First Launch

The first time you open Ariv, a short onboarding wizard walks you through setup. It takes about 30 seconds and gets you straight into your notes.

The Onboarding Wizard

Step 1: Choose or Create a Vault

A vault is simply a folder on your computer where your notes live. Ariv asks you to pick one:

• Use an existing folder: Point Ariv at any folder that already contains Markdown files. This is the recommended approach if you have notes from another app.
• Create a new folder: If you’re starting fresh, Ariv can create a new empty vault folder for you.

Coming from Obsidian?

Ariv works with Obsidian vaults out of the box. Just point it at your existing vault folder. Ariv reads standard Markdown files and respects your folder structure — no migration, no conversion, no lock-in. You can even keep using both apps on the same vault if you want.

Your notes are always plain .md files stored in the folder you choose. Ariv indexes them for search and features, but it never moves, renames, or converts your files into a proprietary format.

Step 2: Indexing

After you select a vault, Ariv scans the folder and indexes all Markdown files into its local SQLite database. This enables fast full-text search, lifecycle tracking, tag extraction, and other features.

• Small vaults (under a few hundred notes): indexing finishes almost instantly.
• Large vaults (thousands of notes): may take a few seconds. A progress indicator keeps you informed.

Ariv also sets up a file watcher that detects changes in real time, so if you edit a file outside of Ariv (in VS Code, Obsidian, or any text editor), the index stays current automatically.

The Dashboard

Once setup is complete, Ariv opens to the Dashboard — your home base. The dashboard gives you an at-a-glance overview of your knowledge base:

• Lifecycle overview: See how many notes are in each bucket — Inbox, Active, and Background. This helps you understand what needs attention.
• Action items: Any tasks or to-dos extracted from your notes appear here, so nothing falls through the cracks.
• Active notes: Notes you’ve been working on recently, making it easy to pick up where you left off.
• Vault statistics: Total note count, tag distribution, and other metrics about your vault.

The dashboard appears whenever no note is open. You can always return to it by pressing the home button or closing all open notes.

Product Tour

On first launch, Ariv highlights key parts of the interface with a brief product tour:

• How to create and capture notes
• Where to find your lifecycle buckets
• How to use search and Ask Brain
• Where settings live

The tour is short and skippable. If you want to revisit it later, you can re-trigger it from Settings.

Switching Vaults

You’re not locked into a single vault. Ariv supports switching between multiple vaults at any time:

1. Open the vault selector in the sidebar.
2. Choose a different vault or add a new one.
3. Ariv re-indexes and switches context immediately.

This is useful if you keep separate vaults for work and personal notes, or if you want to try Ariv on a test folder before pointing it at your main vault.

Note

Each vault has its own independent index and settings. Switching vaults is a clean context switch — your tags, lifecycle states, and search results are all scoped to the active vault.

What Happens Behind the Scenes

When Ariv sets up a vault, it creates a small .ariv folder inside your vault directory. This contains:

• The SQLite database (search index, metadata, tags)
• Configuration specific to that vault

This folder is lightweight and can be safely deleted if you ever want Ariv to re-index from scratch. Your actual note files are never modified by Ariv’s internal bookkeeping.

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Next step: Core Concepts — learn about lifecycle buckets, auto-tagging, and the ideas behind Ariv.