Related Notes

How Cogito's Related Notes card works, including the link-based sources and the on-device semantic search powered by qmd.

What it is

The note inspector shows notes related to whatever you're writing, including:

• Links here — notes that link to this one
• Linked from this note — notes this one links to
• Shared links — notes that link to many of the same places
• Similar text — notes that cover similar ideas, found by on-device semantic search

The first three come from Cogito's own link graph. The last one is powered by qmd, a small command-line tool that builds local vector embeddings of your notes.

Why qmd

Semantic search needs an embedding model. Running one inside Cogito would mean bundling a large model and locking everyone into a single choice. Instead, Cogito delegates to qmd, which runs entirely on your machine and can be reused across other tools.

Your notes never leave your Mac.

Setting it up

1. Install qmd by following its Quick Start.
2. Open the note inspector and find the Related Notes card.
3. Click Index this Location.

Cogito indexes the Location's Markdown files and stores the embeddings in a qmd collection it owns (in the cogito sub-index). Indexing runs in the background and can take a few minutes the first time, depending on how many notes you have.

If you already use qmd and have a collection pointing at the same folder, Cogito will reuse it in read-only mode instead of creating its own.

Day-to-day

• Related notes refresh automatically as you write and as notes change on disk.
• Very short notes (under roughly 80 characters) don't trigger a semantic query — there isn't enough signal to match against.
• Each Location is indexed independently. You can enable it on some Locations and skip others.
• If indexing fails, the card surfaces the error and offers a retry.

Turning it off

Semantic search is opt-in per Location and can be disabled the same way. Link-based related notes keep working regardless of whether qmd is installed.