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.

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.

Can I sync my entire Obsidian vault? How does that work?

Yes, you can sync your entire vault with screen.garden, effectively turning screen.garden into a standard sync service but with built-in collaboration.

To do this, select New collecton when setting up your first collection, follow the prompts, and then select Entire vault when asked what you want to sync.

Syncing your full Obsidian vault to one screen.garden collection has a few special characteristics to be aware of:

1. Because your entire vault is synced to a single collection, collaboration is all-or-nothing: everyone with access to that collection may edit it, unlike the "just a folder" screen.garden setup where you can place collaborative folders in your personal vault alongside private, local-only notes.
2. Because collections cannot contain other collections, you can’t connect a subfolder of your vault to a different screen.garden collection.

You can disconnect your vault from screen.garden and reconfigure your setup at any time in plugin settings.

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?

Yes, it will 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, screen.garden’s editor sync is much more efficient than syncing external edits. As a result, we suggest editing within Obsidian whenever possible.

I want to share a note that embeds an image. Will the image also be shared?

Yes. screen.garden supports syncing all kinds of files. As long as your image is in the collection folder with your note, it will sync.