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.
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] Titlerenders as a bold-titled blockquote instead of literal[!note]text (same treatmentmd-printapplies 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 NotecreatesDaily/YYYY-MM-DD.mdfrom 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.