Coming from Obsidian#

There is no migration. Scoria opens the folder Obsidian already opens, reads the same .obsidian configuration, and leaves everything where it is. You can open a vault in Scoria this afternoon and in Obsidian this evening, and neither will notice.

What follows is what to expect.

What carries over, with no work#

What you will miss#

Be realistic about this list before you make Scoria your daily reader.

• Community plugins. They are JavaScript against an Electron app; Scoria is a native binary. They cannot run, and making them run is out of scope. If your workflow rests on Dataview or Templater, Scoria is not yet a place you can work.
• Themes. appearance.json's base theme and accent color are honored, but a CSS theme is not. A variable-level subset of Obsidian's CSS custom properties is a later phase.
• Rendered math. $x$ and $$x$$ are parsed and show as their source text, not as typeset math.
• HTML in notes. Shown as text rather than rendered.
• Remote images. A ![](https://…) does not load; local images do.
• Canvas and Bases views. The formats are implemented, the views are not.
• Changing settings in the app. Settings shows your real configuration and is read-only.
• Tabs and split panes. One note at a time, with back and forward history.
• Multiple vaults in one window, PDF export, heading folding, drag-and-drop in Files, inline title editing, pasting attachments.

The full list, kept honest, is what differs from Obsidian.

Trying it without risk#

The safe order, in increasing commitment:

1. Read-only, on your real vault. Open it in Scoria and browse. Reading writes nothing at all — not a cache, not a settings file, not workspace.json. There is no risk here beyond the program crashing, which loses nothing.

2. Edit a scratch copy. Copy a dozen notes into a new folder, including a couple with frontmatter, tables and CRLF line endings if you have them. Edit them in Scoria, then open the folder in Obsidian and look for anything that changed that you did not change. That is exactly the round-trip check Scoria's own phase-3 gate makes.

3. Edit for real, with a backup. A git repository in the vault is the ideal form of this: git diff after an editing session tells you precisely what Scoria wrote, which is both a safety net and the most useful bug report you can send.

Running both on one folder#

This works, and it is how the project itself is developed — Scoria's own specification vault is edited in both apps. Two things to know:

• Scoria watches the folder. A save in Obsidian re-indexes in Scoria within a moment, and the open note reloads keeping its scroll position. You do not need to reopen anything.
• Do not have the same note unsaved in both. Obsidian and Scoria both autosave, and whichever writes last wins. Scoria will not overwrite a note that changed on disk while you have unsaved edits in it — it leaves your buffer alone — but then you have two versions and have to pick. The habit that avoids it is the ordinary one: edit a note in one place at a time.

Running both at once is also the best way to find bugs. If the two apps disagree about how a note renders or where a link points, that is a real defect and worth reporting↗.

Things that will feel different#

Not bugs, just differences you will notice in the first ten minutes:

• It starts immediately. There is no splash and no window-restore step, because the layout is not restored — Scoria opens its own default three-pane shell every time.
• One window, one vault. Run it twice for two vaults.
• There are no tabs. One note is open at a time, and Ctrl + Alt + ← / → walk the history of what you have opened. Split panes, stacked tabs and popout windows do not exist here.
• Settings is a window you read. Every value is your real value, pulled from .obsidian; none of them are editable yet. To change a setting, change it in Obsidian or edit the JSON.

Next#

• The window — a tour of what you are looking at.
• Reading view — what is drawn and what is not.
• Obsidian compatibility — the tiers and the numbers.