Obsidian as viewer

Curator has no editor and wants none. Any tool that reads and writes plain markdown works on a Curator vault; Obsidian is a recommended viewer and nothing more — no plugin, no sync service, no Curator-specific configuration inside it.

Point both at the same directory

An Obsidian vault is a markdown+YAML directory, which is exactly what Curator indexes. Run curator init . in an existing Obsidian vault (or open a Curator-scaffolded directory as an Obsidian vault) and both tools see the same files:

• Frontmatter coexists. Obsidian shows kp-note/v1 keys (kp_id, tags, source, …) in its Properties panel; unknown keys are preserved by both sides — that's a binding rule of the note contract.
• Wikilinks are indexed. Ingest extracts both [[wikilinks]] (including [[target|display]] and [[target#heading]]) and standard markdown links into the index's edge tables, so the link structure you build in Obsidian powers relatedness and one-hop expansion in search.
• Digests are just notes. Applied librarian digests land under your digest directory (default digests/) and render like any other note, links included.
• now.md is just a note. Edit the librarian's interest anchor wherever you like editing markdown.

Obsidian's Web Viewer is also a producer

Obsidian's core Web Viewer plugin doesn't just browse the web in a tab — its Save to vault turns the page you're reading into a markdown note with YAML frontmatter (a source URL, title, author, date, tags). Curator's web-clip adapter recognizes those notes and maps their frontmatter onto kp-note/v1 during ingest, so ad-hoc web reading becomes a first-class source — searchable, citable by its source URL, tag-filterable, and recency-ranked — right alongside your feeds and papers. Two capture arms, one plane: subscriptions come in through Curio, ad-hoc pages through the Web Viewer, and both land as markdown that Curator indexes uniformly.

• Tolerant, not a pinned contract. Clippers let you edit the property template, so the adapter aliases the common keys (source or url; published/created/date; a tags list or comma string) and never fails — a note that isn't a recognizable web clip (no http(s) source) is just an ordinary note. The defining signal is the source URL the clip came from.
• The file is never rewritten. Like every producer, the Web Viewer keeps byte-ownership of its own frontmatter; the adapter only synthesizes the in-memory indexed view. Identity stays path:<relpath> — no kp-note/v1 contract change.
• Any clipper works. The mapping keys on shape, not on Obsidian: a browser extension, a shell script, or a different app that writes source-bearing markdown into the vault is recognized the same way.

curator ingest reports how many it mapped (web clips: N …, and web_clips in --json).

Two hygiene rules

1. Keep derived state out of git. .kp/ (proposals staging, cursors, model cache) and index.db are the plane's working state. The scaffolded setup keeps the index inside .kp/; make sure your vault's .gitignore covers .kp/ and *.db.
2. Don't fight the managed regions. Producer-owned notes (Zotero literature notes, Curio exports) carry marked machine regions; edit below the markers and your changes survive re-syncs (how that works).

What Curator does not do for Obsidian

Honesty section: Curator indexes markdown content, YAML frontmatter, wikilinks, and standard markdown links. It is not an Obsidian plugin, does not read .obsidian/ configuration, and has no special handling for other Obsidian-only syntax — vault features like canvases or dataview queries are outside the contracts. If a future producer wants to emit them, the producer path is open.