Quickstart

Grove starts with your notes and grows into your code. This walkthrough takes about ten minutes: open a vault, write and think, then connect a repo and hand real work to an agent.

1. Open a vault

Launch Grove and pick a folder to open as your vault. Choose either:

An empty folder — a fresh start; Grove seeds it with a welcome note.
An existing notes vault — an Obsidian vault or any other folder where you keep your Markdown notes. It opens as-is; the same files stay editable from any other app.

Your notes live at the root of this folder as plain Markdown. Grove keeps its bookkeeping in a hidden .grove/ directory, so the vault stays clean.

Markdown files open in a WYSIWYG editor with [[wikilinks]], backlinks, #tags, Mermaid diagrams, and live panels — drop a kanban board into a daily log, or embed a live agent chat inside a design doc. The New from template picker seeds daily logs, to-do lists, and project plans.

This is where thoughts start: plans, ideas, research, specs. See Markdown editor.

3. Think with an agent

You don't need code to use agents. Cmd+N starts a chat — a real terminal running Claude Code, Codex, or opencode. Agents can read and write your notes through Grove's MCP tools, so you can ask one to flesh out a plan, organize research, or draft a doc, and the results appear live in your sidebar.

4. Connect a repo when you're ready to code

Open Settings → Projects and link a code repo (you can also create one on the fly when you make your first workspace). The repo joins the vault as a project: its file tree appears in the project panel, Cmd+P and search scope to it, and notes can deep-link into its files and symbols. A vault can hold several projects — one notes hub across all your codebases. See Vaults and projects.

5. Create a workspace

A workspace is a unit of work: its own notes, its own agent chats, and its own git worktree branched off your base branch. Click the new workspace button on a project (or press Cmd+Shift+N), and Grove creates one instantly.

Hover the workspace and start a chat with the agent of your choice. The worktree materializes the moment the agent spawns — and your repo's setup script runs, so node_modules and .env are there too. Tell the agent what to build.

6. Review the diff

As the agent works, Grove paints its changes inside the actual files, tinted in the workspace's color, with the full file as context — no patch hunks floating in space. Select lines and leave a comment; it's anchored to content, so it survives rewrites. See Diff view.

7. Get a reply

Agents see your comments as a to-do list through MCP: they can list what's pending, reply, and resolve. Ask the agent to address your comments — replies appear threaded in the Comments panel.

8. Ship it

The workspace's PR button creates a pull request from its branch (via the gh CLI) and tracks it once it exists — see GitHub. Or archive the workspace: uncommitted work is captured, the branch is kept, and you can revive it later exactly where you left off.

Keep going

Publish any note or folder as a hosted page or docs site — free.
Run several workspaces in parallel and watch the workspace rail.
Press Cmd+/ any time for the keyboard cheatsheet.