Glossary
Terms as this manual and Scoria's source use them. Most are Obsidian's words, kept deliberately so that one vocabulary covers both applications.
Alias — another name for a note, declared in its aliases
property. Resolvable by [[alias]], matched by the quick
switcher, and counted in unlinked mentions.
Attachment — a file in the vault that is not a note: an image, audio, video or PDF.
Backlink — a link to the note you are reading, from somewhere else. Counted per occurrence, so a note linking here three times appears three times. See the side panes.
Base — a .base file, Obsidian's Bases format. The format is implemented; there is no
view yet.
Block — the parser's unit of structure: a paragraph, a list item, a table, a code block, a quote. A block id names one so that it can be linked to.
Block id — ^an-id attached to a block, making [[Note#^an-id]] possible.
Callout — a block quote with a declared type: > [!warning]. See
callouts.
Canvas — a .canvas file, JSON Canvas 1.0. The format is
implemented; there is no view yet.
Clean room — implementing from an observed and documented specification rather than from another program's code. No code, CSS or icons in Scoria come from Obsidian's bundle. See how Scoria works.
Command id — the stable string naming a command, like editor:toggle-source. What your
hotkeys.json keys on. Scoria registers all 244 of Obsidian's. See commands and
hotkeys.
CommonMark — the Markdown specification Obsidian Flavored Markdown builds on. Scoria passes all 652 of its spec examples.
Core plugin — one of the 35 features Obsidian ships as a built-in plugin: the file explorer, search, the graph, backlinks, and so on. Scoria implements these as part of the application rather than as plugins.
Embed — a link with a ! in front, which renders the target in place:
![[Note#Heading]]. See embedding files.
Frontmatter — the YAML block at the very top of a note, line 1 only. Obsidian calls its contents properties.
Gate — a condition a development phase must meet before the next begins, written as a claim about a person rather than a feature list — "a daily user browses their real vault with no missing content". See compatibility.
GPUI — the GPU-accelerated interface toolkit from the Zed editor, which Scoria's interface is built on.
Linked mention — a real link, as opposed to an unlinked mention. The first group in the Backlinks pane.
Live Preview — the editing mode that hides a construct's markers unless your cursor touches it. The same buffer as Source mode, with a display transform. See editing a note.
Metadata cache — what Scoria knows about every note: links, embeds, tags, headings, sections, list items, blocks, footnotes and frontmatter, plus the resolved link graph. Built from the one parse of each note, held in memory, never written to disk.
Note — a .md file in the vault.
Obsidian Flavored Markdown (OFM) — CommonMark, plus the GitHub extensions Obsidian uses (tables, strikethrough, task lists, footnotes, bare URLs), plus Obsidian's own syntax (wikilinks, embeds, tags, block ids, callouts, highlights, comments, math).
Property — a key in a note's frontmatter. aliases and tags have special meaning;
everything else is yours, and searchable with [key:value].
Ratchet — a test suite that is not allowed to score lower than it currently does. Scoria has two: the CommonMark suite at 652/652, and the Obsidian corpus at 1,007/1,009.
Reading view — the mode that shows a note as a finished document, with no markers and no cursor.
Resolved link — a link that finds a file. An unresolved link is a [[Name]] with no
file behind it; Scoria tracks these and clicking one creates the note.
Round-trip — opening a vault in one application, editing it, opening it in the other, and finding nothing changed but what you changed. Byte-identical round-tripping is the gate for Scoria's writer phase.
Section — the span from one heading to the next heading of the same or a higher level.
What ![[Note#Heading]] embeds, and what section: searches.
Source mode — the editing mode that shows every character of the file, with syntax highlighting and nothing hidden.
Span — a byte range in the source. Every node in Scoria's parse tree carries one, which is what makes surgical rewriting possible.
Tier — one of the four levels of Obsidian compatibility the project aims at: vault and format, feature parity, themes, plugins. See compatibility.
Unlinked mention — a note's name or alias appearing as plain text where it could have been a link. Found whole-word and case-insensitively, never inside a link or code.
Vault — a folder of notes. That is the entire definition; there is no vault file.
Wikilink — [[Note]], Obsidian's link syntax. Its body grammar is
path#heading#heading|alias or path#^block-id. See internal
links.