Plain notes
The simplest setup: one folder for notes and one for a daily journal. Just write, link the things worth linking, and a connected web of notes builds itself. Built on the Plain notes starter pack.
Plain notes is the "I just want to write" layout. Two folders, no structure imposed: a flat notes/ for topics and a daily/ journal. You write; you link the things worth linking; and a navigable graph emerges on its own. It's the pack to reach for when the other packs feel like too much scaffolding for what you're actually doing.
There's no pipeline and no lifecycle here. The only discipline is the linking habit — and OpenKnowledge's graph, backlinks, and search do the rest.
Note-takers get a plain notes app backed by markdown they own, with an agent keeping everything linked and nothing locked in a proprietary format. Journalers get each daily entry chained to the last, with mood and gratitude fields, so the journal is also a navigable graph to look back across. And if you're not sure which pack to pick, this is the lightest possible starting point — begin now and promote notes into a more structured layout later.
The folders
notes/ one file per topic, flat
daily/ one journal entry per day (YYYY-MM-DD.md)The pack ships just two templates — note and daily. The daily entry has a light shape (morning intentions, capture through the day, evening reflection) plus optional mood, top3, and gratitude frontmatter fields you fill when journaling, so you can look back across days later.
The one habit: link liberally
The entire value of this pack is the graph that emerges from links. So when a note or entry mentions something worth its own page, link it — and if that page doesn't exist yet, stub it. The agent does this for you:
On the first entry of a day the agent links back to yesterday's entry and pre-fills the date, so your linear journal is also a navigable graph you can walk in either direction.
What's in your project after seeding
Pick Plain notes in the starter-pack picker, or run:
ok seed --pack plain-notesThe pack creates notes/ and daily/ at the project root (no subfolder), each with its .ok/frontmatter.yml guidance and template. That's the whole footprint — minimal on purpose.
Seeding also installs a skill
ok seed --pack plain-notes installs the Plain notes project skill into your agent editors (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode). It's the "how to work here" guidance that gives the agent the linking habit and the daily-chain behavior — read automatically, and editable like any other doc. It lands as a real SKILL.md committed to your repo, one per detected editor. See Skills and what OpenKnowledge writes to disk.
Cadence
| When | Do |
|---|---|
| Any time | Drop a note in notes/; link the nouns worth their own page |
| Each morning or evening | A daily/ entry; let the agent chain it to yesterday and fill mood / gratitude |
| Weekly | Ask the agent to link loosely-related notes so the graph tightens |
| When a topic outgrows a note | Promote it — or switch to a more structured pack for that area |
Further reading
- LLM wiki workflow. When your notes become source-grounded research, this is the pack to graduate to.
- Writing pipeline workflow. When your notes grow into essays or newsletters, this pack adds ideas → drafts → published stage gates.
- Core Concepts. Links, backlinks, and the well-connected graph that make the emergent structure visible.
- Skills. What the installed pack skill is, and how to edit it.
- Claude Code, Cursor, Codex. MCP-capable agent hosts.
Worldbuilding
A living encyclopedia for a story you're writing: characters, places, factions, and lore, each on its own page that links to the others. Mention someone new and the AI adds a page for them; contradict your own canon and it flags it. Built on the Worldbuilding starter pack.
From Obsidian
How to open an existing Obsidian vault in OpenKnowledge, which markdown syntax carries over, and where the two differ.