Coming from Obsidian

An Obsidian vault opens in the Jotura desktop app with no export or import step. Point Jotura at the vault folder and your notes, links, and folder tree are there. Nothing is converted, and Obsidian keeps working on the same folder.

This page covers what happens on that first open, what Jotura reads from .obsidian/ and what it leaves alone, how the two apps behave on one vault, and the Obsidian features Jotura does not have. Check that last list before you move a workflow over.

Opening your vault

1. Install the desktop app from the download page.
2. Click Open vault… in the sidebar header.
3. Pick your Obsidian vault folder in the Select a vault folder dialog.

The tree fills with your notes. Opening the vault creates one hidden folder, .jotura/, for Jotura’s own state: the search index, local history snapshots, its trash, and its templates. Your notes are not touched.

Jotura writes into the vault only when you ask it to:

What appears	When
.jotura/	On the first open. Hidden, and skipped by Jotura’s own tree, search, and sync.
A daily note	When you click a day in the calendar. Pre-creating upcoming days is off by default.
Jotura/settings.json	The first time you change a setting that applies to the vault, such as the theme.
Jotura/theme.json	When you turn on a custom theme.
A markdown copy beside a PDF or Office file	Only after you turn document conversion on. See Document conversion.
assets/	The first time you paste or drop an image into a note in Jotura.

Opening a note and closing it without edits leaves the file byte-identical. An edited note keeps every byte you did not change, including frontmatter and any syntax Jotura does not render. A round-trip test suite with a set of Obsidian-syntax fixtures holds this in place.

The phone gets the vault a different way. The Android app downloads a vault from Jotura Sync, so an Obsidian vault reaches it only after you turn on sync from the desktop. Files under .obsidian/ never sync, so the phone has none of your Obsidian settings.

Running both apps on one vault

Both apps can have the vault open at the same time. Jotura never prompts about a file that changed on disk: it merges the disk version into the note you have open, and creates no conflict files. That merge protects the Jotura side only, so avoid editing the same note in both apps at once.

A few behaviors are worth knowing while you run both:

• Renames. Renaming or moving a note in Jotura’s file tree rewrites the links that point to it. A rename made outside Jotura, in Obsidian or your file manager, is not seen by Jotura as a rename, so Jotura itself changes no links. Give the note its old name as a frontmatter alias if links need to keep working.
• Pasted images. Jotura saves pasted and dropped images in an assets/ folder at the vault root, whatever attachmentFolderPath in .obsidian/app.json says. Embeds of existing images still resolve through Obsidian’s attachment folder.
• Jotura’s state and Obsidian Sync. Obsidian Sync skips hidden folders, so .jotura/ stays on each device. A cloud drive such as iCloud or Dropbox copies it, which is harmless.

What Jotura reads from .obsidian/

Jotura reads three files from .obsidian/ and never writes anywhere inside the folder.

File	Keys used	What Jotura does with them
app.json	attachmentFolderPath	Embeds such as ![[diagram.png]] resolve by file name anywhere in the vault, then in this folder, then in the note’s own folder. All four of Obsidian’s spellings work: vault root, same folder as the note, a subfolder beside the note, and one fixed folder.
daily-notes.json	folder, format, template	Existing daily notes appear in the calendar, and clicking a day creates the note beside them in the same format, seeded from the template. jotura today follows the same file.
templates.json	folder	The template picker lists that folder next to Jotura’s own .jotura/templates/. Jotura creates and deletes templates only in its own folder.

The daily notes format supports the tokens YYYY, YY, MM, M, DD, and D. A format using any other token, such as dddd or MMMM, makes Jotura ignore the file and use its own layout, Daily/YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD.md. Jotura also uses its own layout when the vault has no daily-notes.json at all. Obsidian’s default without that file is YYYY-MM-DD.md at the vault root, so in that case the two apps file daily notes in different places.

Templates from Obsidian’s folder work when they stick to the variables Jotura knows, which include {{date}}, {{time}}, {{title}}, and the formatted {{date:FMT}} and {{time:FMT}} with the tokens YYYY YY MM M DD D HH H mm ss. Templater syntax is copied into the new note as plain text. Full detail is in Daily notes, tasks, and templates.

What Jotura ignores

Jotura skips the .obsidian/ folder and Obsidian’s .trash/ folder everywhere: the file tree, search, sync, and the file watcher. Any file or folder whose name starts with a dot is treated the same way.

Everything else inside .obsidian/ is left alone, including plugin folders and their settings, the workspace layout, hotkeys, appearance, and installed themes. Deleted notes in Obsidian’s .trash/ stay there, and notes you delete in Jotura go to its own .jotura/trash/ instead.

Syntax that carries over

The syntax you write in Obsidian is the syntax Jotura uses. Each construct below is a first-class editor feature in Jotura and is kept byte-for-byte through edits. The editor has a section on each.

Syntax	Example	In Jotura
Wikilinks	[[Roadmap]], [[Roadmap|the plan]]	Resolved by Obsidian’s rules: case-insensitive, shortest matching path, no fuzzy fallback. Typing [[ opens a link picker.
Heading and block links	[[Roadmap#Q3]], [[Roadmap#^abc123]]	Kept in the file. The anchor is ignored when resolving, so the link opens the note.
Aliases	aliases: [The Plan] in frontmatter	Resolve in links, the link picker, and quick open.
Markdown links	[text](My%20Note.md)	Decoded and resolved relative to the note, then to the vault root.
Embeds	![[diagram.png|300]], ![[contract.pdf]]	Images render, sized as given. Other files and notes show as a chip with the name.
Callouts	> [!note] Title, > [!warning]-	Render, including the folded form.
Highlights	==text==	Render.
Comments	%% note to self %%	Shown as muted text and left out of exports.
Math	$\pi r^2$, $$...$$	Typeset on the desktop. The phone shows the TeX as written.
Footnotes	[^1]	Supported, with a slash-menu item to insert one.
Task states	- [/], - [-], - [>], - [?]	Right-click a checkbox to pick a state. Only todo and done items appear in the Tasks pane.
Tags	#travel/japan and frontmatter tags	Listed in the Tags pane with counts, nested tags by their full path.
Mermaid	A ```mermaid code block	Rendered as a diagram.

Document conversion

Jotura can turn PDFs, Word files, and spreadsheets into searchable markdown copies stored beside the originals. In an ordinary vault that runs automatically. A vault with an .obsidian/ folder gets it switched off the first time Jotura opens it, and nothing is written.

If the vault holds documents Jotura could convert, a notice says how many and offers Convert now or Not now. The switch is Convert documents automatically, under Settings, Advanced, Document conversion. It applies to that vault on every device. The Convert pending and Reconvert all buttons work whether the switch is on or off.

A vault Jotura has opened before keeps whatever setting it had. A vault the jotura CLI has already written to counts as opened, because the CLI creates the .jotura/ folder. See Documents.

What Jotura does not have

Obsidian feature	In Jotura
Community plugins	No plugin system. Dataview queries and Templater syntax stay in your notes as plain text.
Graph view	None.
Backlinks panel	None in the app. The CLI lists backlinks with jotura backlinks <path> --json.
Canvas and Bases	.canvas and .base files appear in the tree and open as plain JSON text. There is no canvas editor and no Bases view.
Excalidraw	.excalidraw.md notes open in source mode. The drawing is not rendered.
Note transclusion	![[Note]] shows a chip with the note’s name. The note’s text is not pulled in.
Community themes and CSS snippets	Five built-in themes, plus your own colors in a theme file. No custom CSS. See Custom themes.
Obsidian Publish	No publishing feature.
iPhone and iPad apps	Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) and Android only.

Search by meaning, which finds notes related to a query when the words differ, is built into the desktop app and the CLI and is absent from the phone. It is off until you enable it. Settings preselects OpenAI’s text-embedding-3-small, which needs your own OpenAI API key and sends note text and queries to OpenAI. The Local option runs a 34 MB model on your machine with no key and sends nothing. See Choosing a provider.

Sync and sharing

Jotura Sync and Obsidian Sync are separate paid services, both end-to-end encrypted. Each one syncs only through its own app, so a phone running Jotura needs Jotura Sync to receive the vault.

Both share with other people, in different shapes. Obsidian Sync shares a whole remote vault with up to 20 collaborators, each with their own Sync subscription. Jotura shares a folder or a single note from inside your vault, as an editor or a viewer, and everyone involved needs a Jotura Sync subscription. The details are in Sync and sharing, the price is on the pricing page, and a side-by-side table is in Jotura vs Obsidian.

Your files stay yours

Your notes stay plain markdown in the same folder for as long as you use Jotura, so any markdown app opens the vault at any point with nothing to export. Jotura’s own state lives in the hidden .jotura/ folder, and its vault settings in Jotura/. Before deleting .jotura/, restore any note you still want from Jotura’s trash, because the trash lives inside it.