What is vigil.wiki?

A cloud notebook for the long-form thinking I didn't want to keep losing.

How it feels

Open a note, start typing. Wikilinks — Other Note — resolve to real links the moment you write them, and the notes they point at gain a backlink. On desktop, backlinks render in the right margin Tufte-style, aligned to the inline anchors via SVG hairlines. On mobile they collapse into inline footnotes. There's no save button: autosave runs while you write. Groups (folders) and tags handle organization without ceremony, and ⌘E toggles a distraction-free READ mode.

How it looks

Six themes — monochrome, ink, penguin, sulfur, jade, iris — each in light and dark, persisted in localStorage with a pre-paint application so the theme never flickers when the page loads. Fraunces for display, Inter for UI, Geist Mono for metadata. The chrome stays out of the way; the content gets the typography.

Why it exists

Two reasons.

The first is selfish. I wanted a notebook I'd actually use — fast, owned, beautiful enough to make me want to write in it. So I built one.

The second is the part I find more interesting. vigil.wiki ships an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which means agents like Claude can read and write your notes directly. Create a note from a chat. Search across your notebook. Publish to the public web. The tools are scoped — notes:read, notes:write, notes:publish — granted on a consent screen, with a per-account toggle gating private-note reads.

The wiki is the personal notebook. The MCP turns it into a writing surface that AI agents share.

Publishing

Any note can be made public. The publish flow takes your private markdown, sanitizes it, and ships a static page at https://vigil.wiki/notes/<slug> — anonymously readable, no auth, server-rendered HTML with the same typography as the editor. Unpublish takes it back.

This post is one of those static pages.

The honest part

vigil.wiki is free to use as a personal notebook. MCP access — letting Claude or any other agent read and write your notes — requires a subscription. That's how the lights stay on.