obsidian-vault-template

A GitHub template repository for a multi-topic Obsidian vault of public study notes on reverse engineering, coding, programming languages, and adjacent CS topics — one self-contained topic folder per subject, all sharing the same structure and tooling.

Each topic mirrors the shape of reversing-dalvik-bytecode: topic-centric chapters and self-updating Dataview indices, with Templater scaffolding for every note type. Topics are top-level folders at the repository root, numbered in the order they're added — so the vault can hold as many as you're studying, side by side. A small set of standalone note types (case studies, cheatsheets, tool notes, reading notes, project logs) covers things that don't belong to one chapter — and don't belong to one topic either, so they live once, shared vault-wide, at the repository root rather than inside any topic folder.

📓 Using this template

1. On GitHub, click Use this template → Create a new repository (if this repo isn't already marked as a template, enable it once under Settings → General → Template repository).
2. Clone the new repository and open its root folder in Obsidian.
3. Add your first topic with the New-Topic Templater template (see [[New-Topic]] / Templates/New-Topic.md) — it creates the topic's home note and walks you through copying its 01-Reference/ from _Topic-Skeleton/.
4. Add chapters within that topic with New-Chapter (see [[New-Chapter]]) — everything else grows from there.
5. Install the recommended community plugins (Templater, Dataview, Spaced Repetition) — see Home.md for why each one matters.

[!TIP] This vault is meant to be read and edited in Obsidian, not on GitHub. The notes rely on Obsidian-only features — [[wikilink]] navigation and the graph/backlinks view, Dataview queries, Templater templates, foldable callouts — that GitHub's markdown renderer simply doesn't have; on GitHub they degrade to plain text or empty code blocks. Open the folder with Obsidian (free, available on desktop, iOS, and Android) and start from Home.md for the full, properly-rendered index.

📚 What's included

Path	Content
<NN>-<TopicName>/ (one per topic, numbered by add order)	everything for that subject, at the repository root — empty at ship time
Case-Studies/, Cheatsheets/, Tools/, Reading-Notes/, Projects/	standalone note types shared vault-wide across every topic — see below
_Topic-Skeleton/	copy-source for a new topic's 01-Reference/ folder
Templates/	every Templater template, used vault-wide across all topics
assets/	non-note files (scans, screenshots, exported diagrams), not topic-specific

Topic folders sit directly at the root alongside these — don't use Templates, _Topic-Skeleton, assets, or any of the five shared-folder names above as a topic name, and don't number the shared folders (the number prefix is exclusively a topic-folder marker). Each topic follows this internal shape:

<NN>-<TopicName>/
├── <TopicName>.md      <- topic home/MOC
├── 01-ChapterName/       <- numbered concept chapters, added as you go
│   ├── ChapterName.md
│   ├── examples/
│   └── snippets/
└── 0N-Reference/          <- always the highest-numbered chapter

Case-Studies/ also ships with a fictional demo-project-case-study/ showing the expected case-study shape (overview note, imported source/, analysis notes/), tagged placeholder so it's excluded from the real listing.

See CLAUDE.md for the complete structuring convention — including the vault-wide filename-uniqueness rule Obsidian's bare [[wikilinks]] depend on — read it before adding a new topic, chapter, note type, or top-level folder.

Structure and extensibility

• Notes are cross-linked with Obsidian's [[wikilink]] syntax, which powers the graph view and backlinks panel (see the tip above about reading this in Obsidian).
• Diagrams use Mermaid, rendered natively by both Obsidian and GitHub.
• New notes of any kind should be created from the files in Templates/, via the Templater community plugin (recommended) or the core "Templates" plugin.
• Every topic's Reference index note, and the vault-wide Case-Studies, Cheatsheets, Tools, Reading-Notes, and Projects index notes, include Dataview queries that automatically list every matching note as it's added.

License

MIT — do whatever you like with the skeleton; the content you fill it with is yours.