Vaults

A vault is a folder on your disk. Mindex indexes it, draws it and writes back to it. Nothing about a vault lives anywhere else.

Rules

• Notes are Markdown files.
• YAML frontmatter carries structure.
• Attachments are ordinary files inside the vault.
• Note types and settings are files too, under .mindex/.
• Git is optional, and tracks the vault like any other repository.

Why the folder matters

Because you can leave. Open the vault in another editor, grep it from a terminal, back it up with whatever you already use, or hand it to someone with no copy of Mindex at all. The app should never become the only way to read your own notes.

This also means Mindex has to be careful: anything it cannot express as a file is something you would lose by walking away. That is the reason types, context and templates are all files rather than rows.

What .mindex/ holds

Path	Purpose	Safe to delete
cache.json	The index	Yes — rebuilt on next open
settings.json	Per-vault settings	Yes — back to defaults
types/	Types you created or edited	No — these are yours
templates/	Your context template	No — falls back to the built-in
tmp/	Staging for atomic writes	Yes

The directory is excluded from the file watcher and from the indexer, so nothing in it shows up as a note.

Vault state and app state

Some things belong to the vault and should travel with it. Others belong to the installation and should not.

Vault	App
Note types and their fields	Which assistant is active
Type icons and colours	Window size and zoom
The context template	The list of recent vaults
Per-vault settings	Theme and text size

Opening an existing folder

There is no conversion. Point Mindex at a folder you have been keeping by hand and it indexes what is there. Notes without frontmatter are untyped notes; they work.