OKF in Stashpad — a getting-started guide

This guide assumes you know nothing about OKF or Stashpad. By the end you'll know what OKF is, why Stashpad is a natural way to produce it, and exactly how to turn one of your folders into an OKF bundle and share it.

What is OKF?

OKF (Open Knowledge Format) is Google's open, vendor-neutral spec for packaging curated knowledge so that LLMs and AI agents can browse and use it reliably. An OKF "bundle" is deliberately simple — just a folder of plain Markdown files:

one file per "concept" (a table, a dataset, a metric, a runbook, a note…),
each with a little YAML frontmatter at the top (type is required; title / description / tags / timestamp are recommended),
cross-links between concepts are relative Markdown links (e.g. [Onboarding](onboarding.md)), not app-specific [[wikilinks]],
an index.md in the folder that lists the concepts,
the file path is the concept's identity.

That's the whole idea: knowledge as a tidy, linkable folder of Markdown that any tool — or any AI — can read without a proprietary importer.

Spec & background:

What is Stashpad?

Stashpad is an Obsidian plugin that turns a folder into a chat-style outliner: you jot notes, nest them under one another, and navigate the tree. Under the hood every note is just a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter, and the parent/child structure is recorded there too.

Why Stashpad is a good fit for OKF

Look at the two descriptions above — they're almost the same shape:

OKF wants…	Stashpad already has…
one Markdown file per concept	one Markdown file per note
YAML frontmatter on each	frontmatter on every note
a folder of related concepts	a Stashpad folder of related notes
relative-Markdown cross-links	a real parent/child hierarchy
an `index.md` per folder	a known folder structure to generate one from

So an OKF bundle is basically "a Stashpad folder, written down in OKF's conventions." Stashpad can therefore generate the OKF layer for you — the required frontmatter keys, the relative-Markdown links, and the index.md — instead of you hand-authoring any of it. And it does so without disturbing your notes: the OKF fields are added alongside Stashpad's own (nothing is renamed or removed), so the same folder stays a normal Stashpad folder AND becomes a valid OKF bundle.

Get started in ~1 minute

Turn OKF on. Settings → Open Knowledge Format (OKF) → toggle Enable OKF. This creates an OKF Template.md file in your vault.
Pick which folders use OKF. Click Create template + open Templates. In the Templates list, set a folder's template to OKF Template.md. Do this for as many (or as few) folders as you want — it's per-folder. (Archive folders are skipped on purpose; OKF is about sharing, archives are about privacy.)
Build the OKF layer. Back on the OKF page, click Rebuild OKF frontmatter. For every OKF folder this writes the OKF fields onto each note and generates the folder's index.md.
Share it. Right-click a note (or a selection) → Export as OKF… and tick the format(s) you want: .zip or .tar.gz (portable OKF bundles) and/or .stash (Stashpad's own re-importable format). The export lands in the folder's _exports.

That's it. Hand the .zip/.tar.gz to a colleague, an agent, or a data tool — it's standard OKF.

What Stashpad writes for you

On a note in an OKF folder, after a Rebuild:

okfType — the concept type (defaults to concept; edit this freely per note).
okfTitle, okfTimestamp — filled in if missing (yours to edit after).
okfParent, okfChildren — relative-Markdown links to the parent/child notes (Stashpad keeps these in sync; they mirror your tree).

And per folder: an index.md (type: index) with a nested list of the concepts plus a short legend explaining the field names — so even an AI reading the live folder knows how Stashpad's okf* fields map to OKF's standard keys.

Why the okf prefix? So these never collide with your own tags/title/type frontmatter or other plugins'. On export, Stashpad maps them to OKF's bare spec keys (type/title/description/tags/timestamp) in the bundle, while keeping the okf* + id fields too so the bundle can be re-imported into Stashpad losslessly.

Good to know

Complementary, never destructive. Your existing Stashpad notes and links are untouched; OKF fields are added on top.
Auto-updates, but not instantly. When you add, move, or delete notes in an OKF folder, Stashpad refreshes that folder's OKF fields + index.md automatically — a few seconds after you stop (it's debounced, so a burst of changes becomes one rebuild). A brand-new note gets okfType right away; its okfParent/okfChildren and the folder's index.md catch up on that refresh. Want it immediately? Click Rebuild OKF frontmatter in Settings → OKF.
Archive folders are excluded from all OKF processing by design.
Export scope. Exporting a note/selection bundles that subtree, and the bundle's index.md reflects just what you exported.

Glossary

Concept — one OKF Markdown file (= one Stashpad note).
Bundle — a folder of concepts + index.md, optionally zipped/tarred.
index.md — the per-folder table of contents OKF expects (Stashpad generates it).
Rebuild — Stashpad's pass that (re)writes the OKF fields + index.md.

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