Connect Claude to your notes folder

What this does. Tells Claude Code which folder on your Mac it’s allowed to read and edit. That folder will be your Obsidian vault — so once it’s connected, Claude can see every note you have, edit them, and create new ones.

Two clicks. Shortest page in the course.

Why this matters

Claude Code can’t help with your notes unless it knows where they are. By default it’s sandboxed — it won’t touch anything on your Mac until you point it at a specific folder. That folder is called the project root. For everyone here, the project root is your Obsidian vault.

Steps

1. Open Claude Desktop. Click the Code tab.
2. Click Select folder.
3. Navigate to your Obsidian vault — the folder you created on the install page (it’ll be inside iCloud Drive if you followed that suggestion). Select it.

That’s the whole thing.

Quick test

Type this into the Code prompt:

list the files in this folder

Claude should reply with the contents of your vault. If you only created one test note earlier, you’ll see one file. Wired up.

What you can do now (and what to wait for)

Technically Claude can now read and edit everything in your vault. Don’t ramp up real work yet, though — the next page is the one that makes Claude useful for you specifically. Without it, Claude is generic and you’ll spend every session re-explaining who you are and what you do. So do that one before doing anything substantive.

A note on permission prompts

Claude Code asks you for permission before each action by default — “can I edit this file?”, “can I run this command?”. That’s a useful introduction at first but gets tedious fast. The next page covers how to switch to Auto mode, which lets Claude run without prompting for everything. Until then, the default prompts are fine.

What’s next

Tell Claude about your work — the highest-leverage step in the course. Claude will interview you for about fifteen minutes and write a personalised set of instruction files based on your answers. After that, every future Claude Code session will already know who you are, how you write, and what you work on.