vault-starter

This is an Obsidian research notebook pre-wired for Claude Code, built for day-to-day research work in astrophysics. You get a ready-made structure for journals, papers, projects, and tasks — plus a set of Claude skills that import papers, survey the literature, and answer questions from your own notes.

Setup takes about 15 minutes. No programming knowledge needed.

1. Install Obsidian

Download it from obsidian.md/download — Windows, macOS, and Linux are all supported. Install it like any other app.

2. Install Claude Code

Follow the instructions at claude.com/claude-code. On Windows, either the native installer or WSL works — for the basic setup it makes no difference.

3. Get the vault

This step uses git — if it isn't installed, get it from git-scm.com (on Windows: Git for Windows), or use the ZIP fallback below.

In a terminal (on Windows: PowerShell, or the WSL shell if you installed Claude Code there), run:

The repository is public — no GitHub account or sign-in is needed to clone it.

This creates a my-vault folder — rename it to whatever you like, but do it now, not later: parts of the advanced setup record the folder's location, and moving or renaming it afterwards means redoing them (see docs/SETUP-ADVANCED.md).

No git? Downloading the repository as a ZIP works too, but you lose the easy update path — see docs/UPDATING.md before choosing that route.