Vault Mode

A vibecoded IDE extension I built for personal use, for densely linked collections of Markdown notes. Wikilinks behave like code references: preview rendering, jump-to-definition, backlinks, completion. Semantic search is optional, aimed at LLM-agent workflows: point your agent at the vault root and ask questions over your notes. Works in VS Code and Cursor. In my experience, a vault like this built up over months of personal writing, when given to an LLM agent as context, yields much deeper and personalized answers than the default one.

styled preview

Features

Wikilink preview rendering. [[Note]], [[Note|alias]], [[Note#heading]], ![[Note]] become clickable links in the Markdown preview. Code fences and inline code spans are respected.
Wikilink intelligence. Ctrl/Cmd-click a [[Wikilink]] to jump. Hover for a content preview. Type [[ for completion. "Find all references" lists backlinks.
Syntax highlighting for wikilinks in the editor (distinct token scope; styled by your color theme).
Callouts in the preview. > [!note] Title renders as a bold-titled blockquote instead of literal [!note] text (same treatment md-print applies in PDFs).
Styled preview. The built-in Markdown preview gets an opinionated light style: serif headings, restrained palette, tight vertical rhythm, hidden YAML-frontmatter table. Ships as markdown.previewStyles, so it works in any folder with zero settings.
Preview-to-side button in the editor title bar for markdown and markdown-adjacent files (prompt, instructions, chatagent, skill).
Rename propagation. Rename a note file and every [[wikilink]] pointing at it is rewritten (alias/anchor/embed preserved), as one undoable edit.
Daily notes. Vault: Open Today's Daily Note creates Daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md from a configurable template.
Semantic search (optional). If you have a compatible search CLI (see below), you get Vault: Semantic Search, Vault: Insert Wikilink, Vault: Show Related Notes, and hover popups augmented with the top-3 semantic neighbors. Without one, these features quietly disable; everything else is unaffected.

Install

VS Code: search Vault Mode in the Marketplace, or code --install-extension yoonholeee.vault-mode.

Cursor / VSCodium / other forks: grab the .vsix from Releases, then cursor --install-extension vault-mode-*.vsix.

From source:

git clone https://github.com/yoonholee/vault-mode && cd vault-mode
npm install && npm run build
npx vsce package
code --install-extension vault-mode-*.vsix

Recommended sidecar extensions: yzhang.markdown-all-in-one, esbenp.prettier-vscode, davidanson.vscode-markdownlint.

Feedback and bug reports

Bug reports and small feature requests are welcome in GitHub Issues. For bugs, include version, editor, OS, a minimal markdown/vault snippet, and relevant lines from the "Vault Mode" output channel. Large features should start as an issue before a PR.

The `vs` semantic-search bridge

The search features shell out to an external CLI (vaultMode.vsPath, default vs). Any executable with this contract works:

vs --paths-only [--no-update] [--limit N] [--weight W] [--lexical-only] <query>

It must print newline-separated absolute paths of matching notes to stdout and exit 0. My implementation is a private embeddings search script. The contract is intentionally small, so replacements are easy:

lexical: rg -l --glob '*.md' -- "$query" "$VAULT_ROOT"
embeddings: query a local sqlite/LanceDB/Chroma index, return matching note paths
agent bridge: wrap your retrieval command, return the notes the agent should inspect first

If the binary is not on PATH at activation, the vs-dependent features disable with a note in the "Vault Mode" output channel.

Configuration

Setting	Default	What
`vaultMode.vsPath`	`vs`	Path to the search CLI
`vaultMode.vsTimeoutMs`	`5000`	Hard timeout for any search invocation
`vaultMode.dailyNotesFolder`	`Daily`	Folder under vault root for daily notes
`vaultMode.dailyNoteTemplate`	`# {date}\n\n`	Template (placeholders: `{date}`, `{iso}`, `{weekday}`)
`vaultMode.updateLinksOnRename`	`true`	Rewrite wikilinks when a note is renamed
`vaultMode.hover.augmentWithVs`	`true`	Append semantic neighbors to wikilink hover
`vaultMode.ignorePatterns`	(see settings)	Globs excluded from the workspace index
`vaultMode.perfLog`	`true`	Log detailed timings and counters to the output channel

Commands

Command	What
`vaultMode.semanticSearch`	QuickPick over search results
`vaultMode.insertWikilink`	Search + insert `[[Stem]]` at cursor
`vaultMode.relatedNotes`	Semantic neighbors of the current file
`vaultMode.openDailyNote`	Open / create today's daily note
`vaultMode.openRandomNote`	Open a random vault note
`vaultMode.previewToSide`	Open Markdown preview to the side
`vaultMode.rebuildIndex`	Rebuild the wikilink index from scratch

No default keybindings; bind in keybindings.json if you want hotkeys.

Performance

Benched on my 2718-file / 18MB vault (npm run bench, mean ± σ over 5 runs).

Operation	Measured
Full index build (read + parse, 32-way concurrent)	525 ± 66 ms
Parse all files, CPU only	67 ± 5 ms
Resolve 2000 wikilink targets	3.4 ± 1.2 ms
Backlinks for 2000 targets	1.6 ± 0.4 ms
Bundle size	~38KB

Activation, indexing, watcher updates, commands, providers, and vs calls log timings to the "Vault Mode" output channel when perfLog is on. Index logs include file count, bytes, wikilink count, read errors, list time, parse/read time, and total time.

Development

npm install
npm run test:unit         # vitest
npm run typecheck         # tsc --noEmit
npm run lint              # eslint + prettier check
npm run build             # esbuild bundle to dist/extension.js
code --extensionDevelopmentPath="$PWD" /path/to/your/vault   # Extension Development Host

License

MIT.

Vault Mode

Yoonho Lee

Vault Mode

Features

Install

Feedback and bug reports

The vs semantic-search bridge

Configuration

Commands

Performance

Development

License

The `vs` semantic-search bridge