The git backend

Revision history is backed by git. Not the git you might already be running in a notes folder — a separate repository the app manages itself.

Screenshot prefs-history.png

The History tab in Preferences showing repository location and commit interval settings.

Where it lives

Outside your vault, at a path set in Preferences → History. Keeping it elsewhere means:

• your notes folder has no .git directory in it
• a vault you already track in git of your own is not disturbed
• syncing the vault does not sync the whole history

One repository, many workspaces

Inside, each file tree gets its own directory:

<repo>/workspaces/<slug>/

The slug is generated once when a tree is created and never changes — tb08w0k4m2-notes, for example. It combines a creation timestamp, a short hash of the path, and a readable name, so two trees called notes in different places never collide, and renaming a folder does not orphan its history.

Settings

Setting	What it does
Repository path	Where the history repo lives
Commit interval	Minimum time between recorded versions
External change debounce	How long to wait after an outside edit before recording
Max concurrent loads	How many histories to read at once when browsing

The debounce matters if you sync your vault: a sync writing several files at once would otherwise produce a version per file.

Disk usage

Notes are small text files and git stores changes compactly, so history is typically a small fraction of the vault’s size. A vault of a few thousand notes edited daily generally stays in the tens of megabytes.

Using git yourself

It is an ordinary repository — git log works. Treat it as read-only: the app owns it, and hand-committing risks confusing its bookkeeping. To keep your notes in git yourself, make the vault its own separate repo.