Vault

A vault is the folder on disk that holds a set of notes; the tool indexes it, links resolve inside it, and its subfolders are the note hierarchy.

A vault is the root folder of a note collection. Everything under it is the tool’s universe: files are notes, subdirectories are folders, and a [[link]] is looked up among the titles inside that root and nowhere else.

Origin

The word is Obsidian’s. Its help defines a vault as “a folder on your local file system where Obsidian stores your notes”, possibly with subfolders, and says you can keep one vault or several (Obsidian: Create a vault). The concept is older and goes by other names: a vimwiki wiki is a path in g:vimwiki_list (vimwiki README); nb calls it a notebook; Dendron says vault too, “a git backed folder for your notes” (Dendron README); Joplin’s notebooks are database records, not directories. What they share is a boundary: an index is built over one tree, and identity (titles, links, tags) is unique within it.

How it works

The tool walks the tree at startup, indexes titles, links and tags, and watches for changes. Anything it needs to remember about the collection that is not a note goes in a hidden folder at the root; Obsidian writes .obsidian/ with per-vault hotkeys, themes and plugins, and its docs recommend excluding workspace.json from git because it changes on every open (Obsidian: How Obsidian stores data). Multiple vaults are separate indexes: switching is a context switch, and a link cannot cross the boundary.

Pitfalls

Nesting a vault inside another vault confuses both indexes; Obsidian warns against it because links may not update correctly. The hidden config folder is the part that does not travel: sync it and you carry plugin state between machines, ignore it and each machine has its own settings. Sync clients treat the whole tree as data, so a tool that writes caches or lock files next to notes creates conflicts that have nothing to do with your writing.

In other tools

Obsidian: one folder, .obsidian/ inside it, and as many vaults as you like, each with its own settings. Logseq: a graph; the file-based version is a folder, and the newer DB version keeps the graph in SQLite (Logseq README). nb: notebooks are git repositories under ~/.nb by default, or any folder initialised as a local notebook, switched with nb use (nb README). Joplin: notebooks live in SQLite, with the folder-like hierarchy stored as records rather than directories (Joplin FAQ).

In tnotes

tnotes calls a vault a root. roots in ~/.config/tnotes/config.toml is a list, so several folders can be open at once, and a note’s id, root/sub/stem, names which one it belongs to.

tnotes ~/work/notes      # add a root to the config and open it
tnotes --dir ~/tmp/notes # this folder only, config untouched

The first launch asks where notes live (default ~/Documents/notes). tnotes writes nothing inside a root except notes and a per-root .Trash/ that mirrors the folder layout; config and session state live under ~/.config/tnotes and ~/.local/state/tnotes. Dot-prefixed entries such as .git and .obsidian are ignored, so an Obsidian vault can be added as a root and its config folder stays out of the way. See /docs/config and /for/obsidian-users.