I built Witral to solve a specific bottleneck in my workflow: the friction of mobile capture.
I like the idea behind PKMs like Obsidian, but I know that I am never going to commit to writing structured notes periodically, like a "Second Brain" demands. That friction is small, but enough to kill the habit for me.
However, I'm already on WhatsApp 24/7, and constantly write quick notes and reminders in a group that only has me as a member. So instead of forcing myself to be more disciplined, I built the infrastructure to turn my existing chat stream into a structured CLI for my notes.
It's a self-hosted Docker container (Node.js/TypeScript). It can connect to WhatsApp via the included Baileys based plugin (or any messaging service, if someone develops an appropiate plugin), listens for tags in specific groups (like `,,idea` or `,,buy`), and writes standard Markdown files to a local volume (which I sync to Drive).
It’s 100% deterministic. I don't want an LLM summarizing my thoughts or hallucinating context when I'm focused on raw data preservation.
It runs in the background. I manage the system via chat commands in monitored groups (`,,menu`) without needing to SSH into the server.
Ingestion and Storage are decoupled. Currently supports WhatsApp -> Local FS + Google Drive (optional), but it's designed to be agnostic to both messaging services and cloud sync providers.
It's open source (MIT). I built it for my own sanity, but releasing it here in case others face the same friction.