Adopting an existing vault

Point lore init at a Markdown or Obsidian vault you already have. It is adoption, not migration: nothing of yours is rewritten to suit the tool.

Adopt it

This vault already holds two notes, a folder of its own, and its own AGENTS.md:

$ lore init vault
Adopted the vault at ~/vault

  inbox/
  daily/
  notes/
  sources/
  entities/

6 starter files, recorded in .lorekeeper/manifest.json.
Skipped 1 starter file already in your vault, left unchanged and unclaimed:
  AGENTS.md
Everything else in that directory is yours.

Start by reading ~/vault/README.md

What happened, and what did not:

The starter folders and READMEs were added beside what was there. Your Projects/ folder, and every other folder, is left where it is.
A starter path that already exists is skipped, left unchanged, and not claimed. Here that was AGENTS.md: the file is still exactly the one you wrote. The build that made this page checked that byte for byte.
Only files lore actually wrote go into the manifest. Every note that was here before is yours, and stays yours.

Search it at once

Your notes need no frontmatter and no conversion to be searchable. lore search reads any directory of Markdown, adopted or not:

$ lore search vault "retry budget" --limit 1
notes/retry-budget.md#Retry budget:3-3  score 0.0164
~/vault/notes/retry-budget.md
    Three retries, then the dead-letter queue.

Run it again

A second init is safe. It reports what it owns and changes nothing:

$ lore init vault
Found an existing Lorekeeper installation at ~/vault

  inbox/
  daily/
  notes/
  sources/
  entities/

No changes were needed, and .lorekeeper/manifest.json was not changed.

Owned files:
  unchanged: README.md
  unchanged: daily/README.md
  unchanged: entities/README.md
  unchanged: inbox/README.md
  unchanged: notes/README.md
  unchanged: sources/README.md
Skipped 1 starter file already in your vault, left unchanged and unclaimed:
  AGENTS.md
Everything else in that directory is yours.

If your vault had its own `AGENTS.md`

Merging instructions into a file the toolkit does not own is not something init may do. So when you adopt a vault that already has an AGENTS.md, automatic agent discovery is not set up. If you want it, copy the instructions from Agent integration into your own file.

Obsidian

Obsidian is an optional viewer, not the architecture. A vault stays a vault: open it in Obsidian before or after adoption. The starter folders carry no numeric prefixes to force a sidebar order, and lore reads the frontmatter you already use.