A well written post on a well-thought out product.

> Eventually, I want Ruin to be a native Mac and iOS app.

Whenever I've had this idea for other projects the first concept I like to play around with is a Raycast extension, it allows you to experiment with how you can leverage spotlight search and Mac commands to interact with your product, especially for the Quick Capture functionality (I see you've mentioned it toward the end).

I like the concept, is there a wizard type thing for how I can port over a lot of my existing .md files to the "ruin style .md files" with all the notation? Perhaps something I can give Claude to essentially onboard my files to be viewed and interfaced with effectively through ruin?

Thanks for reading!

Migrating an existing vault isn’t something I’ve poked at too much yet. Running `ruin init --config && ruin doctor` from the directory with your files should set up the proper indexes and note frontmatter, and then you can run `ruin` commands or `lazyruin` from anywhere. Thinking about it, I should probably just have `ruin init` do that automatically w/ a confirmation.

Definitely do it on a copy of your markdown vault / folders. The note content themselves shouldn’t be touched but the files are be read and edited. If you have any frontmatter in those files, that will be updated w/ the ruin-specific values. Existing frontmatter fields should come through unchanged, but the exact order and formatting isn’t guaranteed. Also, currently Ruin and Obsidian (if that is where your notes are coming from) have a different format for storing tags in frontmatter, so that will be annoying duplicated. How compatible I want to be with Obsidian is on the list to think deeper about.

Broadly, this isn’t a workflow I’ve thoroughly tested yet, so your milage may vary. A /skill would also be trivial for Claude to write from the various `--help` outputs to get you going as well.