Getting started

Create your first vault

A vault is a local folder holding all your docs, tables, and settings.

What is a vault

One vault = one ordinary folder. Open it and you see raw .md files, .kitable table files, and a .kition/ metadata directory. No proprietary format, no lock files, no cloud dependency.

That means you can edit the markdown in VS Code, zip the directory and email it to a colleague, or grep across the entire history in milliseconds. Kition layers structured features on top (wikilinks, tables, agent), but the substrate stays flat files.

Create one

Hit Create New Vault in onboarding, or once in the main UI press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + N. Point it at an empty directory (or let Kition create one) and give it a meaningful name like personal or work-2026.

You can mount several vaults at once — the top dropdown swaps between them. A common pattern is one vault for work, one for personal, and a separate one for anything sensitive.

Use an absolute path. Avoid symlinks and OneDrive on-demand folders
Avoid iCloud Drive with Optimize Storage on — it evicts files asynchronously
Avoid network shares / WebDAV — vault index locking is unreliable on remote filesystems
Prefer a local SSD with Git layered on top for versioning

Inside the vault

A freshly created vault looks roughly like this. .kition/ is Kition's metadata directory — do not hand-edit it, but everything inside is plain text or JSON, so it diffs cleanly in Git.

my-vault/
  Notes/                 # your freeform markdown
  Projects/
  Tables/                # one .kitable file per table
  .kition/
    config.json          # per-vault settings
    index/               # search index (regenerable)
    secrets/             # never commit this dir
    history/             # local undo history

A starter layout

You can absolutely dump everything in the root and never make folders. But if you want a starting point, this layout works well for indie writing, project tracking, and research notes:

Notes/ — freeform notes, journal, ephemera
Projects/ — one subfolder per project
Tables/ — data tables (auto-created)
Templates/ — doc templates the palette can quick-insert
Resources/ — attachments, PDFs, screenshots
Archive/ — excluded from default search

Working with multiple vaults

Vaults are fully isolated: each has its own provider config, hooks, and index. That is deliberate — your work vault uses the company-issued API key, your personal vault uses yours, and the two never bleed into each other.

Do not symlink subdirectories between vaults — the two indexes will fight. If you need to share content, export and re-import the markdown instead.