Prism
Find the note, email or document without remembering which app it's in. Search your connected sources from one shortcut, or use Ask for an answer that links to what it retrieves.
- My role
- Independent developer
- Status
- Released desktop app
One query across notes, files and mail
Why I wanted one search
I wanted a single keyboard shortcut that could search everything I self-host: Obsidian notes, Paperless-ngx scans, the BookStack wiki, Nextcloud, mail. Existing tools either required cloud processing or searched one source at a time.
Why Tauri + Rust
Electron was the obvious choice, but I wanted native performance and a small footprint. Tauri 2 uses the system webview and a Rust backend for native integrations. Both frameworks can access native capabilities; Tauri avoids bundling a separate Chromium runtime. The tradeoff was a steeper learning curve with Rust's ownership model.
The Connector System
Each data source is a pluggable connector with a standardized interface: search, fetch and index. Connectors run in parallel so a single query fans out to the enabled sources at once. Results are ranked on text similarity, source reliability, title match, recency and phrase bonus, then fused across connectors by rank rather than by scores that aren't comparable.
Local-First AI
Prism connects to LM Studio or Ollama for fully offline AI. RAG queries embed the user's question, retrieve relevant chunks from Qdrant and pass them as context to the local model. Grounded answers link to retrieved sources. Weak retrieval is labelled, and model-only answers are identified separately. Cloud AI is available as opt-in with bring-your-own-key.
Fifteen Sources, One Search
A sixteenth connector, LM Studio, runs the model rather than answering a query. Sources can be local, self-hosted or externally hosted, such as Gmail and Outlook. Data goes to the sources and model providers you configure; a local-only setup requires local endpoints.
Built with
Making answers traceable
Ask runs retrieval before drafting. The response links to sources, and weak retrieval stays visible. The tradeoff: an answer can be incomplete when the connected sources do not support it.
See the Full Product
Visit the marketing site for features, pricing, downloads and a free trial.