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Create your first vault

A vault is a local folder holding all your docs, tables, and settings.

What is a vault

One vault = one ordinary folder. Open it and you see raw .md files, .kitable table files, and a .kition/ metadata directory. No proprietary format, no lock files, no cloud dependency.

That means you can edit the markdown in VS Code, zip the directory and email it to a colleague, or grep across the entire history in milliseconds. Kition layers structured features on top (wikilinks, tables, agent), but the substrate stays flat files.

A vault is just an ordinary folder on disk.

Create one

Hit Create New Vault in onboarding, or once in the main UI press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + N. Point it at an empty directory (or let Kition create one) and give it a meaningful name like personal or work-2026.

You can mount several vaults at once — the top dropdown swaps between them. A common pattern is one vault for work, one for personal, and a separate one for anything sensitive.

Use an absolute path. Avoid symlinks and OneDrive on-demand folders
Avoid iCloud Drive with Optimize Storage on — it evicts files asynchronously
Avoid network shares / WebDAV — vault index locking is unreliable on remote filesystems
Prefer a local SSD with Git layered on top for versioning

Inside the vault

A freshly created vault looks roughly like this. .kition/ is Kition's metadata directory — do not hand-edit it, but everything inside is plain text or JSON, so it diffs cleanly in Git.

text

my-vault/
  Notes/                 # your freeform markdown
  Projects/
  Tables/                # one .kitable file per table
  .kition/
    config.json          # per-vault settings
    index/               # search index (regenerable)
    secrets/             # never commit this dir
    history/             # local undo history

A starter layout

You can absolutely dump everything in the root and never make folders. But if you want a starting point, this layout works well for indie writing, project tracking, and research notes:

Notes/ — freeform notes, journal, ephemera
Projects/ — one subfolder per project
Tables/ — data tables (auto-created)
Templates/ — doc templates the palette can quick-insert
Resources/ — attachments, PDFs, screenshots
Archive/ — excluded from default search

Working with multiple vaults

Vaults are fully isolated: each has its own provider config, hooks, and index. That is deliberate — your work vault uses the company-issued API key, your personal vault uses yours, and the two never bleed into each other.

Do not symlink subdirectories between vaults — the two indexes will fight. If you need to share content, export and re-import the markdown instead.

Vault switcher: Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + V
Pin frequently used vaults in Settings → Vaults
Each vault can have its own default model and theme
Deleting one vault leaves the others untouched

Install Kition

Download for macOS / Windows and finish first-run.

UI tour

Know the sidebar, editor area, agent panel, and command palette.