WebMD

A remote-first Markdown workspace for editing notes through an SSH tunnel.

Setup

npm install
npm run dev

With no workspace configured, WebMD opens its sandbox: a small example workspace with a guided tour of links, tasks, citations, and daily notes. Change anything you like there. On the first run the sandbox is copied from sandbox/ in this repository to ~/.local/share/webmd/sandbox (or WEBMD_SANDBOX_DIR), and that copy is what you edit, so the repository stays clean. Your edits are kept across restarts. Delete the copy to start over. The sandbox is never auto-committed.

To open your own notes instead:

WORKSPACE_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/notes npm run dev

To switch between server folders from the sidebar, pass a path-delimited list:

WORKSPACE_ROOTS="/absolute/path/to/notes:/absolute/path/to/other-notes" npm run dev

The backend always binds to 127.0.0.1. The Vite dev server also binds to 127.0.0.1 and proxies /api to the backend.

Instead of passing env vars on the command line, put them in ~/.webmd.conf (KEY=VALUE per line, same format as .env). The backend loads it automatically on startup; real environment variables still take precedence:

WORKSPACE_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/notes
PORT=3000

Auto-Commit

If a workspace root is a git repo, AUTO_COMMIT_MINUTES snapshots it on an interval, and once more when the server shuts down:

AUTO_COMMIT_MINUTES=15

Unset or 0 disables it. Each tick runs git add -A and commits everything git would track under that root — including changes you deliberately left unstaged — as WebMD autosave <date> <time>. Nothing is pushed. A clean tree, a directory that is not a repo, and a repo mid-merge or mid-rebase are all skipped. Commits run with --no-verify and signing off, so no hook or passphrase prompt can block an unattended snapshot; if git has no user.email configured anywhere, the commit is attributed to WebMD <webmd@localhost>.

This is the safety net that outlives the browser: the editor's undo history is per-note and dies with the tab, so git show HEAD:note.md (or git checkout HEAD -- note.md) is what recovers a note deleted by mistake.

SSH Tunnel

On the remote server:

npm install
npm run build
WORKSPACE_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/notes PORT=3000 npm start

From your local machine:

ssh -N -L 3000:127.0.0.1:3000 user@remote-host

Then open http://127.0.0.1:3000 locally. The app still binds only to 127.0.0.1 on the remote host, so the SSH tunnel remains the access boundary.

iPhone access

For persistent private access without keeping an SSH app open, install Tailscale on the server and iPhone, sign both into the same tailnet, and run on the server:

tailscale serve --bg http://127.0.0.1:3000

Open the HTTPS URL printed by Tailscale in Safari. Use Share → Add to Home Screen, enable Open as Web App, and tap Add. Keep Tailscale connected on the phone; do not use Tailscale Funnel, which would make WebMD public.

Environment

WORKSPACE_ROOT: absolute path to the Markdown workspace. Without it (or WORKSPACE_ROOTS), WebMD opens the sandbox.
WORKSPACE_ROOTS: optional path-delimited list of Markdown workspaces.
WEBMD_SANDBOX_DIR: where the sandbox copy lives, defaults to ~/.local/share/webmd/sandbox.
PORT: backend port, defaults to 3000.
IMAGE_ASSET_FOLDER: fallback folder for pasted and uploaded images and PDFs in workspaces whose .webmd/settings.json does not set imageAssetFolder; defaults to /assets. See Workspace settings.
VITE_API_PROXY_TARGET: optional dev proxy target, set by npm run dev.
AI_PROVIDER: optional ollama or openai, defaults to openai when OPENAI_API_KEY is set and ollama otherwise.
AI_MODEL: optional model override. Ollama defaults to llama3.2; OpenAI defaults to gpt-5.6.
OLLAMA_BASE_URL: optional Ollama URL, defaults to http://127.0.0.1:11434.
OPENAI_API_KEY: required for AI_PROVIDER=openai; never sent to the browser.
OPENAI_BASE_URL: optional OpenAI-compatible base URL, defaults to https://api.openai.com/v1.
INDICO_<NAME>_TOKEN: optional Indico personal access token, for protected meetings in the Meetings view and for naming pasted Indico links that need a login. Each token is bound to one exact origin: INDICO_CERN_TOKEN to https://indico.cern.ch, INDICO_FNAL_TOKEN to https://indico.fnal.gov, INDICO_GLOBAL_TOKEN to https://indico.global. It never leaves the backend and is sent to that origin only. See Meetings for scopes.
INDICO_<NAME>_URL: the https:// address of any other Indico, paired with its token, as INDICO_DESY_URL=https://indico.desy.de beside INDICO_DESY_TOKEN. A token with no known or configured address is ignored.
ARXIV_NEWS_CATEGORIES: optional comma-separated arXiv categories for the News view, defaults to hep-ex,hep-ph,cs.LG,cs.AI,physics.data-an.
ARXIV_NEWS_INTERESTS: optional ranking instructions for the News view, used when the workspace has no .webmd/news.md.
ARXIV_NEWS_MAX_CANDIDATES: optional number of papers the News view's AI ranking reads each day, the best matches by lexical score, defaults to 120. More papers mean a longer, costlier model call. Press Re-rank to apply a change to a day already ranked.
WEBMD_CACHE_DIR: where the News listings (a month of them), their AI rankings, and the Meetings view's Indico answers are kept across restarts, defaults to ~/.cache/webmd. Meetings shows its last copy at once and refreshes it behind the scenes; protected meetings are cached there too, readable only by you. Nothing there is needed; delete it any time.

Workspace settings

How a workspace is laid out belongs to that workspace, so each one can carry a .webmd/settings.json. Commit it with your notes and every machine gets the same layout. There are no controls for these in the UI. Edit the file, then switch to the workspace again or reload the page.

{
  "imageAssetFolder": "/assets",
  "dailyNoteFolder": "/raw/dailynotes",
  "dailyNoteTemplate": "/raw/dailynotes/template.md"
}

Every key is optional:

imageAssetFolder: where pasted and uploaded images and PDFs go. It is created on the first upload. If you leave it out, WebMD uses IMAGE_ASSET_FOLDER from the environment or ~/.webmd.conf, and then /assets.
dailyNoteFolder: where today's note, Tasks, and date links look for daily notes. If you leave it out, WebMD uses /raw/dailynotes, or / when the workspace has no such folder.
dailyNoteTemplate: the note a new daily note starts from (see Daily note template). "" means no template.

WebMD skips a value it cannot use, keeps the rest, and names the problem when it next creates a daily note.

Prompt presets

The AI panel's Prompts picker is a group rail with that group's prompts beside it — one click runs a prompt. There are two kinds:

Rewrite prompts (kind: "edit") act on the selected text. Select text first, or they stay disabled. The result lands in the diff preview, so nothing changes until you accept it.
Ask prompts (kind: "chat", marked with a dot) act on the whole note and need no selection. They answer in the chat transcript and never touch the file.

Anything typed in the chat box refines the prompt you click.

Built-in presets:

Group	Kind	Presets
Paper	Rewrite	Tighten (academic), Active voice, Methods-section voice, Calibrate claims, Compress to abstract, Plain-language summary
Email	Rewrite	Polite reply, Concise reply, Soften a decline, Follow-up nudge
Notes	Rewrite	Condense to bullets, Clean up dictation, Extract action items, Expand shorthand
Ask	Chat	Summarize this note, Open questions, Skeptical review, Suggest next steps

Add your own in $WORKSPACE_ROOT/.webmd/prompts.json. Reusing a built-in id replaces that preset, so you can retune one without redefining the rest:

{
  "presets": [
    {
      "id": "grant-aims",
      "label": "Specific Aims voice",
      "group": "Paper",
      "system": "You rewrite text in the voice of an NIH Specific Aims page. Return only the replacement Markdown, with no explanations or code fences.",
      "instruction": "Tighten to active voice and cut hedging."
    },
    {
      "id": "ask-reviewer",
      "label": "Reviewer 2",
      "group": "Ask",
      "kind": "chat",
      "system": "You review a note as a demanding but fair referee. Answer in concise Markdown and do not rewrite the note.",
      "instruction": "How would a hostile reviewer attack this?"
    }
  ]
}

id, label, and system are required; group defaults to Custom, kind defaults to edit, and instruction is derived from the label when omitted. An edit preset's system prompt should tell the model to return only the replacement Markdown — anything else it says ends up in your document. System prompts stay on the server and are never sent to the browser. Invalid entries are skipped with a warning in the AI panel rather than dropping the whole file.

Titles name the file

A note's file name follows its title, the way Obsidian's does. Retitle a note — the frontmatter title: field when it has one, otherwise the first heading — and the next save renames the file to match: # Reading list in /wiki/Untitled.md moves the note to /wiki/Reading list.md.

Every [[wiki link]] in the workspace that pointed at the old name is rewritten to the new one, keeping its alias, heading anchor, and ! embed marker, so renaming never leaves a dead link behind. Characters a file name cannot carry (/, :, ?, and friends) are dropped from the name; the title in the note keeps them.

Two notes are left alone: a daily note, which is addressed by its date rather than its heading, and a note whose new name is already taken — that rename is reported as an error instead of overwriting the other note.

Wiki links

Typing [[ in the editor offers the notes it could mean — matched on the name and on the folder, so iaas finds /raw/projects/iaas/triton.md too. Accepting one writes the shortest form that still resolves back to that note, so a completed link is never ambiguous and never dead.

Typing # after the note name switches to that note's headings: [[hybrid-search#Setup]] opens the note and scrolls to its ## Setup, in the preview or in the editor, whichever pane is open. ![[hybrid-search#Setup]] embeds that one section as a card.

A link to a note that is not in the workspace is drawn wavy and warm in the preview, since a dead link is usually a typo worth seeing while reading. Clicking one offers to create the note rather than opening an empty page that belongs to no file.

The graph view counts the same dead links as the mentions it cannot draw, and its footer lists them: every unresolved link in the workspace, with the note it is written in. Clicking one opens that note in the editor with the cursor already on the line the link sits on. The list is capped at 200 entries and says so when there are more; the count above it is always the true total.

The bottom of every note lists its linked mentions — the notes that link here, with the line each link sits on. Clicking a mention opens that note at that line. Mentions are resolved rather than string-matched, so [[triton]], [[iaas/triton]] and [[/raw/projects/iaas/triton|Triton]] all count as the same link.

Citations

Keep bibliography entries in references.bib at the workspace root and cite them with Pandoc syntax such as [@Ju:2026abc]. Typing @ completes known BibTeX keys. Preview shows inline citations, hover metadata, and a generated References section; the graph connects notes to the papers they cite.

Pasting an arXiv, DOI, or INSPIRE literature link, a nature.com article, or a journal article link with the DOI in its URL imports its BibTeX entry and replaces the link with its [@key] citation. DOI metadata comes from doi.org; arXiv and INSPIRE metadata comes from INSPIRE-HEP.

File to projects

A daily note is where the day's work lands, but it is not where you look for a project later. File to projects in the AI panel takes the lines you select in the open day and files them into the project notes they advanced.

Select first. A day is mostly noise no project wants, and deciding which part is worth keeping is your judgement, not the model's. The button stays disabled until you select something, and only the selection is filed; the rest of the day goes along as context, so a selected line that says "traced it to the batch size" can still be written up as a sentence that makes sense on its own.

It ranks every Markdown note in the workspace by how much wording it shares with the selection, sends the strongest dozen to the model as a shortlist, and asks which projects the selection actually moves and what one line each should gain. Notes in your daily-note folder are never targets — filing one day into another would only copy a log sideways.

The button is only enabled on a daily note in your daily-note folder, which is set per workspace in .webmd/settings.json. This one writes into notes you are not looking at, so it is deliberately hard to fire by accident.

Nothing is written until you say so, twice:

The list. Every project note the selection would touch, with a checkbox. Uncheck anything you would rather leave alone.
One note at a time. Each kept note is shown on its own, with the exact line it would gain and where that line lands. File it, skip it, or close the panel and stop. Notes you never reach are never touched.

A filed line is a dated backlink and a summary, appended under a ## Log heading in the project note, which is added at the end if the note has none:

## Log

- [[2026-07-08]] — ruled out the detector geometry by rerunning with the old alignment
- [[2026-07-09]] — requests started dropping once the GPU instance count went past four

Nothing else in the project note changes. Because the link points back at the day, the day shows every project it fed among its own linked mentions, with no second pass and nothing written into it.

Filing the same day twice cannot double an entry: a project note that already links to the day is left out of the list and counted as already filed. Each backlink is emitted in the shortest form that resolves back to the day from that note, so it can never be a dead link, and the model can only choose from the shortlist, so it cannot invent a path.

Snippets

Typing /date and pressing Tab writes 2026-08-21 into the note. Tab anywhere else still indents, so an unknown /word is left alone.

Snippet	Inserts
`/date` `/time` `/now`	`2026-08-21`, `14:30`, or both
`/lastupdate`	`Last update: 2026-08-21`
`/today` `/tomorrow` `/yesterday`	a link to that day's note
`/task`	`- [ ]`
`/log`	`- 14:30` , for a running log
`/meeting`	date heading, Present, Notes, Actions
`/table` `/code` `/details`	a skeleton, caret in the first field
`/note` `/idea` `/warning`	the matching callout

Snippets expand to plain Markdown, once, at the moment you type them: nothing is re-evaluated when the note is rendered, so Last update: 2026-08-21 keeps saying the day it was written — in this editor, in Obsidian, and in git show HEAD:note.md. Add or edit snippets in src/snippets.js.

Tasks

Any - [ ] checkbox is a task. Ticking one in the preview writes today's date into the note, so a finished task records when it was finished:

- [ ] Write the intro
- [x] Draft outline ✅ 2026-08-14

Tasks can also carry a due date and a priority, in the Obsidian Tasks emoji convention, so notes stay portable and readable as plain text:

Field	Syntax	Effect
Due	`📅 2026-08-20`	Preview badges it red when overdue, amber when due today
Done	`✅ 2026-08-14`	Written and removed for you as the box is ticked
Created	`➕ 2026-08-01`	Shown as typed; never written automatically
Priority	`🔺` `⏫` `🔼` `🔽` `⏬`	Highest to lowest; sorts the Tasks view

A note in preview shows how far along it is (7/12 done) above the text. Anything unrecognised — including recurring tasks (🔁), which WebMD does not support — is left in the task's text untouched.

Typing shorthand

The emoji never have to be typed. On a task line, write due: and a date, or :p1:–:p5: for priority, and the editor rewrites it as soon as the caret leaves the line — so the file itself stays plain Obsidian syntax:

- [ ] Submit the abstract due:friday :p2:

becomes

- [ ] Submit the abstract ⏫ 📅 2026-08-21

Shorthand	Means
`due:` `created:` (or `added:`) `done:`	`📅` `➕` `✅`
`:p1:` `:p2:` `:p3:` `:p4:` `:p5:`	`🔺` `⏫` `🔼` `🔽` `⏬`
`2026-08-20`	That date
`10-01` `10/1`	The next time that day comes round
`today` `tomorrow` `yesterday`	Also `tod` and `tmr`
`monday` … `sunday`	The next one to come; `mon` … `sun` work too
`+3d` `+2w`	Days or weeks from today

Shorthand replaces a field the line already has, so due:tomorrow on a task that is already dated just moves it. Anything that does not resolve to a real date — due:someday, or a typo — is left exactly as typed rather than guessed at, and shorthand in ordinary prose or inside a fenced code block is ignored. Priority carries its colons so that a task about the p2 bug keeps its own words.

Tasks view

The checklist button in the global bar (or Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+T) opens every open task in the workspace. Clicking a task's text opens its note in preview, scrolled to that task; ticking its box completes it without leaving the list, and Completed shows finished tasks so one can be reopened. A [text](url) link in a task shows as just its text and opens in a new tab, without opening the note. A who:me reads as a highlighted Me in the sentence, and clicking it — or a #tag chip — filters to that person or tag. A reading-list entry written as a conventional citation, Yu et al., "Title" — [arXiv:…](…), shows the paper's title and an Open paper link. Tasks inside fenced code blocks are ignored, so an example in a how-to never turns into work.

There are three ways to look at the same list.

Board is what the view opens on: four short columns, ranked rather than filed, for answering "what now" without reading everything.

Lane	Holds
Now	Overdue, due today, or marked `:p1:`
Soon	Dated within the month, marked `:p2:`, or written recently
Later	Real work, but nothing about it is pressing yet
Shelf	Reading and ideas — an unread paper is not late

A task's place comes from three things a note already carries: its due date (the strongest signal — an overdue task reaches Now on its date alone), its priority mark, and how long ago it was written, taken from its daily note's filename or its ➕ created date. Age cuts both ways: something written this week is surfaced, and something written two months ago and never dated sinks, which is what keeps Now short. It also sets the task's ink, so old work fades rather than earning another badge. Each row shows the note it came from and, in a daily note, the ## it sits under.

Shelf holds the sections marked as reading rather than work — Ideas, Interesting papers and Interesting software, by default. Those skip the ranking entirely, because scoring a paper against a deadline it never had would only bury the actual backlog. Any section can be shelved or unshelved under Edit sections; the catch-all never can.

The summary counts open tasks and shelved references separately; a shelved item with a due date or priority counts as a task. Edit sections and Refresh tasks are in the toolbar's ⋯ menu.

Filter narrows the list before any of the three views slice it, matching a task's prose, tags, headings and path alike, so gnl finds "GNLarge" halfway through a word. / puts the cursor in it, and Escape clears it.

Sections is a dashboard: a task is filed under the first section whose terms it matches, and whatever matches nothing lands in Other tasks. That keeps a reading list, a stack of ideas, and real work in one - [ ] habit without them crowding each other out. Urgency is the third view, grouped Overdue / Today / This week / Later / No date. Both sort by due date then priority, and both group a note's tasks under the note — except in a daily note, where they group under the ## they sit beneath, so a project's work reads as one pile across the week rather than one per day.

A term matches four things, so notes can be organised whichever way reads best:

Source	Example	Matches
Inline tag	`- [ ] Read the GNN paper #paper`	`paper`
Frontmatter	`tags: [paper, reading]`	every task in the note
Heading	`## Interesting papers`	the whole heading, and each of its words
arXiv	`- [ ] arxiv.org/abs/2608.00146`	`paper`, tagged or not

Singular and plural are the same term, and a leading # is optional, so paper finds #papers and ## Papers alike. A task that mentions arXiv anywhere on the line counts as #paper, since pasting a link in is how a paper usually arrives. Edit sections renames a section, changes its terms, sets whether it shows open, done, or all tasks, marks it as Shelf, and reorders or adds sections; the layout, the chosen view, and any folded lanes are remembered in the browser. Completed loads finished tasks as well, and shows them struck through in place.

Opening today's note

The note button in the global bar (or Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+D) opens today's note from wherever you are, creating it from the template if the day has none. The dashboard's Open today's note card does the same thing.

Daily note template

A new daily note starts from the dailyNoteTemplate set in .webmd/settings.json. The template may use {{date}}, {{title}}, {{weekday}}, and {{quote}}. If no template is set, WebMD looks for a conventionally named one (dailynote_template.md, daily-template.md, or template.md) in the daily-note folder, then in the workspace root. Setting "dailyNoteTemplate": "" keeps just the # YYYY-MM-DD heading.

Quote of the day

{{quote}} asks the configured model for one attributable quote on the day's theme, written into the note as a single line so a > {{quote}} template stays one blockquote. The line always reads {quote} -- {author} ({date}), where the date is when the quote was said or published, not the day of the note. An unattributed quote becomes Unknown rather than a differently-shaped line, and a quote whose date the model does not know drops the parentheses, so notes from different days line up. Three things keep it from repeating itself:

The theme rotates with the date, so consecutive days cannot land on the same subject, and the same day always asks for the same one. Set your own rotation with QUOTE_THEMES in the environment or ~/.webmd.conf:
```
QUOTE_THEMES=life,programming,finance
```
Any comma-separated list works — stoicism,music,physics rotates over three days, a single theme asks for that one every day. Unset, it rotates over life, programming, and finance.
Every quote already used is stored in .webmd/quotes.json and sent back to the model as an exclusion list, along with the authors of the last twenty.
A reply that repeats one anyway is caught and asked again once.

Today's quote is written to that history, so reopening or recreating today's note reuses it instead of spending another model call. If no model is reachable the placeholder is simply left empty — the note is still created.

The Home dashboard shows the same quote under its heading, and asks for one on the first visit of the day whether or not your template uses {{quote}}. Whichever surface asks first pays for the call and the other reads it back, so the dashboard and the note never disagree about today's quote.

Unfinished tasks

A new daily note is the template and nothing else — yesterday's unfinished tasks are not copied into it. An open task stays in the note that raised it, and the Tasks view is where you see the whole backlog: it reads every note in the workspace, so a task written weeks ago is one row there rather than a line duplicated into every day since. Clicking a row opens that note in preview at the task's line, where the box can be ticked once and for all.

Notes written before this carry ↩ [[origin]] links from the old carry-over behaviour. Nothing writes them any more, but they are still parsed and shown as backlinks, so those notes keep reading the way they did.

arXiv news

The newspaper button in the left bar opens today's arXiv announcements for the categories in ARXIV_NEWS_CATEGORIES. They are read from arXiv's public RSS feed, so no key is needed. The listing is cached for as long as arXiv says it stands (until the next announcement), kept on disk so a restart does not refetch it, and checked by ETag once stale, so an unchanged feed costs a 304. The AI ranking is saved the same way: one model call per listing, until the instructions change or you press Re-rank.

Earlier days

Each day's listing is kept for a month (31 days) under WEBMD_CACHE_DIR, so papers you missed are still there to catch up on. Once there is more than one day, the arrows and day menu next to the arXiv heading step through them. Filters, clipping, and ranking work on an earlier day as they do on today's, and a clipped paper still goes to today's daily note. Each day is ranked once, the first time you open it. Refresh goes back to the latest listing.

The server checks the feed every hour, so a day is kept even when you never open News that day. Days when the server was not running are not kept, because arXiv's feed only ever carries the latest announcement. Weekends have no listing and are skipped.

Filter keeps papers whose title, authors, or abstract contain every word you type. The category chips narrow the list to the ones you pick. Both are remembered, so tomorrow's listing opens filtered the same way.
Clip adds the paper to today's daily note, under a ## Reading heading that is created the first time. The line is the same citation a pasted arXiv link becomes. If today's note does not exist yet, it is created from the daily template. A paper already linked from today's note shows as Clipped.

Ranking

For you orders the listing for you. The configured AI model reads the day's papers against three things:

Your instructions in .webmd/news.md: your research, and how papers should be judged, in your own words. Instructions in the News view opens the note, and starts one the first time. HTML comments in it are not sent. With no note, ARXIV_NEWS_INTERESTS is used instead.
What you read: the titles of arXiv papers cited in your notes, including clipped ones, and the titles in references.bib.
What you are working on: your most recently edited notes.

The model picks up to 20 papers, each with a score from 1 to 10, the research area it connects to, and a one-sentence reason. The five strongest are listed first as Top picks, then Also relevant. Everything else follows, ordered by how much of your profile's rarer vocabulary each paper uses. That same lexical score chooses the 120 papers the model reads (see ARXIV_NEWS_MAX_CANDIDATES), which keeps a day of listings to one call. Replacements — new versions of older papers — are not listed at all.

↑ and ↓ on a paper say more or fewer papers like this. Votes are kept in .webmd/news-votes.json, with each paper's title and abstract, so they outlast the listing. They move the lexical score towards the words of papers you upvoted and away from those you downvoted, and the AI sees the titles of your most recent votes. A paper you voted down is never a pick. Press the same arrow again to take a vote back. Like clipping, a vote does not reshuffle the page; it counts from the next day's ranking, or straight away with Re-rank.

A listing is ranked once per day, so reloads and other tabs reuse it, and clipping a paper does not reshuffle the page. Editing the instructions note earns a fresh ranking the next time you open News. Re-rank asks again straight away. Without a reachable model the order falls back to the lexical score, with a note saying so. arXiv switches back to arXiv's own order.

arXiv publishes no listing on Saturday or Sunday, so the view is empty on weekends; Friday's is in the day menu.

Meetings

The lectern button in the left bar opens Meetings: the upcoming meetings of the Indico categories and events you follow, one meeting's agenda, and a Markdown note for it.

Add source takes an Indico category link (…/category/1234/) or event link (…/event/5678/, or any page of the event). The link is checked and stored in canonical form; Remove takes it off again.
Categories are read two weeks ahead and one week back. Meetings are grouped into Ongoing, Today, Tomorrow, This week, Next week, Later, and Past week (newest first) by your browser's local day. Times show in local time, with the event's own time beside them when its timezone reads differently. A meeting listed by two sources appears once.
Choose a meeting to see when and where, its agenda (times, titles, speakers, and links to each contribution), and Open in Indico.
Create note writes a note for the meeting and opens it. Pressing it again, now labelled Open note, opens the same note. Refresh asks Indico again, skipping the ten-minute cache.
A Zoom meeting shows its meeting ID and passcode, and Join Zoom. From a quarter of an hour before it starts until it ends, Join also appears beside it in the list. See Zoom.

Zoom, recordings, and transcripts

Indico's Zoom plugin shows its room on the event page but leaves it out of the export API, so WebMD reads the page for it: for the meeting you open, and for meetings under way or starting within a day (at most 12, cached for ten minutes). It also picks up what organizers type into the location, room, or description: a zoom.us (or zoomgov.com) join link, or a written "Meeting ID". Only a link's embedded passcode (pwd) is kept. No room, no Join button. Nothing about Zoom is guessed.

A public event's page shows its meeting ID and link to anyone. The join link with its passcode built in appears only to signed-in users, so WebMD gets it only with a token that has the read:everything scope.
A read:legacy_api token is turned away from event pages, so WebMD then reads the page anonymously. That works for public events. For protected events it finds no room unless the organizer pasted the link into the description.

Once a meeting has started, its detail shows Recording and transcript:

Recording: Add link saves a recording share link (any web address) as recording: in the meeting note's frontmatter. A Zoom recording link found in the Indico description is offered with Save to note.
Transcript: Add file takes the transcript Zoom gives with a cloud recording (the recording page's Audio transcript, a .vtt), or SubRip (.srt), Teams-style voice-tagged WebVTT, or Zoom's saved captions (.txt). It becomes a note of its own beside the meeting note, Title (YYYY-MM-DD) transcript.md, with type: transcript, the same indico: link, a wiki link back to the meeting note, and one paragraph per speaker turn (**00:03:12 Ada Lovelace:** …). Replace rewrites it with a better file.
Summarize into note asks the AI provider for the meeting's minutes and writes them into the meeting note: a ## Summary section ahead of ## Notes, with any decisions, and new action items under ## Action items in task syntax (- [ ] … who:ada 📅 2026-09-20), so they show up in the Tasks view. Items already listed are not added twice. If the note already has a ## Summary, it is never replaced; delete it to write a new one. Transcripts longer than about 160,000 characters are summarized from their first part, and the note says so.

Any of these creates the meeting note first if it has none. WebMD's own edits to a note reach an editor that has it open as an ordinary change, so nothing typed there is lost. Recordings themselves stay on Zoom: WebMD needs no Zoom account and never signs in to Zoom.

Sources file

Sources are kept per workspace in .webmd/meetings.json, which is safe to commit: it never holds a token.

{
  "version": 1,
  "noteFolder": "/meetings",
  "sources": [
    {
      "id": "indico.cern.ch-category-1234",
      "label": "Weekly meetings",
      "origin": "https://indico.cern.ch",
      "url": "https://indico.cern.ch/category/1234/",
      "enabled": true
    }
  ]
}

id and origin are derived from url. Set "enabled": false to pause a source, and noteFolder to put meeting notes elsewhere. An entry that does not check out is skipped with a warning naming it, and the others still load. If the file is not valid JSON, Meetings says so and refuses to overwrite it.

Tokens and scopes

Public meetings need no token. For protected ones, create a personal token in Indico under My profile → Settings → API tokens and put it in ~/.webmd.conf, then restart WebMD:

INDICO_CERN_TOKEN=indp_REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_TOKEN

Meetings reads only Indico's documented HTTP export API (/export/categ/… and /export/event/…), which needs the read:legacy_api scope ("Classic API (read only)"). That is the least privilege it needs.
Naming a pasted protected link reads the event's page first, which needs read:everything. With a read:legacy_api token it falls back to the export API, which names events and contributions but not sessions.
The token goes in an Authorization: Bearer header to its own origin only. A redirect to another host, or off HTTPS, is not followed. The browser is told only whether a token is set.

Meeting notes

A note is created in noteFolder as Title (YYYY-MM-DD).md, with frontmatter naming the event, the time in the event's timezone, the Indico link, the room, a snapshot of the agenda, and empty ## Notes and ## Action items sections:

---
type: meeting
indico: https://indico.cern.ch/event/5678/
date: 2026-09-11
tags: [meeting]
---

# Tracking weekly (2026-09-11)

The note's header also links to its day, - **Day:** [[2026-09-11]]: the day in your browser's timezone that the meeting starts on, which is the one whose daily note it belongs with. WebMD never writes into the daily note. The meeting shows up there among its backlinks. If that daily note does not exist yet, following the link offers to create it, from your daily template and in your daily-note folder, as with any date link to a missing daily note.

The indico: line is what ties the note to the meeting, so retitling or moving the note keeps the link. Creating never overwrites a file: if the name is taken by another note, the event id is added to the name. After that the note is yours. Refreshing Indico never touches it, including its agenda. The only later changes WebMD makes are the ones you ask for from Meetings: the recording: line and a summary.

Troubleshooting

"rejected INDICO_CERN_TOKEN": the token is expired, revoked, or lacks read:legacy_api. Create a new one and restart WebMD.
"No upcoming meetings visible without a login": without a token Indico answers a protected category with an empty list, not an error. Set the token.
"is not a known Indico": the host does not start with indico.. Add INDICO_<NAME>_URL=https://… for it.
Timeouts or "Could not reach": the server running WebMD needs outbound HTTPS to the Indico. Each request gives up after 15 seconds.
To check a token from the shell without starting WebMD: INDICO_SMOKE_SOURCE=https://indico.cern.ch/category/1234/ npm run smoke:indico. It only reads, and never prints the token.

Note dates

Saving a note stamps its frontmatter with creation-date and last-modified-date, so you can tell at a glance how old the information in a note is:

---
creation-date: 2024-03-02
last-modified-date: 2026-08-19
---

Both are written automatically, with no frontmatter block needed up front — one is added when the note has none. creation-date is written once and never rewritten; a note that predates this feature is dated by the age of its file rather than by the day you happened to reopen it. last-modified-date moves at most once a day, so a note only changes when its contents actually do.

Daily notes are exempt: their file name is already the date.

YAML frontmatter

WebMD understands the Open Knowledge Format fields type, title, description, resource, tags, and timestamp in a Markdown file's leading YAML frontmatter. Preview renders the Markdown body, and workspace search can filter any field with field:value, for example type:Playbook, tags:oncall, or timestamp:2026-07. Tag matching is exact; other fields support partial, case-insensitive matching.

Scripts

npm run dev: start backend and frontend locally.
npm run test: run focused workspace safety tests.
npm run lint: run syntax checks.
npm run build: build the frontend into dist/.
npm run fixture: serve a seeded throwaway workspace with a stub AI provider, arXiv feed, and Indico on port 3197 (AI_MODE=slow|error, NEWS_MODE=error|empty, MEETINGS_MODE=notoken|auth|offline|none|zoom). It never reads ~/.webmd.conf, and its Indico token is a placeholder.
npm run scenarios: after npm run build, run the headless Chrome layout and AI-context acceptance checks against fixtures (OUT_DIR keeps screenshots). Needs Google Chrome, or CHROME_PATH.
npm run scenarios:meetings: the same for Meetings: list, agenda, notes, add source, token failures, Zoom join, transcript and summary, and narrow layouts.
npm run smoke:indico: opt-in, read-only check of a real Indico source with your own token (INDICO_SMOKE_SOURCE=<link>). Not part of npm test.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.agents/skills/review-before-coding		.agents/skills/review-before-coding
.claude/skills		.claude/skills
public		public
sandbox		sandbox
scripts		scripts
server		server
src		src
test		test
.gitignore		.gitignore
.prettierrc		.prettierrc
AGENTS.md		AGENTS.md
ARCHITECTURE.md		ARCHITECTURE.md
CLAUDE.md		CLAUDE.md
LICENSE		LICENSE
Plans.md		Plans.md
README.md		README.md
index.html		index.html
package-lock.json		package-lock.json
package.json		package.json
skills-lock.json		skills-lock.json
vite.config.js		vite.config.js

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