---
title: Obsidian Starter Kit
nav_order: 8
---

# Obsidian Starter Kit

The first-party `obsidian` workspace profile scaffolds a curated Obsidian starter kit for hybrid knowledge work.

It creates:

- `.obsidian/` starter configuration scaffolded during init
- `garden/` directories and templates owned by the human after scaffold
- install and verification guidance shown during `ztlctl init --profile obsidian`

It does **not**:

- download community plugin binaries
- enable plugins automatically inside Obsidian
- index `garden/` through the ztlctl core

## What Gets Scaffolded

The Obsidian starter kit writes:

- `.obsidian/app.json`
- `.obsidian/appearance.json`
- `.obsidian/core-plugins.json`
- `.obsidian/community-plugins.json`
- `.obsidian/templates.json`
- `.obsidian/graph.json`
- `.obsidian/snippets/ztlctl.css`
- `.obsidian/snippets/garden-layers.css`
- plugin config files for `folder-notes`, `omnisearch`, and `obsidian-book-search-plugin`
- `garden/README.md`
- `garden/notes/`, `garden/groves/`, `garden/library/`, `garden/canvases/`, `garden/attachments/`
- `garden/templates/note.md`, `grove.md`, and `book.md`

## Curated Community Plugin Preset

The generated `.obsidian/community-plugins.json` expects you to install:

- `dataview`
- `templater-obsidian`
- `folder-notes`
- `omnisearch`
- `obsidian-book-search-plugin`

ztlctl writes config and guidance for those plugins, but it does not ship the plugin binaries.

## Ownership

- Core-managed paths: `ztlctl.toml`, `.ztlctl/`, `self/`, `notes/`, `ops/`
- Profile-associated scaffold surface: `.obsidian/`
- Human-managed paths: `garden/`

`ztlctl` writes the `.obsidian/` starter files during init, then leaves them for you to customize in Obsidian or by editing the files directly. `garden/` is intentionally outside default indexing and mutation. The core vault model still indexes only `notes/` and `ops/`.

## First Open in Obsidian

After `ztlctl init --profile obsidian`:

1. Open the vault in Obsidian and trust it.
2. Install the curated community plugins from Settings -> Community plugins.
3. Enable those plugins so the scaffolded config in `.obsidian/` takes effect.
4. Verify that new notes target `garden/notes`, attachments target `garden/attachments`, templates point at `garden/templates`, and both CSS snippets are enabled.

The same checklist is printed during init and stored in `garden/README.md`. `ztlctl` does not later validate or rewrite your `.obsidian/` changes.

## Relationship to Export

`ztlctl export dashboard --viewer obsidian` is an external review workbench, not part of the starter kit itself. It gives you portable markdown and JSON review artifacts for triage and topic review, but it does not export the literal `garden/` directory and it does not mirror `.obsidian/` workspace state.
