Your first note and vault

A vault is just a folder

Open any folder of markdown files in Solomon and it becomes a vault — there's no import, no conversion, no separate database. Your notes stay exactly what they are: .md files you can open in Solomon, in Obsidian, in a plain text editor, or from a script. Nothing about opening a folder changes the files in it.

Creating a note

Run New note from the File menu or the command palette — Enter-through mints a blank note immediately, or give it a path and (optionally) a template (a starter note kept in Templates/) to fill it in with a starting body. The note opens straight into the editor.

Frontmatter

The block between --- fences at the top of a note is its frontmatter — plain YAML that becomes structured metadata:

---
status: active
tags: [inbox]
---

The rest of the file is the note's body.

Frontmatter is what powers everything else in Solomon: [[Bases and widgets|bases]] filter and sort on it, agents can read and write it, and search can match against it ([status:active]). A note doesn't need any frontmatter to exist — plain prose files work fine — but the moment you want a note to show up in a table or kanban view, giving it a property or two is what makes that possible.

The first time Solomon opens a note, it stamps in a stable id (a lowercase ULID) and a created timestamp if they're not already present — so a note you drop into the vault from outside Solomon (or an existing Obsidian note) gets adopted cleanly the first time you open it, without losing its content.

The live-preview editor

Notes open in a live-preview markdown editor: you're always editing the raw markdown, but formatting renders inline as you type — headings, bold/italic, links, tables, checkboxes you can click, and embedded [[Bases and widgets|widgets]]. There's no separate "preview mode" to toggle; what you see is the same file that's on disk, rendered live. This matters for sync too — the buffer underneath the live preview is always the real markdown, which is what lets edits merge conflict-free across devices when you turn sync on.

Folders you'll notice

As you use more of Solomon, a few folder names take on special meaning at the vault root:

None of these are required. An empty vault with just a few plain notes is a completely normal way to use Solomon.

Next steps

• [[Core concepts at a glance]] — the rest of the tour.
• [[Local-first and CRDT sync]] — how sync works once you turn it on.
• [[Agents and skills]] — how agents read and propose changes to a note's frontmatter.