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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, updates the database, and regenerates its search embeddings. 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This can happen when you're editing the same note in two places at once, or when a sync tool writes a newer version of the file.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 in the root of your notes folder. It doesn't recurse into subdirectories (except for the _coeus/ internal folder). So if you have notes in subfolders, Coeus won't see them.

This is intentional. All notes live in the root folder. Use note types and tags for organization instead of folders.

The _coeus/ folder​

Coeus creates a _coeus/ folder inside your notes directory. It stores:

  • attachments/: metadata and extracted text for imported files
  • Any other internal data Coeus needs to maintain

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