The Obsidian inbox

Plenty of writing starts somewhere else — a phone, a clipper, an Obsidian vault. The inbox closes that loop: point it at a folder, and notes dropped there import themselves into the site.

§4.1Turning it on

The inbox ships off. Enable it in inkbrush.config.ts:

inkbrush.config.ts

inbox: {
  dir: '~/vault/inbox',        // the folder to watch (supports ~/)
  ignore: ['daily-'],          // optional: filename prefixes to skip
},

Files already in the folder at startup are marked as seen, not imported — only notes added afterwards sync automatically. Anything older can be backfilled explicitly through the API, so turning the inbox on never dumps a decade of vault history onto your site by surprise.

§4.2What the importer does

Each incoming note is converted, not copied:

image embeds are resolved against the vault's asset folders, the files are copied next to the imported note, and the embeds become standard image syntax — deleting the note later deletes its assets with it
[[wikilinks]] that match a real note on the site survive as links, resolved with the same rules as everywhere else; the rest are flattened to plain emphasis with a warning
highlights become real <mark> elements, frontmatter metadata becomes a source line under the title, and a description is derived from the first substantive paragraph

The converted note then has to pass the same build gate as a manual save — a note that would break the page is refused instead of imported.

Every import lands in the revision journal (via: inbox) as a whole-file record: ⟲ lists it as an audit row, and undoing an import is a git operation. With autocommit on, each import also becomes a git commit like any other edit; with it off, imported files arrive as ordinary working-tree changes to review and commit yourself.