# QMD

> **TL;DR.** QMD is a local-first command-line search engine for Markdown notes, docs, and knowledge bases, built by Shopify CEO [Tobi Lütke](https://github.

- **Category:** AI / Developer Tools / Retrieval
- **Stage:** established
- **Age:** 190 days
- **Origin date:** 2025-12-08
- **First detected:** 2026-04-21
- **Canonical URL:** https://earlyterms.com/term/qmd
- **Sources:** 8 primary URLs

## Definition

QMD is a local-first command-line search engine for Markdown notes, docs, and knowledge bases, built by Shopify CEO [Tobi Lütke](https://github.com/tobi/qmd). 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](https://github.com/tobi/qmd) went public on [December 8, 2025](https://github.com/tobi/qmd), crossed 22,000 stars by April 2026, and landed on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46689289) on January 20. Version [v2.1.0](https://github.com/tobi/qmd/releases/tag/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".

## Example

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](https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/releases) 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.

## Analogy

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

## Why it's 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.

## Related terms

- *related:* OpenClaw
- *related:* Claude Code
- *related:* UserPromptSubmit hook
- *related:* MCP server
- *related:* LLM wiki
- *related:* vault-context
- *parent:* context-engineering
- *related:* Quarto .qmd
- *competitor:* ripgrep
- *competitor:* Obsidian Omnisearch
- *child:* lazyqmd
- *child:* obsidian-qmd

## Sources

1. [tobi/qmd — official repository](https://github.com/tobi/qmd)
2. [QMD v2.1.0 release notes](https://github.com/tobi/qmd/releases/tag/v2.1.0)
3. [QMD — Quick Markdown Search (Hacker News, Jan 20 2026)](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46689289)
4. [Tobi Lütke: "So many people at Shopify use QMD we integrated it into the monorepo"](https://x.com/tobi/status/2012910909140693162)
5. [Tobi Lütke: "The QMD industrial complex grows stronger"](https://x.com/tobi/status/2044548316084535628)
6. [Alexander Zeitler — Introducing lazyqmd: a TUI for QMD](https://alexanderzeitler.com/articles/introducing-lazyqmd-a-tui-for-qmd/)
7. [DeepWiki — QMD getting started guide](https://deepwiki.com/tobi/qmd/2-getting-started)
8. [Andrew Levine: "qmd by @tobi saved me 96% on tokens with clawdbot"](https://x.com/andrarchy/status/2015783856087929254)

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_Generated by EarlyTerms · https://earlyterms.com/term/qmd_