About
A notebook for the moment things go wrong
Orbgem exists because the most useful engineering knowledge is written at the worst possible time to organise it.
Why it exists
The command that fixed it, the order things failed in, the detail that turned out to matter: all of it appears in the middle of an incident, when your hands are in a terminal and your attention is somewhere else. Most of it is never written down, and what is written down ends up in a scratch file that nobody opens again.
Wikis and documentation tools do not help here. They are built for finished knowledge, and they ask you to pick a place for a page before you can write it. Orbgem is built for the unfinished kind. You log the line from the shell you are already in, it attaches itself to the notes it mentions, and later you find it by time, by connection or by laying things out on a board.
It is a hosted service, so the same vault is there from every terminal and every browser you sign in from. It is also deliberately easy to leave.
Three commitments
Ownership
Your notes are stored as the exact Markdown you wrote. You can export the whole vault as a .zip of .md files at any time, with one click, and open it unchanged in Obsidian or any editor.
Clarity over density
The interface is monochrome on purpose. Colour is reserved for things that mean something: green for what is active or linked, amber for what you highlighted. Nothing competes with your own text.
Speed of capture
Writing something down should cost one line, from wherever you already are: the shell, or the capture box at the top of the timeline. Deciding where it belongs is never a precondition.