Open an Obsidian vault as a team wiki, without changing a file

Folio 0.3 can open an Obsidian vault in the browser, so a team reads and edits it without installing anything, and it does so without rewriting your notes. You connect the Git repository that holds the vault, and the pages appear with their wikilinks, embeds, callouts and properties drawn the way Obsidian draws them. A colleague changes one paragraph, and the Git diff shows one line.

This post covers what the vault looks like in Folio, what stays untouched, how we tested it on real vaults, and what does not work. A longer comparison, with prices and the cases where you should stay on Obsidian alone, is on the Folio vs. Obsidian page.

The files stay as they are

A team wiki built on someone's vault has one way to lose trust: the first time it rewrites the notes. So the rule is that opening a page writes nothing.

• Light footprint. When a repository holds an .obsidian folder, Folio detects the vault and connects it in light mode. It adds no id to any note and keeps its own bookkeeping in one small hidden file, committed once. After the scan, git status is clean.
• One-line diffs. An edit changes the lines you edited. File mode, Windows line endings (also when mixed in one file) and a missing final newline are kept.
• Other tools' front matter is never removed. Folio reads your properties, and a key it did not write stays as it was.
• Obsidian is read, not written. Folio never turns your Markdown links into wikilinks, and the one time it touches a wikilink is when you rename or move the page it points to: then the link is rewritten in its own form, so it keeps working.

What a vault looks like in the browser

Wikilinks with aliases, headings and block ids are links. A sized image embed is an image, and a note embed shows the note (to depth three, with the reader's access checked, loops cut). Callouts of any type, with fold and title, are drawn, %% comments are hidden, #tags are chips and formulas go through KaTeX. Search and PDF or DOCX export read the same text.

Properties get a panel. Types come from Folio's own settings or, as a read-only fallback, from the types file of the vault's .obsidian folder, so a list stays a list and a date stays a date. Saving rewrites only the front matter block. A value that Folio did not write is shown as it is and never overwritten.

Around the pages there is the part a vault does not give a team. A tag tree in the sidebar with bulk rename. Backlinks that show the line each link sits on. Lists of unresolved links and of orphans, pages that nothing links to, so you see what rotted; both come through the API and MCP. Page rights, roles per space and live editing work as they do for any Folio space.

Search that understands the vault

One grammar works in the interface, the REST API and MCP: "phrase", -word, tag: (with child tags), in:folder/, kind:, status: and prop:key=value; several values of one filter match any of them, as in kind:doc,table. A search can be saved, up to 50 per person.

Git and agents

The vault stays in your repository. A browser edit becomes a commit after about 90 seconds of quiet, and a push from Obsidian or an IDE comes back into the wiki. Nobody has to give up their editor: the person who loves Obsidian keeps it.

Agents get the same vault over MCP, 26 tools in all with the rights of whoever owns the token. Three are new for this release: one returns a page's outline, tags, properties and links, one lists unresolved links, one lists orphans. An agent can ask the vault what is broken, not only what is written.

How we tested it

We put four vaults into local Git repositories and connected each as a space: Obsidian's own help vault, two popular MIT-licensed public vaults (Steph Ango's, with 30 Bases files, and Bram Adams's, with Dataview, Templater and a canvas), and a synthetic vault of our own where we put every awkward construct on purpose. The help vault has no licence file in its repository, so we used it only to look at: its text is not copied anywhere, and the numbers below are counts.

• Pages and files. 179 of 179 Markdown pages in the help vault opened, 103 of 103 in the first MIT vault and 67 plus a PDF in the second. Connecting took between 0.26 and 2.4 seconds on a local server.
• Nothing written. We opened every page of every vault and synced. The Git history had zero new commits and git status was clean. CRLF files, an executable bit and a missing final newline survived.
• Unresolved links match Obsidian's. The vaults have 6, 11 and 18 links that point nowhere, and the synthetic one has 2; Folio's counts matched the expected ones in all four.
• One edit, one line. An edit in the live editor changed one line in git diff on the help vault, on the first MIT vault and on the synthetic one. A tag rename and a page rename touched only the tag or the links to the page.

The test also found 15 problems, and two were critical. The properties panel removed the labels key when a note had both tags and labels, and a repository without an .obsidian folder at its root got an id written into every file. Both are fixed in 0.3.0, together with images and PDFs found by name in shared links, DOCX export with images, note embeds after text, code in wikilink aliases, a non-breaking space in a callout and mixed line endings. The rest are small, and the ones we left are in the next section.

Where it stops

• Dataview and query blocks are shown as code, not run. Templater tags stay text.
• Canvas and Bases files are not shown. A canvas file is only a file in the index, and an embedded Bases file is a link to the file.
• No plugins, no plugin CSS, no graph view. Callout types map onto five looks, so a custom type loses its own colour and icon, and an unclosed %% is text here, not a hidden rest of the note.
• In the live editor, an image embed by name shows as a label, not a picture. Reading mode shows the picture. Formulas and %% comments show as source in Live.
• The [[ picker in the editor writes a plain relative link. Folio reads wikilinks and never writes new ones.
• Some things we saw and left. A wikilink value in the properties panel is a plain chip, not a link, and a web video embedded as an image shows as a broken image.
• Not tested: two people editing one note at once, conflicts after a pull, published sites built from a vault, and PDF export of the two public vaults.

The full list of limits is in LIMITATIONS.

Try it on your vault

Put a copy of your vault in a Git repository, make a new space from it with "From a git repository", and open a few pages that use wikilinks, embeds and callouts. Start with a copy, not the original. The public demo runs the release, and if something in your vault renders wrong, tell us on GitHub Discussions with the syntax that failed.

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