Vaults

A vault is a folder of notes on your computer. Any folder works: an empty one, a folder of Markdown files, or an Obsidian vault, which Nether opens as it is.

Opening a vault

Open Nether and choose Open a folder. Nether reads the folder, lists its notes, and remembers it under Recent vaults for next time. You can also start Nether with a folder:

nether ~/Notes

Name a note after the folder to open the vault at it, by its path in the vault or on disk; otherwise Nether opens at the note you had open last:

nether ~/Notes Projects/Plan.md

Nether follows the folder while the vault is open: a note you add, change, move or delete with another app shows up in Nether within moments.

What Nether adds to the folder

Very little, and only out of sight:

• .nether/vault.json holds the vault’s ID, so Nether knows the folder again after you move or rename it. Beside it, small JSON files keep the vault’s settings, such as its property types and templates, and a record of its trash.
• .trash holds the notes you delete in Nether, as Obsidian’s trash does.

Nether never adds anything to your notes themselves. Opening a note does not change its file.

Files and folders whose names start with a dot, such as .obsidian or .git, are left out of the vault.

Deleting and restoring notes

Move to trash, at the top of a note, moves it to the vault’s .trash folder. The sidebar then says so, with Restore to put it straight back, and × to close the message.

The Trash tab lists every note in the trash, the latest first, with the folder it was in, when it was deleted and how many days it has left. From there:

• Restore puts a note back where it was, as the same note: links to it and its history work as before. If another note has taken its place, it comes back beside it, as Plan 2.
• Delete for good deletes a note’s file, after one more click to be sure. Empty trash does the same for every note in the trash.

Notes stay in the trash for 30 days, or as many as you set at the bottom of the Trash tab, and are deleted for good when the vault next opens after that. Notes another app put in .trash, such as Obsidian, show there too, and their days count from when Nether first finds them.

A note’s history

Nether keeps a note as it was before each spell of editing, and every ten minutes while one goes on, on this computer. Run Show the note’s history from the command palette to see its versions, the latest first. Choosing one shows what changed from it to the note now: lines since removed, marked with a minus, and lines since added, marked with a plus, with long runs of unchanged lines folded away.

Restore this version puts the note back as it was. The note as it is just before is kept as a version first, so a restore is undone the same way. A restored note is an edit like any other: it syncs to your other computers.

Versions are kept for 30 days, or as many as you set at the bottom of the history, and deleted when the vault next opens after that. They are kept in Nether’s index, not in the vault, so they stay on the computer that made them.

A vault that syncs with a server shows the server’s versions too, beside this computer’s and marked with where each is kept, so the history has the edits made on your other computers. The server’s admin decides how long it keeps them. An encrypted workspace’s server cannot read your notes, so there each computer keeps its own history.

Where the index lives

To open a large vault quickly, Nether keeps an index of it: the notes, their sizes and dates, and the IDs that keep links working when a note moves. The index is a database in Nether’s own data folder, not in the vault, so a sync tool or Git never carries it. Deleting it loses only the notes’ earlier versions on this computer: Nether builds the rest again the next time it opens the vault.