Obsidian Vault for the Monodex Pattern

The "Monodex" pattern is a single Obsidian vault that holds every note, draft, project log, and reference document a developer accumulates — one searchable graph, one daily note rhythm, one set of conventions. The alternative is the project-vault sprawl most Obsidian users end up with after a year: one vault for work, one for personal, one for side-projects, none of which can see each other. The Monodex pattern collapses all of that into a single source of truth and leans on folder structure plus tags to keep the surfaces separate.

This entry is the vault configuration — folder shape, core plugin settings, a curated set of community plugins, and the callout conventions that make the vault legible to both a human and an AI agent operating on it. It assumes Obsidian 1.5+ on macOS, but everything except the file paths translates to Windows and Linux unchanged.

#// Vault Shape

The folder layout is opinionated and small. Five top-level folders cover every category of note; nesting inside each folder is per-folder convention, not a forced taxonomy.

.obsidian/         # vault config (committed)
.trash/            # Obsidian's soft-delete bucket (gitignored)
Projects/          # active work, one folder per project
Reference/         # durable knowledge — concepts, libraries, patterns
Daily/             # daily notes, YYYY-MM-DD.md
Drafts/            # writing in flight before it goes to git
Attachments/       # images and PDFs (centralized, see core settings)

Projects/ holds short-lived working notes — once a project ships or moves to a real repo, the notes either get archived in Reference/ (the durable ones) or deleted (the throwaway ones). Reference/ is the long-term knowledge base: one note per concept, library, or technique, all linked together. Daily/ is the date-stamped journal that becomes the timeline of what you were working on and when.

#// Core Plugin Settings

Obsidian's "core plugins" are the ones bundled with the app. The ones that earn their spot for a Monodex setup are Daily Notes, Backlinks, Outgoing Links, Tag Pane, Templates, and Properties. The full settings are in the artifact below; two settings matter enough to call out:

{
  "useMarkdownLinks": true,
  "attachmentFolderPath": "Attachments",
  "newLinkFormat": "shortest",
  "showLineNumber": true
}

attachmentFolderPath: "Attachments" centralizes every pasted image and PDF into one folder, so attachments don't pollute the note folders. newLinkFormat: "shortest" makes new links use the shortest unique path — [Convex](Convex.md) instead of [Convex](Reference/databases/Convex.md). Easier to read, still resolvable.

#// Community Plugins That Matter

The community-plugin ecosystem is enormous and mostly noise. Three plugins are worth the install for a Monodex setup:

[
  "templater-obsidian",
  "dataview",
  "obsidian-git"
]

templater-obsidian is the template engine that powers daily-note generation, project scaffolding, and any "new X" workflow. The bundled core Templates plugin is fine for static templates; Templater adds variables, prompts, and small JavaScript expressions, which is the difference between "boilerplate" and "scaffold."

dataview lets notes query other notes — pull every project marked as status:: active, list all daily notes from this week, show every reference note tagged #convex. The query language is its own thing but pays off the first time you stop maintaining an index manually because Dataview generates it.

obsidian-git runs git add, git commit, and git push against the vault on a schedule (every 15 minutes is fine). It's the difference between "if my laptop dies I lose six months of notes" and "everything is on GitHub by tonight." Pair it with a private GitHub repo and the vault becomes durable.

#// Callout Conventions

Obsidian's callout syntax (extended Markdown blockquotes with a typed prefix) is the single most useful convention for a vault that will eventually feed an AI workflow. A callout looks like this:

> [!note] Title goes here
> Body goes here. Multiple lines work.
> Links and **formatting** work.

> [!warning] Things that bit me
> - Specific bug
> - Specific fix

Obsidian supports note, tip, warning, danger, info, success, question, quote, example, cite, abstract, todo, failure, and bug out of the box. For a Monodex feeding an AI content pipeline, picking a small subset and using it consistently is more valuable than using all of them.

#// Daily Notes and the Templater Wiring

The Daily Notes core plugin handles date-stamped file creation; Templater fills the contents. The combination gives you a daily journal that's both reflexive (open Obsidian, today's note is the front page) and structured (every daily note has the same shape, so a Dataview query can aggregate across them).

---
date: <% tp.date.now("YYYY-MM-DD") %>
tags: [daily]
---

# <% tp.date.now("dddd, MMMM Do") %>

## In flight
- 

## Decisions
- 

## Notes
- 

## Tomorrow
- 

The four sections — In flight, Decisions, Notes, Tomorrow — cover the daily writing rhythm without forcing a long-form journal. "In flight" is what I'm working on; "Decisions" is what I decided (this is what feeds the Monodex's decision log when I eventually port the vault); "Notes" is everything else; "Tomorrow" is the explicit handoff to my future self.

#// Theme and CSS Tweaks

Two CSS snippets in .obsidian/snippets/ make the vault visibly calmer:

.markdown-source-view.mod-cm6 .cm-line {
  max-width: 760px;
}
.cm-content {
  font-family: "JetBrains Mono", "iA Writer Mono", monospace;
}
.markdown-preview-view {
  max-width: 760px;
  margin: 0 auto;
}

The reading column at 760px is a deliberate constraint — long-form reading falls apart past ~80 characters per line, and Obsidian's default width tries to fill the whole window. Capping the column makes notes easier to read and forces you to actually scroll long notes rather than skimming horizontally. The monospace font choice is taste — works equally well with any prose-friendly variable-width font.

#// Sync and Backup

Obsidian's paid Sync service works fine. For a developer who already lives in git, obsidian-git (mentioned above) plus a private GitHub repo is equivalent at zero cost, and it has the side benefit of giving you a real commit history of the vault — which means real git log on your own thinking. The trade-off is that git's merge model can occasionally surface conflicts in .obsidian/workspace.json (per-machine UI state); the fix is to gitignore that file.