ShadowVault

The brain is for having ideas, not storing them.

ShadowVault is a long-term Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system built in Obsidian. It is a thinking environment – a place where ideas are captured, connected, refined, and surfaced over time into durable knowledge.

It combines ideas from:

Zettelkasten — atomic notes and linked thinking
Evergreen Notes — continuously refined ideas
Linking Your Thinking (LYT) — Maps of Content (MOCs)
Progressive Summarization — layered distillation of information
TallGuyJenks workflows — practical source capture, processing systems and naming convention

The goal is to build a system that helps transform information into understanding.

Documentation

Full documentation lives in 99 - Meta/01 - Documentation/

File	Description
SETUP.md	Installation, plugin setup, first run
UPDATING.md	Updating the vault to a new release without touching your notes
STRUCTURE.md	Folder tree, naming conventions, philosophy
WORKFLOWS.md	Knowledge flow, note maturity, daily notes
GLOSSARY.md	The vault's vocabulary: source, literature and permanent notes, recaps, MOCs, growth
TEMPLATES.md	All templates and the Source Capture system
METADATA.md	YAML frontmatter schema and tags
REVIEW-SYSTEM.md	Review scheduling and Dataview queries
PLUGINS.md	Required and optional community plugins
CSS.md	Future implementation: CSS snippets (notebook backgrounds, daily themes, sidebar colours)
EXTERNAL-INTEGRATIONS.md	Zotero, Raindrop, Snipd, etc.
DESIGN-PHILOSOPHY.md	Core principles behind the vault's design
INSPIRATION.md	Inspirations: Zettelkasten, Evergreen Notes, LYT, Progressive Summarization, Tallguyjenks
ROADMAP.md	Planned improvements and ideas
CHANGELOG.md	Added, changed, fixed and removed between versions
SUPPORT.md	How to support the project (donations)

Quick Start

Full guide on SETUP

Clone this repository into your Obsidian vault folder.
Install required plugins: Templater, Dataview.
Run (TEMPLATE) Source Capture via Templater to add your first source.
Start with the Home MOC (04 - MOCS/Home.md).
To update later, run 99 - Meta/04 - Tooling/update-vault.ps1 (Windows) or update-vault.sh (macOS/Linux) — see UPDATING.

Core Principles

Links over folders – navigation happens through connections, not hierarchies.
Atomic notes – one idea per note, stated as a claim. Literature and permanent notes are both atomic; what separates them is whether the idea still needs its source to make sense.
Nothing is ever finished – notes (including evergreen ones) are living, always open to revision.
Avoid the collector's fallacy – capture without connection is hoarding.

This is a short excerpt. See the full set of 11 in DESIGN-PHILOSOPHY.md.

Knowledge Flow

Every piece of information follows a path through the vault:

External World
       │
       ▼
    Capture ─────────────────────────┐
       │                             │
       ▼                             │
    Source                           │
       │                             │
       ▼                             ▼
Literature Note ··promotion··▶ Permanent Note
needs its source               stands on its own
                                     │
                                     ▼
                               MOC / Project

Not every note reaches the end, and not every note starts at the top.

The literature/permanent split is a property of the note, not a stage it passes through. A note is a literature note while its idea still needs its source to be intelligible, and a permanent note when the claim stands on its own. An idea you form yourself is born permanent – it never was a literature note. Promotion (dotted above) is the conditional move between the two, prompted by review; most literature notes never make it, and that is a correct outcome rather than a backlog.

See WORKFLOWS and the GLOSSARY

Vault Structure (simplified)

ShadowVault/
│
├── 00 - Inbox
├── 01 - Sources
├── 02 - Literature Notes
├── 03 - Permanent Notes
├── 04 - MOCS
├── 05 - Projects
├── 06 - Daily
├── 07 - Attachments
├── 08 - Nexus
├── 09 - Entities (Agents / Non-Agents)
└── 99 - Meta

Full structure and reasoning behind it: STRUCTURE

Note Development

Notes progress through four growth stages:

Stage	Meaning
🌱 Seedling	Initial capture or rough idea
🌿 Fern	Partially developed thought
🔆 Incubator	Complete but not yet integrated
🌲 Evergreen	Refined, linked, and connected

This system encourages gradual refinement instead of forcing perfection during capture.

Check Note Maturity Model

Key Features

Smart source capture – 9 source types (Books, Articles, Papers, YouTube, Video, Podcast, Tweet, Thought, Lecture) with automatic metadata fetching (ISBN, DOI, oEmbed). Check Templates
Validated lecture system – picks from existing Courses/Units/People, creates missing ones on the fly. Check Templates
Note maturity model – seedling → fern → incubator → evergreen. Check Note Maturity Model
Review system – scheduled reviews (14 days) plus Dataview queries.
Daily notes with weekly/monthly/yearly reviews.
CSS themes (planned) – notebook backgrounds, daily note colours, coloured sidebar, general tweaks will be added in a future release.
Metadata-Driven Organization - Every note has a growth stage, status, review dates, metadata and relationships. Extremely powerful using Dataview dashboards

Licence

GNU AGPL-3.0 — open source, copyleft.

Free for everyone, including companies. You may use, modify, fork and share ShadowVault for any purpose, including commercially and internally within an organisation. The only obligation is on redistribution: if you distribute a copy, you must make its source available under the same terms. That means a fork you hand to others must stay open — not that using it costs anything.
You may charge for copies if you wish, provided you still pass on the source under the same terms.
Writing about, reviewing or quoting the project is unaffected — AGPL does not restrict fair use or rights you have by law.

Why AGPL, and why the change. ShadowVault was source-available under PolyForm Noncommercial until 2.16.0. Three things argued for the move. The vault bundles plugins licensed AGPL-3.0 and GPL-3.0 — Templater, Excalidraw and Style Settings — and its own user scripts run inside Templater, so a copyleft-compatible licence removes a question a noncommercial one left open. A noncommercial licence is also not open source, and GitHub does not recognise it, so the repo displayed no licence name at all. And restricting private internal use was never the goal: the obligation that matters here is on redistribution, and AGPL states it in terms courts and companies already understand.

Notes you capture into your own vault are yours. The licence covers ShadowVault's own scripts, templates, docs and example scaffolding only, and grants no rights in anything you capture with it.

The Obsidian community plugins bundled under .obsidian/plugins/ belong to their respective authors and are not covered by this licence — see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md and NOTICE.

Support

If ShadowVault has been useful to you, consider supporting its development: ☕ ko-fi.com/tenebrishv

See SUPPORT.md for details.

shadowvault-setup