Editing your vault

Because your vault is just a folder of plain markdown files, you can read and write it in whatever editor you already use. horus-os never locks your notes into a proprietary format or database. This guide focuses on Obsidian, a popular markdown knowledge-base editor, and then covers other editors and a few things to know about how horus-os sees your edits.

Use Obsidian as your vault editor#

Obsidian opens any folder of markdown files as a "vault." Pointing it at your horus-os notes folder gives you a polished editor, a file tree, graph view, and live preview over the exact same files your agents read and write.

There are two ways to connect them.

Option A: open your horus-os notes folder in Obsidian#

Point Obsidian directly at the existing notes folder.

1. Find your vault path. It is the notes/ folder in your data directory, for example ~/Library/Application Support/horus-os/notes on macOS.
2. In Obsidian, choose Open folder as vault and select that folder.
3. Obsidian now edits the same markdown files horus-os uses. Notes your agents write appear in Obsidian, and notes you write in Obsidian are visible to your agents.

Option B: point horus-os at your existing Obsidian vault#

If you already keep an Obsidian vault, tell horus-os to use it as the notes folder. Edit config.toml in your data directory:

Restart horus-os and your agents now read and write inside your existing vault.

What horus-os understands (and what it does not)#

This is the important part, so that Obsidian behaves the way you expect. horus-os treats your vault as plain markdown. It does not currently parse Obsidian-specific conventions, so a few Obsidian features are visible only inside Obsidian and are not understood by your agents:

Obsidian feature	Works in Obsidian	Understood by horus-os agents
Standard markdown (headings, lists, tables, code)	Yes	Yes
Full-text and semantic search of note bodies	Yes	Yes
Wikilinks [[Note Name]]	Yes	Stored as plain text, not resolved as links
Tags #tag	Yes	Stored as plain text, not indexed as metadata
YAML frontmatter properties	Yes	Stored as plain text, not parsed as metadata
Backlinks and graph view	Yes	Not built

In practice this means you can absolutely use Obsidian to organize, link, and tag your notes for your own benefit. Your agents will still find those notes by their text content through keyword and (if enabled) vector search. They just will not follow a [[wikilink]] or filter by a #tag the way Obsidian does.

Other editors#

Anything that edits text files works just as well:

• VS Code with a markdown preview extension, opened on your notes folder.
• Vim, Neovim, or Emacs for terminal editing.
• Any plain text editor, since there is nothing but .md files.

After editing notes outside horus-os#

Keyword search always reads the current files on disk, so notes you add or edit in another editor are searchable immediately, with no extra step.

If you have enabled on-device vector memory and you make a large batch of external edits, rebuild the semantic index so those changes are reflected in vector search:

Next steps#

• The vault explains how memory, audit logging, and vector search work under the hood.
• Autonomous research shows the Researcher writing cited reports straight into your vault.