Vaults and the sidebar

A vault is a folder of notes. You can have many vaults, for example "Work", "Study" and "Personal". The window and the terminal use one list of vaults.

The workspace sidebar

The sidebar is a workspace, as in VS Code. The tree roots are vaults. Each vault expands into its own tree of folders and notes, and you see all of them at the same time.

kknow reads a vault only when you expand it, search in it or sync it. Ten vaults in the list cost nothing.

• Folders come before notes. Names sort by the alphabet of the window language.
• A long name stays on one line. The tooltip shows the full name and path.
• kknow remembers the collapsed folders, the recent notes and the last note of each vault. ⌘2 returns you to the exact place in that vault.

Add a vault

• Drag one or more folders into the window.
• Click the folder button in the sidebar header.
• Run open -a kknow ~/notes, or use Open With in Finder.
• Run kknow vaults add ~/notes --name Personal.

If the folder is already in the list, kknow only switches to it.

Switch between vaults

• Click a note of that vault in the sidebar.
• Press ⌘1…⌘9. The number is the position in the list.
• Click the active vault in the status bar.

The active vault owns the theme, the sync status and the status bar.

Vault actions

The ⋯ button on a tree root (or a right-click) has these actions:

• make the vault active;
• rename it (the files do not change);
• reveal it in Finder;
• change the label color;
• remove it from the list. The files stay on disk.

Labels

A vault can have text labels, for example work or study. Set them in Settings → Vaults → Labels, or in the terminal:

kknow vaults label Personal home ai

Labels do two things:

• Filter. The row of labels above the tree is a filter. Click #work, and the tree and ⌘K show only the vaults with this label. The active vault always stays.
• Group for agents. kknow mcp --label work serves all vaults with the label. See Agents.

#Work and work are the same label.

Unavailable vaults

If you move a vault folder or unmount a disk, the vault stays in the list with a mark. It does not open until the folder comes back.

Where the settings of a vault are

Each vault keeps its sync configuration, bookmarks, themes and trash in the hidden .kknow/ folder inside the vault. The vault list itself is in the app config directory. See Files and folders.