Thoute imports an Obsidian vault in one pass: notes, daily notes, wikilinks, tags, attachments, and Excalidraw drawings. This guide covers what to expect, how to run it, and what does not carry over yet.
The short version if you are weighing the move: Obsidian is a folder of Markdown files you own outright, with a plugin for everything. Thoute is a block outliner where every bullet has its own identity, with real end-to-end encryption, sync included, and AI that works without the server ever reading your notes. If your vault is mostly long prose documents, most of it will arrive as documents you can keep editing. If it is mostly bullet lists, it will arrive as outline.
Obsidian is prose-first and Thoute is bullet-first, so the import looks at each file and picks the shape that fits it.
| In Obsidian | In Thoute |
|---|---|
| A note that is mostly prose | A Markdown document in your Library, editable in the long-form editor with its formatting intact. |
| A note that is only bullet lists | An outline subtree — bullets, nesting and all — the same shape a Logseq page takes. |
| Daily notes | The matching day in your Journal, as outline. Days you already use are merged, never overwritten. |
[[Wikilinks]] and [[Note|alias]] |
Live references to the imported note. Click one and you are there; the target shows a backlink count. Links to notes outside the import stay as plain text. |
#tags and #[[multi word tags]] |
Tags. Multi word tags become single tokens (for example #acme-corp), and the words stay readable in the text. |
![[image.png]] and  |
The file itself, encrypted and uploaded, attached beneath the bullet that referenced it. |
.excalidraw.md files |
Real drawings you can open on the canvas, not the plugin's wrapper text. |
| YAML frontmatter | Read for the note's title and tags; the rest is kept with the note. |
All imported notes sit under one Imported from Obsidian bullet in your Library, so the import stays tidy and is easy to relocate or remove.
.obsidian/ folder. You can also drag it onto the dialog.Parsing happens entirely in your browser. Your notes are encrypted on your device before anything is uploaded, the same as everything else you write in Thoute. The server never sees them in readable form.
Your Obsidian vault is never modified. If an import goes wrong, delete the "Imported from Obsidian" bullet in your Library and run it again.
Thoute reads your daily-note settings from .obsidian/daily-notes.json — the folder you keep them in and the date format you use — and lands those files on the matching days in your Journal.
If you have never opened Obsidian's Daily Notes settings, that file may not exist. The import says so in the preview and puts everything in your Library instead, which is harmless: you can move any of it onto a day afterwards. If you want the days, open Daily Notes settings in Obsidian once before exporting so the file is written.
Unusual date formats (anything with folders in the pattern, or tokens beyond the usual year/month/day) fall back to Library notes rather than guessing at a date.
Honest list, so there are no surprises:
.canvas files are not imported. Excalidraw drawings are..obsidian/ except the daily-note settings is ignored.^block-id). Obsidian's block anchors import as plain text. Links between whole notes do become live references.> [!note] blocks keep their text but render as ordinary quotes.