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A vault is a named pointer to a directory of Markdown files — for example, your Obsidian vault, a folder of engineering notes, or any collection of .md files on disk. smolbren keeps a registry of vaults so you can maintain multiple independent knowledge bases and switch between them with a single flag.

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Registering a vault

smolbren vault add <name> <path> [--default]
Register a directory as a named vault: 
smolbren vault add personal ~/notes/obsidian
smolbren vault add work /home/alice/work-notes --default
The --default flag marks this vault as the one smolbren uses when no --vault flag is passed. You can only have one default vault at a time; registering a new vault with --default replaces the previous default. smolbren stores the name-to-path mapping in ~/.smolbren/config.json. The vault directory itself is never modified.

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Listing vaults

smolbren vault list
Prints a JSON array with one entry per registered vault: 
[
  {"name":"personal","path":"/Users/you/notes","default":true,"indexed_at_ms":1719700000000},
  {"name":"work","path":"/home/alice/work-notes","default":false,"indexed_at_ms":null}
]
Each entry shows the vault name, its directory path, whether it is the current default, and when it was last indexed (indexed_at_ms is null if the vault has never been indexed).

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Removing a vault

smolbren vault remove <name>
Unregisters the vault and permanently deletes its index data from ~/.smolbren/vaults/<name>/. The original Markdown files are never touched. Use this command when you no longer need smolbren to query a vault, or to force a clean slate before re-adding the vault. If the removed vault was the default, the default is cleared and you will need to pass --vault explicitly (or re-add a vault with --default) until a new default is set.

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Using a specific vault

Every smolbren command accepts a global --vault <name> flag that overrides the default: 
smolbren search "distributed systems" --vault work
smolbren query "MATCH (n:project) RETURN n.title" --vault personal
smolbren index --vault work

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Data storage

After indexing, smolbren writes all index data under: 
~/.smolbren/vaults/<name>/
├── notes.lance        # full-text search index + note metadata
├── edges.lance        # typed graph edges derived from frontmatter wikilinks
└── ontology.json      # discovered node types and edge types with counts
These files are managed entirely by smolbren. You do not need to read, edit, or back them up — simply re-run smolbren index to rebuild them from your Markdown files at any time.
Pass --default when you register your primary vault so you never have to type --vault for everyday searches and queries. You can always change the default later by running smolbren vault add <name> <path> --default again for a different vault.