Files and folders
A vault is an entire Git repository, so it holds whatever repositories hold. Open Note tries to be honest about that rather than pretending a repo contains only notes.
What opens in what
Section titled “What opens in what”| Kind | What happens |
|---|---|
Markdown (.md, .markdown, .mdown, .mkd) |
The note editor: inline decoration, wikilinks, tasks, diagrams. |
| Text and code (anything not a known binary) | A plain editor with line numbers, monospace and syntax highlighting for around 150 languages. |
Images (.png, .jpg, .gif, .webp, .svg, .avif, .bmp) |
Read-only preview. |
Drawings (.excalidraw) |
The drawing canvas. |
Binaries (.pdf, .zip, archives, media, fonts…) |
Listed, greyed out, never opened. |
Classification is a denylist of binary extensions rather than an allowlist of
text ones. A repository can hold a Makefile, a .env, a Dockerfile or any of
a hundred config formats, and an allowlist would never keep up. Anything that
turns out not to be valid UTF-8 is refused when you try to open it.
Creating, renaming, moving, deleting
Section titled “Creating, renaming, moving, deleting”- ＋ and ⊞ above the file tree create a note or folder at the vault root.
- Right-click anywhere in the tree to create inside a folder, or to rename or delete.
- Drag a note or folder onto another folder to move it.
Renaming or moving a note rewrites the [[wikilinks]] that point at it. The
rewrites and the rename land in the same commit, so the whole change can be
reviewed — and reverted — as one thing.
Deleting is permanent as far as the working tree goes; there is no trash. Git history is the recovery mechanism, and a second half-mechanism would be worse than one clear one. If a file has never been committed, the app says so before deleting it, because in that case there is genuinely nothing to recover from.
Empty folders
Section titled “Empty folders”Git cannot store an empty directory. Open Note lists folders from the filesystem so a folder you just made does not appear to vanish — but be aware that an empty folder will not sync to another machine. It shows up there as soon as it contains a file.
What is hidden
Section titled “What is hidden”.git/— never listed, and destructive operations refuse to touch it..opennote/— the app’s own settings. Hidden because the settings and shortcuts panels own it, and listing it invites hand-edits that race them.- Anything in
.gitignore— the file tree comes from Git, so your ignore rules are respected for free. Anode_modulesis never even walked. - Other dot-directories — tooling, not notes.
Attachments
Section titled “Attachments”Paste an image into a note and it is written into the vault as a real file, then linked relatively. It is never embedded as base64 — that would bloat the note, ruin the diff, and make the image invisible to everything except Open Note.
Where they land is configurable in settings: a folder name puts them all in one
place (assets/ by default), and . puts each one beside the note that uses it.
Where Open Note’s own files live
Section titled “Where Open Note’s own files live”In the vault, committed, so they travel between machines:
.opennote/settings.json— sync intervals, attachment folder, pinned notes..opennote/keymap.json— your keyboard shortcuts.
Both are plain JSON and safe to edit by hand. Parsing degrades field by field: a broken entry falls back to its default rather than stopping the vault from opening.
On the machine, in your OS config directory, never committed:
- The list of vaults you have opened recently.
Multiple vaults
Section titled “Multiple vaults”Several vaults can be open at once, each with its own sync state, settings, branch and keymap. They appear as tabs at the top of the window.
They are genuinely independent — one can be mid-conflict while another pushes happily.