FAQ
What is screen.garden?
screen.garden is a web service + plugin system to share Markdown notes with others without compromising on your own personal notetaking setup. Notes are shared using a special algorithm that prevents sync conflicts; you can see your collaborator’s cursors and even where they are elsewhere in your shared notes. You can have folders—and even trees of folders—of shared Markdown in, for example, your personal Obsidian vault that you can reference and link to from your private notes without having to use some entirely web-based, non-Markdown, inscrutably popular app instead.
screen.garden is in Early Access. What does that mean?
screen.garden was previously in private beta; we’ve now opened up to everyone and feel pretty confident in how things work. Early Access is a way for us to signal that there are still a couple temporary limitations to the service that folks should be aware of. Here are they, roughly in the order we expect to make them disappear:
- Only markdown is synced; non-markdown files in connected folders will be ignored. We are actively working on supporting a more naive last-write-wins sync for non-markdown files.
- Everyone in a team has access the team’s note collections. This isn’t a limitation for most people, but we’re working on finer-grained permissions so that you may have user-private or group-private collections within a team.
What is a collection?
Collections are what we call a folder tree of notes and subfolders. They’re the basic unit of sharing in screen.garden: you create a collection, put it somewhere in your Obsidian vault as a folder, and start editing with your team (or syncing solo).
Is screen.garden a sync service?
Yes (and more)! Part of making collaboration work involved building a hyperefficient sync system, so we did. It’s totally valid to use screen.garden by yourself to sync notes; if you do, you can always share one-off notes with a read-only share link, or perhaps invite others in the future.
Is screen.garden a backup service?
No. We highly recommend regularly backing up your vault. This is true whether or not you use screen.garden—it's just a good idea!
Are my shared notes safe?
All connections to screen.garden servers are encrypted, and your data is encrypted in transit and when at rest in our servers. Only members of your team have app and web access to your note—unless you choose share a note publicly, of course. You may optionally require a publicly-shared note to require a password so that you can share notes with specific people who don't have screen.garden (or an app with a screen.garden plugin, like Obsidian).
If you are interested in other security measures, like dedicated, sequestered app servers, please contact us.
For more details, please see our privacy policy.
Can I use iCloud/Obsidian Sync/OneDrive/some other sync solution alongside screen.garden?
If you use the screen.garden plugin on multiple machines it will handle keeping shared notes in sync across those machines for you. If you also use a sync service, you should be careful to exclude shared notes from being synced by that service: otherwise your shared notes may become corrupted as screen.garden attempts to sync changes that have already been copied over. This is a problem when combining any two services that sync notes, not just screen.garden. The screen.garden plugin will attempt to both warn and prevent these sorts of conflicts, but it is safest to preconfigure each sync service manually.
Will web editing support my favorite Obsidian editor feature?
At present, editing notes in the screen.garden web interface is purposefully quite simple. While we want to add new features over time, we plan to do so deliberately and in ways that avoid clashing with other editors. The goal is to enable easy editing in situations where you may not have access to another option, and not to replace Obsidian (or other future supported systems).
Can I use screen.garden in Roam, Logseq, and other PKM systems?
We'd love to support these apps someday—the long-term vision of screen.garden is to enable collaboration across PKM systems. We started with Obsidian because our team uses it personally and is familiar with it.
What happens if I edit a shared note’s file on disk, outside Obsidian? Will it still sync?
screen.garden supports sending updates to notes on your filesystem made outside of Obsidian, but there are a few extra considerations when doing so. First, due to the nature of screen.garden being an Obsidian plugin, we can only "see" those updates if Obsidian is open. Second, if you're editing a note simultaneously with another collaborator you may risk overwriting their changes, as your external editor may not receive their updates and you could save over them. We recommend trying to limit collaboration to inside Obsidian for these reasons.
Given these limitations, we currently recommend making changes directly in Obsidian or the screen.garden web editor if at all possible. If not, have the file you are editing open in Obsidian while you work so that changes are recorded.
I want to share a note that embeds an image. Will the image also be shared?
At present, embedded images (as well as wikilinked and transcluded notes) are not automatically shared alongside their notes. This is largely for security; while we're interested in more holistic sharing, it would be easy to otherwise "leak" files you intend to be private. If you'd like to embed an image in a shared note for others to see we recommend hosting the image outside your notes and linking to it, e.g. with imgur, or using a separate sync service like Syncthing configured to not sync markdown.