Open a folder or Obsidian vault

Writer Computer works on the folders of markdown files you already have: an Obsidian vault, the docs folder of a git repository, a personal wiki. There is nothing to import. Writer reads your .md files where they are and saves them back in place.

Open a folder

Any of these opens a folder as a workspace:

Choose Open Folder… from the workspace menu at the top of the sidebar.
Run Open Workspace from the command palette (⌘P).
Drag the folder onto a Writer window.
Run writer path/to/folder in a terminal. See the writer command.

You can keep several workspaces open at once, each in its own window. Right-click Writer's Dock icon to reopen a recent one.

To open an Obsidian vault, open the vault's folder. Writer doesn't need anything from the .obsidian folder and never writes to it. See Obsidian compatibility for the syntax it understands.

Open a single note

Open a .md or .markdown file with Writer, from Finder's Open With menu, by dragging it onto Writer, or with writer note.md, and it opens in a compact window of its own, with no sidebar, tabs or status bar. Click the note's title at the top to switch to one of your recent notes. From a workspace, Open File in Compact Window in the command palette does the same for the note you're on.

What Writer does with your files

Saves plain markdown in place. Writer doesn't convert, rename or move your files, and keeps its settings and session in its own app data folder, not in your notes folder.
Pasted images go next to the note. Pasting an image into note.md saves it in a note-assets folder beside the note and inserts a standard markdown image link, so the image shows up in other apps too. Pasted images can be up to 5 MB.
Picks up changes made elsewhere. Files you create, rename, edit or delete outside Writer, in Obsidian, another editor or with git pull, show up in the sidebar, and open notes reload with the new content.
Leaves out what you don't edit. Files ignored by .gitignore, hidden folders such as .git and .obsidian, and node_modules are left out of the sidebar and search.

Large folders open quickly: the window shows the top level of the folder and your last open note first, and builds the search index in the background.

The writer command

Choose Writer → Install 'writer' Command Line Tool… to add a writer command at /usr/local/bin/writer. macOS may ask for an administrator password. Then, in a terminal:

writer .          # open the current folder
writer ~/notes    # open a folder
writer todo.md    # open one note

writer --help lists the options. The same menu item uninstalls the command.