Vault and files

Shady Notes has no database and no proprietary format. Every note is a .md file in a folder you choose.

Screenshot finder-vault.png

A Finder window showing the vault folder containing Markdown files and subfolders.

The default location is:

~/Documents/ShadyNotes/

What that buys you

• Nothing is locked in. Open the same folder in Obsidian, VS Code, vim, or anything else. Edits made elsewhere appear in Shady Notes.
• Your existing tools work. Back it up with Time Machine, sync it with iCloud Drive or Dropbox, put it in a git repo.
• Uninstalling loses nothing. Delete the app and the notes are still there.

Sync and conflicts

If you sync the folder across machines, two copies of a note can diverge. Shady Notes detects this and can show you a three-way diff rather than silently picking a winner — see Conflicts.

File trees

You are not limited to one folder. Shady Notes shows one or more file trees, each a root folder somewhere on disk — say a personal vault, a work notes folder, and a code repository’s docs directory.

Add and remove them in Preferences → Vault. Each tree can:

• carry a display name different from its folder name
• auto-track new files it discovers
• be marked inactive, which keeps it out of the combined Navigator view while still being reachable from its own filter

Trees are the raw folders. Workspaces are how you group them into working contexts.

Attachments

Images pasted or dragged into a note are written into an attachments folder alongside your notes — _img/ by default, configurable in Preferences → Editor. See Images.

Filenames

New notes are named according to the naming strategy in Preferences → Vault — from the first heading, from the date, or prompted.

What is not in the vault

Your notes and attachments are on disk. Everything else — window size, theme, open tabs, workspace setup, starred notes, keyboard bindings — lives in macOS preferences, not in the vault. Copying the folder to another Mac brings the notes, not the layout.

Version history is separate again: a git repository outside the vault, so it never clutters the folder. See The git backend.