A local note app 'compatible with Feishu' hits 1,000 stars in two days: how Quiet.md did it with one sentence and one person

On the night of Nov 4, a former ByteDance PM posted on X announcing that he'd open-sourced a local note app that can open Feishu formats. Two days later it passed one thousand stars on GitHub. Another editor written in Rust + GPUI, the same stack, had been in development for 5 months and got only 600 stars. The difference isn't the code. Here's the breakdown.

One post, one 29-second video

Nov 2026 4, Beijing time 19:37, X user sida (@s1dashu) posted a Chinese tweet opening with 'quiet.md is officially open source!' and attached a 29-second demo video. The body had three points:

1. High performance: 'Rust + GPUI draws directly on the GPU, no WebView. Typing continuously in a 1M-character document, median per-frame processing time is 5.06ms, P95 is 5.78ms, below the 8.3ms frame budget of a 120Hz screen.'
2. Local files, Agent-friendly: 'No account, no network by default. Each note is a DocxXML file, plain text readable, and Agents like Claude Code and Codex can read and write it directly.'
3. Feishu-compatible: 'Apart from features that depend on the cloud, the commonly used blocks are mostly there, interaction details match Feishu as closely as possible, and Feishu themes are built in.'

This tweet at 11-06 has 66.5k views, 697 likes, 747 bookmarks and 122 replies (X page, 11-06). More bookmarks than likes is what a "save it to try later" tool post looks like. Ten-odd minutes later he posted an English version.

GitHub numbers: 11-05 is 392 stars, 11-06 is 1,033, and it gained 641 in a day. That afternoon the GitHub page showed 1,156 stars and 103 forks. On 11-05 that afternoon the author posted: 'Quiet.md's 1 day as open source, already 1K stars.'

What it actually is

A rich-text note app for Mac and Windows, open source under the MIT license. The interface and feel are modeled on Feishu Docs. Blocks Feishu users expect are there: tables with merged cells, columns, callouts, formulas. It also ships with Feishu, Notion, Craft, and Bear theme skins. The differences are:

• No account, no network. Files live on your own disk.
• It stores Feishu's DocxXML format, not yet another Markdown dialect.
• No Electron, no WebView. The interface is drawn directly on the GPU, using GPUI, the framework from the Zed editor team.

It's free, with no paid tier.

Why this one took off

First, the person behind it already had an audience. sida's X bio reads 'ex-ByteDance Coze, ex-JD PM' and 'indie product ipaslogo.com · GitHub 6K ⭐ · 10k monthly users'. Three months earlier (2026-08) his ip-as-logo-skill got 6,433 stars, and his pinned post got 643k views and 5,300 likes. This time he had only 3,071 followers on X, but Chinese developer circles already expected 'this guy shipped something again'. He used the same playbook for the second time: post on X, link to GitHub.

Second, 'Feishu-compatible' is understood instantly. Chinese teams write docs in Feishu every day, but Feishu lives only in the cloud. People had already built tools to pull Feishu docs back to local: feishu2md, feishu-cli, cloud-document-converter, each with 1,000 to 2,000 thousand stars (GitHub, 11-06). The demand was proven; nobody had built a client you could open and edit directly. In user feedback afterward, 'Feishu sync, round-trip without losing formatting' ranked fourth and came up 5+ times (from the feedback summary post by the author, 11-05).

Third, a set of numbers people can repost as-is. '1M characters, P95 5.78ms, under the 8.3ms frame budget.' Reposters don't have to rewrite anything. In Nov 5, a Chinese open-source curator (@jaywcjlove), known for recommending projects, reposted the intro and basically parroted these numbers. The same day, independent developer Fox (@indie_maker_fox) reposted it and added it to the OpenFree directory. It gained 641 stars between 11-05 and 11-06, matching that timing. Some replied that their own test showed 61ms. That dispute is unresolved, but the argument itself added heat.

Fourth, it rode two trends. One was Agents: 'the notes are plain text files Claude Code can read and write directly' appears in the second line of the launch post, and replies immediately said they'd feed their pitfall notes to Claude. The other was 'anti-Electron': in 2026, the GPUI ecosystem was hot, and gpui-kit (19K stars), disktree (4K), sonora (2.6K), and ElyOffice (1.2K) all picked up recently (GitHub, 11-06).

Fifth, usable on day one. The launch included an Apple-notarized Mac installer, a Windows installer, READMEs in three languages, and a script to reproduce the performance numbers. It shipped 8 releases in 6 days (0.1.0 → 0.1.7). Of 133 commits, 122 were by the author, and 5 small PRs from outside contributors have been merged.

Control group: same stack, 5 months, 629 stars

The clearest comparison is manyougz/velotype. It started in 2026 May. It's also a block-level editor written in Rust + GPUI, with nearly the same tech stack, but it does Markdown and its author had no audience. After 5 months it had 629 stars (GitHub, 11-06).

So 'native and fast' alone isn't enough. Quiet.md pulled ahead through three things: the author's own distribution, the 'Feishu-compatible' hook that Chinese users instantly connect to their own work, and a set of numbers plus a video that people could repeat. Of those, the first is something followers can't get.

Where the stars came from

Nothing on Hacker News, Reddit, or Product Hunt (11-06). The English scene is only repost accounts. For now it's still something circulating in the Chinese X circle.

The author clearly knew the traffic window was short: a few days after open-sourcing, he pushed another side project while "there's still some traffic."

What users still want

The author 11-05 ranked the feedback by how often it came up:

1. Folders / workspaces / opening local md directly: 10+
2. Linux version: 10+
3. Whiteboard / drawing board: 7
4. Feishu sync with no formatting loss on round-trips: 5+
5. AI / CLI integration: 5+
6. Mermaid / Feishu diagrams: 3

On launch night, a user replied: "It can't load an entire directory... what I usually need is to drag my whole knowledge base into a Markdown editor." The top two requests are both things Quiet.md doesn't have yet.

Two things are unclear: the installers on GitHub have only been downloaded about 540 times (Mac 284, Windows 230), and most downloads go through the official site's own links, so the real install count is invisible. The repo is only 5 days old, so there's no data on how long the heat will last.

If it were you

Verdict: B. Turning a cloud-locked major platform's format into a native local client is the right move, and Feishu's slot is already taken by it. But its biggest traffic driver was the author's own audience, which you can't replicate. Someone copying this without an existing audience will most likely end up where velotype did.

Who it's for: indie devs who already have some audience (a few thousand people who actually follow you on X, Jike, or V2EX, or a project with 1,000+ GitHub stars), and who can build native desktop apps (Rust/GPUI, Swift, Tauri all work) and ship a signed installer on day one.

Who it's not for: anyone with no distribution channel who's counting on GitHub organic traffic; anyone planning to go head-on with another Feishu-compatible editor, since it ships 8 releases every 6 days and iterates faster than you can; and anyone hoping to make money from it, because open-source diagram tools are about stars and reputation, not revenue.

How to do it: change the format or the audience, not the niche. Three directions:

• Change the format: Yuque, DingTalk Docs, Notion, Apple Notes. Find a format with a large existing user base that is locked in the cloud or a private library, and build something that opens and edits locally and saves to readable plain text. Yuque and DingTalk are in the Chinese market alongside Feishu, with the same users. Notion is the English-market equivalent, and right now only repost accounts are talking about Quiet.md in English, so that spot is open.
• Build what it hasn't: the top two user requests, opening a whole folder and a Linux version, are still missing. A tool that only does "export the entire Feishu knowledge base into a local folder that agents can read" is far lighter than building an editor.
• Build the agent half: "local files that agents read and write directly" was the second selling point in the launch tweet, and it's also the user request ranked fifth ("AI / CLI integration"). A CLI or Skill that lets Claude Code or Codex read and write Feishu or Yuque docs directly is small to build and rides the same wave of demand.

How to get users: copy its launch tweet pattern. One sentence saying exactly what it's compatible with, a set of hard numbers that can be quoted as-is, a video under 30 seconds, and an installer available the same day. The day after launch, post a "Day 1 feedback roundup" that lays out the request ranking and the next version. Before launching, figure out who will repost it: in the Chinese scene that means accounts like Xiaodi Diao and Fox, who recommend open-source projects; in English it means r/rust and Show HN on Hacker News. If you don't have an audience, first build a small, easily shareable Skill or tool to gather followers. That's how sida did it, using ip-as-logo-skill.

How much time is left: Quiet.md's heat window is probably about these two weeks (inference). To build the parts Quiet.md doesn't have (folders, Linux, the agent CLI), you need to move before it ships them itself, which at its pace means within one to two months. The format-change direction is less urgent, but the GPUI trend and the "local files agents can read" trend will likely still be hot until the first half of 2027 (inference).

Signs you've misread this: ① A month from now, Quiet.md's stars stall just above a thousand and issues go unanswered. That means this was a one-time launch spike and the underlying demand isn't strong. ② Someone builds a Yuque or Notion version, writes a launch tweet with hard numbers, and still gets only a few hundred stars. That means the hook was "Feishu" plus "sida," not localization itself. ③ Feishu ships an offline version or local file export. Demand for this would be directly eaten. ④ The reverse: if someone in the English scene translates and covers it, or Show HN hits the front page, the English gap is real, so move fast.

Sources

• Repo and README: github.com/s1dashu/quiet-md; website quiet.md. Star counts are GitHub daily figures (11-05, 11-06) and the GitHub page (11-06 afternoon).
• The author's launch tweet (Chinese, 11-04), English tweet, the Day 1 open-source feedback roundup tweet (11-05); the author's X bio and pinned tweet (read 11-06).
• Retweets from Xiaodi Diao @jaywcjlove and Fox @indie_maker_fox 11-05.
• Star counts for comparison projects velotype, ElyOffice, feishu2md, and others: GitHub, 11-06.
• Anything marked "inference" is inference. Performance figures are the author's own claims; others' tests may differ, and they have not been verified.