Vault Structure

Your vault is yours to shape. MindWiki only ships one folder for you — capture/ — because that's the one piece of structure every workflow benefits from. Everything else, you decide.

What we ship

When you create your account, your vault is provisioned with a single user-facing folder:

capture/

That's it. No projects/, no research/, no _templates/, no opinionated tree. You won't waste time deleting starter content you didn't ask for.

Why structure stays minimal

Different brains organize differently. A founder, a researcher, and a writer all need very different vault shapes, and forcing one template on all of them would slow everyone down. We'd rather you build the structure that fits the way you actually think.

The one universal pattern is a frictionless inbox. That's why capture/ exists — so you never have to decide where something goes before it goes in.

Patterns that work

These are folder patterns we've seen work well across different users. Take what's useful, ignore what isn't.

FolderWhat tends to go here
capture/Raw thoughts, links, voice memos, forwarded emails. Pre-built for you.
projects/Active work with a finish line. One folder per project.
people/Notes about specific humans.
places/Locations that matter.
ideas/Half-formed thoughts and hypotheses you're still developing.
reference/Stable knowledge — frameworks, methodologies, settled answers.
sources/Summaries of articles, books, podcasts, papers.
research/Active investigations and ongoing inquiries.
patterns/Cross-domain connections you've named yourself.
decisions/A decision log with predictions and outcomes.

You can use any subset of these, all of them, or none of them. You can also use folder names that mean nothing to anyone but you. The vault doesn't care.

How to add structure

Create folders the moment you need them, not before. The simplest workflow:

  • Capture into capture/ without thinking.
  • When two or three captures clearly belong together, create a folder for them.
  • Move them in.
  • Repeat as themes emerge.

This way the structure grows out of real content. You never end up with empty folders looking for something to fill them.

In the macOS app, create a new folder with Cmd+Shift+N or right-click in the sidebar. In the web app, use the command palette (Cmd+K) → New folder.

Page format

Every page is plain markdown with optional YAML frontmatter:

yaml
---
title: A Page About Something
area: research
type: note
created: 2026-05-09
updated: 2026-05-09
tags: [example, draft]
---

The body uses standard markdown plus [[wikilinks]] between pages. You don't need any frontmatter to start — it's optional and useful, not required. See Frontmatter & Metadata for the full reference.

Naming and renaming

  • File names use lowercase-with-hyphens, like feedback-loops.md.
  • Page titles are taken from the title frontmatter field if present, otherwise from the file name.
  • Renaming a page in the macOS app updates the file on disk. Wikilinks pointing to old names will continue to resolve as long as the new page title or path matches.

Internal folders to ignore

You may notice a _meta/ folder. That's internal app metadata (vault schema, app-managed files) — not part of your structure. Ignore it. You will never need to edit it manually.

Where to go next