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Creating a Vault

A vault is the folder where Fern keeps all your notes, journals, and templates. Everything in a vault is plain text on disk - you own your data.

First run

Run fern in your terminal. On your first launch, a setup wizard walks you through creating a new vault or pointing Fern at an existing folder:

Fern welcome modal, showing a create vault or load vault options

Select "Create a new vault", enter a path (for example ~/notes), and press Enter. Fern creates the following structure inside that folder:

~/notes/
  notes/        - your notes live here
  journals/     - daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly journal entries
  templates/    - reusable note templates
  .fern/
    config      - vault-level settings (overrides global config)
    bookmarks   - saved bookmark list

Vault Actions

Creating additional vaults

Once Fern is running, open the command bar with : and run:

:vaultCreate ~/work-notes

Loading an existing vault into Fern

Existing notes folders can be loaded into fern using:

:vaultLoad ~/work-notes

Changing the active Vault

You can switch between any of your vaults using the vault folder name:

:vaultSwitch work-notes

HINT: You can use the command palette (ctrl+p) and search for "Vault" to being up all the above vault actions available too.

Vault-level configuration

Each vault has its own .fern/config file. Settings in that file override your global user config for that vault only. This lets you have, for example, a different theme or week-start day per vault.

See Configuring Fern for the full list of available options.

Next: Write your first note