Liefwork

Render a folder of your vault as a living Liefwork coral — a chronological, growing structure where every branch is a folder and every lief a note. Built as the visible half of the Liefwork memory system for AI-assisted work.

The coral vocabulary

Four words cover everything:

• Coral — a folder-tree of your vault rendered as one living, growing structure. Nothing is copied or converted: the coral is your folder, drawn differently.
• Branch — a folder. Sub-folders are sub-branches.
• Lief — a note, drawn as a node along its branch (Liefwork's word for a leaf). "Lief" and "note" name the same file: a note in the vault is a lief on the coral.
• Meristem — a branch's named growing tip, where new liefs appear (in a plant, the tissue where growth happens). A branch can carry a meristem note — its folder note — holding the branch's own summary.

Getting started

• Open a coral: click the ribbon's sprout icon (vault-root coral) or right-click a folder → "Open as Liefwork coral". Liefs sit on their branch ordered oldest → tip.
• Move around: drag to pan, wheel/pinch to zoom, double-click a node to fit its branch, "Show full view" to return to the whole coral. The on-coral "Aa" control adjusts text sizing.
• Read & write: click a node to open its HUD — read the lief right there, add a new lief to the branch, or jump to the note in Obsidian's editor ("Open note ↗") to edit it. Right-click a node for the full menu — new child branch, promote a lief into a branch (and demote a single-note branch back into a lief), colours, archive….
• Display settings: Show meristem notes on branches adds each branch's folder-note as a lief pinned at the branch base (explorer parity; off by default). Display: Notes only / All files — All files also shows images, PDFs and every other file the explorer lists; click one to open it in Obsidian's own viewer. Non-note files are tinted teal so they stand out from your notes at a glance. Note: non-markdown files can't carry order frontmatter, and a branch only follows your editorial order when every sibling has it — so adding a file to a deliberately-ordered branch drops it to date sorting. For strict editorial order, keep Notes only or park attachments in a subfolder.
• Grow a memory coral: "Seed as coral" scaffolds a folder into a Liefwork memory coral — Growth Charter.md (the open instruction set any AI agent reads to grow the coral), pointer files for the big CLI agents (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md — each redirects its agent to the Charter), and the root meristem note; "Undo seeding" reverses it exactly.
• Agents: "Open agent terminal here" (needs the community Terminal plugin) launches a colour-coded terminal pinned to that branch — the coral becomes a live dashboard of the work.

What this plugin does to your vault — full disclosure

• Desktop only. It reads folder creation times via Node's fs (statSync birthtime) — mobile has no such API.
• It writes notes you ask it to create (liefs, meristem folder-notes) and stamps frontmatter in them: created, order (and on archive actions: kind, originalParent, originalOrder, archivedAt). Rendering a coral never modifies existing notes.
• Folder-note rename sync (inside open corals only): renaming a meristem folder renames its folder-note to match, and vice versa.
• Seeding a root coral (optional, disclosed in the dialog, opt-out toggle): writes Growth Charter.md (the coral's canonical growth instructions), three short agent pointer files (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, GEMINI.md) that redirect Claude Code, AGENTS.md-standard agents (Codex, Copilot, Cursor and friends) and Gemini CLI to the Charter, and the root meristem note. When you type a founding prompt, it is also captured as a prompt — founding intent.md note (the coral's founding lief). The three pointer files are deliberately not rendered in the coral — they are configuration breadcrumbs, not memory; they remain visible in Obsidian's file explorer as normal. If enabled, seeding also writes a Claude Code logging hook — .claude/settings.json (merged non-destructively into an existing one), .claude/hooks/coral-log-keeper.mjs — a readable Node script that Claude Code (not Obsidian) executes on each prompt in that folder; it reads only that folder tree, writes only its own state file (.claude/.coral-log-state.json), and never touches the network. Hook or not, seeding always records a provenance manifest (.claude/.coral-seed-manifest.json) listing exactly what was planted. "Undo seeding" removes exactly what was planted.
• Terminal integration (optional): "Open agent terminal here" launches a shell via the community Terminal plugin, if you have it installed and enabled — this plugin never spawns processes itself and degrades to a notice when Terminal is absent.
• No telemetry. The plugin collects nothing. Its only network calls are the user-initiated licence activation described under Network below.

Payment

The plugin is free and fully functional for individual, non-profit, and educational use; no primary feature is gated. Other organizations need a commercial license for internal use — see the LICENSE. An optional supporter licence ("Liefwork Pro") is a one-time purchase made externally through Lemon Squeezy, then activated by pasting the key into the plugin's settings. Pro unlocks cosmetic perks only — a free hand with the agent terminal color picker (the three named deep-sea swatches plus any color at all from the wheel; the first five preset swatches are always free) and an optional spectral-pulse effect that drifts agent tints through neighbouring hues — and permanently stops the support prompts below.

Support prompts. Two moments qualify as a prompt occasion: opening a coral agent terminal while another is already live, and every fifth coral open (the tally persists across sessions). Either way at most one dialog shows per Obsidian session; after the first five gentle prompts the plugin mostly stays silent, with a playful ice-cream vignette on some later occasions. The dialogs never block or gate anything: "Not now, thanks." or the modal's close button dismisses them, and activating Pro stops them permanently.

Network — full disclosure

The plugin's only network surface is licence handling, and every call is user-initiated from the settings tab:

• Activate sends the pasted key once to Lemon Squeezy's public licence-activation endpoint (api.lemonsqueezy.com, via Obsidian's requestUrl). On success the entitlement is stored locally and trusted from then on — there is no startup or recurring validation, ever.
• Remove key sends one best-effort deactivation request to the same endpoint so the activation slot is freed; the local key is cleared whether or not the store answers.

Nothing else ever leaves your vault: no telemetry, no analytics, no update checks, no other requests of any kind. "Get a licence key" links simply open the store page in your default browser.

The coral pane is dark by design

The canvas renders on Liefwork's own dark palette in both Obsidian themes; the HUD and controls follow your theme.

License

Source-available — see LICENSE. Free to read, run, audit, and modify for individual, non-profit, and educational use; competing redistribution is not permitted, and bespoke client work must credit Liefwork and pass the license along (LICENSE §2.4). Every released version automatically converts to Apache-2.0 four years after its release date as recorded in the CHANGELOG.

Repository layout

This repository contains the plugin and exactly the systems it depends on — the release tree of a larger private monorepo:

• obsidian-plugin/ — the plugin itself (source, tests, build config).
• src/ — the Liefwork growth engine (pure functions: hierarchy in, plant out).
• viewer/src/ — the shared canvas renderer the plugin mounts.
• test/, viewer/test/ — the suites covering everything above (bun run test:all).
• scripts/verify-plugin-release.ts — the release gate.

main.js in each release is built from this tree with esbuild — cd obsidian-plugin && npm run build reproduces it.