About — Mahonia

Mahonia is a tool for building, weighing, and sharing packing lists, made by one person. Make a list, see what it weighs, send someone the link. No app, no ads, and no sign-up to make a list: it's yours the moment you start typing. The grams are optional; build a list with zero weights and the totals just stay quiet.

How Mahonia works

A list syncs to the server under a private, unguessable link as soon as you start building it. That’s how the same list opens on your phone and your laptop.
Every list gets a private edit link and a separate read-only link to share. No sign-up. Nothing shows up publicly; a list is only ever reachable by its links.
Weights are backed by a curated, cited gear catalog, but you can override anything.
A list remembers more than weights: calories on food and fuel, the unit you typed each row in, and the dates of the trip it's for.
Flip the same list into a checklist for the night before, and tick things off as they go in the pack.
The Trip tab plans the walk itself. Add a trail as a link or a map file, break it into days, and each day shows its distance and climb, a walking-time estimate, and what the pack weighs when you shoulder it that morning, lighter as the food and water go. Name who's coming and mark who carries what.
My Gear is the one part that asks for an account: a passkey, or a link emailed to you. It fills itself as you build, so the kit you already own is one pick away on the next list, from any device. Lists themselves never need it.

Why “Mahonia”?

Mahonia is the Oregon grape, the Oregon state flower and one of the most common native plants in the Pacific Northwest woods this tool is built for. It’s an unfussy evergreen shrub: holly-shaped leaves, bright yellow flowers in late winter, dusty-blue berries. Hardy, understated, and everywhere on the trails around Portland.

I wanted a name that was short, a little bit odd, and actually rooted in the place this tool is built for. A native plant, for a tool about getting outside, felt right.

Open source

Mahonia is open source under the MIT license. The code lives on GitHub, so you can read how it works, file an issue, or run your own copy. Every day that ships something is a release there, with a feed.

From an assistant

Mahonia is also a connector. Add https://mahonia.app/mcp to an AI assistant that speaks MCP and it can read a list from its share link, search the catalog, make a new list, and, given an edit link, add to one. No sign-in: a share link is the permission to read and an edit link the permission to change, exactly as they are for a person.

One click for Claude, Cursor or VS Code; the README has the line for every other client.

Contact

Questions, or want a list removed? Email hello@mahonia.app. See also the Legal page.