L. D., Oakland writes: I've read the docs twice. I still don't understand what a "vault" is. Is it a folder? Is it a database? Can I have more than one? Why not just call it a folder?
Fair. Glossary question, honest confusion, our fault for not being clearer.
A vault is a folder you've told Froots is the folder. Functionally it's just a directory on your disk — ~/Froots by default, but it can be anywhere: Dropbox, iCloud, a USB stick, a network drive. Inside it are your notes (.md files), your routines (.routine.md files), your agent identities, and a few dotfiles Froots uses to keep things in order. That's it. You can open a vault in TextEdit or VS Code or cat. Nothing is hidden in a database.
Why we call it a vault instead of a folder:
- A vault has a scope. Agents, routines, and memory are bounded by the vault they live in. Open a different vault and you get a different set of agents, with different tools, looking at different notes. That's a useful mental model — "my work vault is different from my journal vault" — that "folder" doesn't carry.
- A vault is indexed. Froots maintains a search index, a backlink graph, and an embedding store scoped to the vault. Those are regenerated if you move the vault; they're not baked in. But treating the folder as an index is conceptually different from "just a folder."
- Plural. You can have more than one. Pick a different vault with
File → Open Vault…or by pointing at a different folder at launch.
What a vault is not:
- Not a database. There's no binary file you can't read.
- Not a project. Projects, tags, and folders are still things inside your vault.
- Not proprietary. Open your vault folder in Obsidian tomorrow and most things work — markdown, wikilinks, tags, frontmatter, daily notes. The reverse is also true.
So: vault = the folder you've named as the root of a notes ecosystem, and the scope within which your agents, routines, and search operate. Nothing fancier than that.
— The editors