Edit the wiki by hand

Read this if you want to treat your OMem wiki as what it is — a folder of plain Markdown files you fully control. You can read them, grep them, edit a page, or open the whole vault in Obsidian. This page also answers the question that matters most: does a hand edit survive the next ingest?

It’s just Markdown on your disk

Your wiki lives at ~/omem/wiki by default (wherever you set data.wiki_path). Inside is one .md file per page, organized by kind and account (e.g. wiki/mail/<account>/…), each with YAML frontmatter and a Markdown body. Nothing proprietary — open it in Finder, a text editor, grep, or point Obsidian at the folder.

grep -ri "margin target" ~/omem/wiki    # search the raw files
open ~/omem/wiki                          # browse in Finder

This is design principle P3: the wiki is the truth, not a hidden index. You can read exactly what your agent reads.

Does a hand edit survive re-ingest?

Yes — as long as the source hasn’t changed. Here’s the rule, precisely:

• OMem only rewrites a page’s body when the source content changes. Each item is fingerprinted; if the bytes are the same, the curation cache hits and OMem does not touch the wiki body. Your edit stays.
• If you edit the source (the original file, the email) so its fingerprint changes, the next ingest re-curates that page and your manual edit to the body is replaced by a fresh curation.

So hand-editing is safe and durable for pages whose source is stable — fix a summary, add a note, correct a name, and it persists run after run. Just know that editing a page whose underlying file you also keep changing is fighting the pipeline.

A good mental model

Edit the wiki to refine what OMem produced (tidy a page, add context). If you find yourself re-editing the same page after every ingest, that page’s source is changing — fix it at the source, or accept that the curation will refresh.

Version-control it

Because it’s plain files, the whole vault is git-friendly:

cd ~/omem/wiki
git init && git add -A && git commit -m "snapshot"

Now every ingest’s changes show up as a diff you can review, and you have history. (Point data.wiki_path at a folder inside an existing repo if you prefer.)

Use it as an Obsidian vault

Set the wiki path to an Obsidian vault (or open the default folder as one) and you get backlinks, graph view, and search over your auto-generated work memory — edited by hand where you want, regenerated where you don’t.

What’s next

• Back up and migrate — move the vault, keep the archive.
• Design principles → P3 — why the wiki is the source of truth.