people at Shopify use QMD we integrated it into the monorepo
"QMD is a game changer locally. So many people at Shopify use it we integrated it into the monorepo."
Feb 2026
Y Hacker News
QMD — Quick Markdown Search
Jan 20, 2026 25 points
Alexander Zeitler
Introducing lazyqmd — a TUI for QMD
Author suggests the lazyqmd + QMD combo can replace Obsidian and Logseq for file-based knowledge management.
2026

Outlook

6-month signal projection and commercial timeline.

Signal high
Revenue moderate

Tobi's reach plus an MCP server at agent-harness critical mass keeps QMD the default local-RAG layer for the Claude Code crowd through 2026.

Risk · Acronym clash with Quarto's .qmd file extension muddies SEO and could split the brand as Posit/R users Google the wrong thing.

Analogs · ripgrep · Obsidian · llama.cpp

Monetization timeline
  1. now
    OSS tool, zero SERP ads

    No paid placements — QMD's SERP is GitHub, DeepWiki, and indie dev blogs.

  2. 3-6mo
    Hosted wrappers + courses land

    Expect paid Obsidian plugins, "Second Brain with QMD" courses, and hosted managed variants.

  3. 6-12mo
    Local-RAG category consolidates

    Winner pulls searches; losing forks drop out and QMD either owns the term or splits it with a rival.

Competition & Opportunity for term “QMD”

Three heuristic signals derived from the tracked queries, the term's monetization cards, and its cluster neighbors. Directional, not audited.

Content Gap
10 queries tracked
Led by General (9), Showcase (1)
10 Suggest-only tails — long-tail opening
Revenue Potential
0% commercial-intent queries
2 monetization angles mapped
Mostly informational — pre-commercial
Build Difficulty
Very High
Stage: established — category is settled
9 / 10 default TLDs taken · oldest incumbent qmd.com (1998-09-24)
7 related terms already published
Heuristic · signals: tracked queries, term monetization cards, cluster neighbors

Ideas for term “QMD”

Buildable pitches — turn this term into an article, site, product, post, newsletter, video, or course. Steal any card and run with it.

Article
QMD vs ripgrep vs Obsidian semantic search: which one belongs in your Claude Code loop?

Head-to-head benchmarks on a 15k-doc corpus — index time, recall, RAM footprint. Dev-tools comparison queries have high search intent and almost no current results.

Article
How to build a Second Brain with QMD, Claude Code, and UserPromptSubmit hooks

Step-by-step tutorial cloning Ryan Wiggins' Mercury setup. The hook pattern plus QMD is the load-bearing combo, and no canonical write-up exists yet.

Article
Quarto .qmd vs Tobi's QMD: disambiguating the two things Google now thinks you want

Explainer that captures both search intents. Acronym-clash pages rank fast because they answer a confused query with one authoritative result.

Product
An Obsidian plugin that embeds QMD with a one-click "index this vault" button

achekulaev/obsidian-qmd exists but is rough. A polished plugin with vault-scoped collections and pricing tier (free personal, $5/mo teams) has a clear buyer.

Product
qmdcloud — hosted team QMD with shared collections and SSO

QMD is strictly local; mid-size teams wanting cross-laptop knowledge recall will pay for a managed variant. Same play Posthog ran vs self-host.

Website
A directory of QMD integrations — TUIs, editor plugins, MCP wrappers, preset collections

Ecosystem is fragmenting fast (lazyqmd, obsidian-qmd, ehc-io/qmd MCP, qntx-labs Rust port). A curated directory captures the "qmd integrations" long tail.

Post
I replaced Notion, Apple Notes, and ripgrep with a 200-line QMD config. Here's my Second Brain stack.

First-person teardown of the real setup (hooks, collections, intent strings). Claude Code + QMD posts are outperforming generic "I tried X" content right now.

Video
"Turning 5 years of my work into a Claude Code superpower with QMD" — 20-minute build-along YouTube

Screen-recorded indexing of a real archive, then live Claude Code prompts against it. Visual tool with a surprising recall demo is inherently clippable.

Post HN / r/programming
The Year the Shopify CEO Became a Dev-Tools Maintainer

Tobi Lütke pushed 973 commits in six weeks while running a $150B company — and the repo sitting on 22,000 stars is a markdown search tool, not a startup.

Post Newsletter / LinkedIn
Why Your Next AI Stack Starts With a 50-Line CLI

Enterprise RAG vendors raised $500M last year to solve what a Shopify engineer's side project now does on a MacBook, offline, in under a second.

Post YouTube / Tech media
I Fed QMD Five Years of Notes. It Told Me Things I'd Forgotten I Knew.

Semantic recall over a personal archive hits different when the archive is actually yours — a live demo of scoping a decade of Slack, meeting notes, and half-written Notion pages.

What People Search

Long-tail queries from Google Suggest + Trends. Volume and competition are heuristics — directional, not audited. Content Type comes from query shape.

Keyword
Competition
Content Type
qmd
Very Low
General
qmd github
Very Low
Showcase
qmd openclaw
Very Low
General
qmdj calculator
Very Low
General
qmd skill
Very Low
General
qmdj joey yap
Very Low
General
qmdj chart
Very Low
General
qmd tobi
Very Low
General
1–8 of 10
1 / 2
Updated 2026-06-14 · sources: Google Trends, Google Suggest · Competition is heuristic

SERP of term “QMD”

What searchers see today — organic results on top, paid ads if anyone's bidding. Ad density is a real-time commercial signal.

FAQ

What is QMD?

QMD is a local-first command-line search engine for Markdown notes, docs, and knowledge bases, built by Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke.

Why is QMD emerging now?

QMD turned four months old in April 2026 with 22.6k stars, an official v2.1.0 tree-sitter release, and a growing ecosystem of TUIs, Obsidian plugins, and Second-Brain templates that plug it into Claude Code — making Tobi Lütke's weekend side project the de facto local-RAG layer for agent workflows.

When did QMD emerge?

Publicly emerged around 2025-12-08 (about 190 days ago as of 2026-06-16). EarlyTerms first recorded a pipeline signal on 2026-04-21.

Related Terms

Other terms in the same space — aliases, subtypes, competitors, and neighbors to explore next.

Explore next
Also mentioned
  • Includes lazyqmd·obsidian-qmd
  • Competitor ripgrep·Obsidian Omnisearch
  • Related Quarto .qmd

Sources

Primary URLs this report cites — open any to verify the claim yourself.

  1. 01 tobi/qmd — official repository github.com ↗
  2. 02 QMD v2.1.0 release notes github.com ↗
  3. 03 QMD — Quick Markdown Search (Hacker News, Jan 20 2026) news.ycombinator.com ↗
  4. 04 Tobi Lütke: "So many people at Shopify use QMD we integrated it into the monorepo" x.com ↗
  5. 05 Tobi Lütke: "The QMD industrial complex grows stronger" x.com ↗
  6. 06 Alexander Zeitler — Introducing lazyqmd: a TUI for QMD alexanderzeitler.com ↗
  7. 07 DeepWiki — QMD getting started guide deepwiki.com ↗
  8. 08 Andrew Levine: "qmd by @tobi saved me 96% on tokens with clawdbot" x.com ↗