What Is Pharion?

A place to think — and a beacon when you want one.

Pharion is a block-based outliner with daily notes and bidirectional links, built for people who think in writing and whose thinking happens over time. It's a tribute to Roam Research, Logseq, and Obsidian — if you know those tools, you'll find much that's familiar here, and a few things that are deliberately different.

You keep your notes in a lighthouse: a private collection that no one else can see by default. But a lighthouse is also part of a network. If you wish, yours can reach other lighthouses — to send a thought to a person you've chosen, and receive theirs in return. There are no feeds, no followers, and no metrics visible to anyone but you.

At its heart, Pharion is a note-taking app for writers. It's for people who write something, come back to it in three months, and want to find the thread. But writers also thrive on discussion and community — which is why the social layer isn't an add-on. It's part of the reason Pharion exists. Knowledge exists to be shared, and the design reflects that.

It is not a project manager, a database, a team wiki, or a place for quick capture-and-forget. It's a tool for thinking — and, when you choose, for thinking together with your friends.

Distill your thinking into top-level conclusions

Note-taking aficionados will be familiar with the Zettelkasten — the organized slip-box of notes. Pharion is built with Zettelkasten-style practices in mind. When you need to write a summary note, tag it ~gist: your own conclusion, in your words, placed above the material that earned it. Gather gists under gists and a map of your conclusions emerges, layer by layer — survey a whole domain of your thinking at the top, descend into the evidence only where you want to.

Create threads that weave through your thoughts

Give a block a name that matters — unanswered-questions — and when the next one comes along, unanswered-questions-2 follows naturally. Now you have a sequence: a thread of blocks in the order you chose, regardless of when they were written or where they live. Navigate it with arrow keys. See the whole thread at once. Reorder it when your understanding changes.

Anchor conversations with others in your notes

Type @theirhandle anywhere in your notes to start a message to a person, or a group of people, you've chosen to connect with. The messaging layer is separate, but the conversation stays anchored wherever in your notes you started it — so when you need to find that exchange six months from now, it's right there, in the context where it happened. In messages you can share whatever you want: notes in outline form, documents you've written, photos you want them to see. They can import what you've shared into their own notes, or leave it in the messaging layer. The choice is theirs.

Utilize the LLM of your choice as a thinking partner

Pharion offers an MCP server, so you can connect the language model of your choice and let it read your lighthouse, subject to your approval. Ask it to find the thread you lost, summarize a month of notes, or take the other side of your counterarguments. Whatever it writes stays a proposal until you decide to keep it — nothing enters your notes without your say-so. The assistant is yours to shape. The judgment about what to include in your notes stays yours, too.

There's more when you arrive — publish essays to the web, log each day in a single line, search every block you've ever written. I've tried to make Pharion a place where the floor is low enough to begin right away, and the ceiling keeps rising.

One day you'll look up and see only stars.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. — Simone Weil