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Folder Watching

Coeus watches your notes folder. When you add, edit, or delete a file outside of Coeus, it picks up the change and updates its index automatically.

What this means in practice​

You can use any text editor you like. Edit a note in VS Code, Vim, Typora, or Obsidian: Coeus detects the change within about 1.5 seconds and re-indexes that file.

This also means you can:

  • Import notes from another app by dropping .md files into your notes folder
  • Use git to version your notes (Coeus ignores the .git folder)
  • Sync your notes with Dropbox, iCloud, or any other sync tool
  • Write scripts that create or edit notes in the folder

How the watch works​

Coeus uses the operating system's file watching API. When a .md file changes, Coeus re-parses it and updates the database. If you have semantic search configured, it also queues an embedding update for that file. The whole process runs in the background.

For large changes (like importing hundreds of files at once), use the manual Re-index option in the sidebar footer, which does a full resync of the folder.

Conflict detection​

If you have a note open in edit mode in Coeus and the file also changes on disk (because another app saved it), Coeus detects the conflict and asks you: Reload from disk or Keep my changes.

This can happen when you're editing the same note in two places at once, or when a sync tool writes a newer version of the file.

Which files Coeus tracks​

Coeus watches .md files recursively inside your notes folder. Subfolders are fine.

This means you can keep notes organized however you like. For example, daily notes can live under daily/YYYY/MM/YYYY-MM-DD.md and Coeus still tracks them normally.

The _coeus/ folder​

Coeus creates a _coeus/ folder inside your notes directory. It stores attachment metadata and extracted text for imported files in _coeus/attachments/.

The search index database (index.db) lives in a separate .coeus/ folder in your home directory, not inside your notes folder.

Don't delete the _coeus/ folder. It's safe to back it up, sync it, or commit it to git.