Navigating markdown vaults

Skill LucaTamSapienza/glance/skills/navigating-markdown-vaults

Use when reading, searching, retrieving context from, or editing a folder of Markdown notes — drive glance's agent-memory commands (context/section/outline/neighbors/backlinks/edit) instead of loading whole files or grepping by hand. glance gives token-cheap, structure-aware reads with a token receipt, the real link graph, and safe surgical edits.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add LucaTamSapienza/glance --skill navigating-markdown-vaults

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

4 stars4 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

SKILL.md

3.4 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Navigating & maintaining markdown vaults with glance

glance is an agent-native memory layer over a folder of .md files: it reads the vault for a fraction of the tokens a raw read costs, resolves [[wikilinks]] by stem across the whole tree, and writes back surgically. Prefer it over loading whole files or grepping — and check the token receipt it prints to see how much you saved.

When to use

"How do we handle X?" / "What do the notes say about Y?" → --context (the budgeted retrieval bundle — start here for any answer-from-the-vault question).
"Show me just the Decisions section of note Z" → --section.
"What's the structure of this doc?" → --outline (depth-bounded, optional abstracts).
"How does this connect?" / "What links to X?" → --neighbors / --backlinks.
"What changed since yesterday?" → --since.
"Add this / update that note" → --edit / --set-frontmatter (never rewrite a whole file by hand).

Commands (JSON on stdout)

Need	Command
Best context for a query, under a token budget	`glance --context "Q" DIR --budget 4000`
One heading's subtree (+ receipt)	`glance --section "FILE#Heading"`
Heading tree, bounded	`glance --outline FILE --depth 2 --abstract`
Link-graph neighbourhood	`glance --neighbors "Note" DIR --depth 2`
Who links here (+ the citing line)	`glance --backlinks "Note" DIR --context`
What changed	`glance --since <unix_ts> DIR`
A file's outbound links / the whole graph	`glance --links FILE` · `glance --graph DIR`
Edit a section (atomic)	`glance --edit FILE append\|insert\|replace "Heading" "text"`
Set a frontmatter key	`glance --set-frontmatter FILE KEY VALUE`

--context returns {query, budget_tokens, chunks, truncated, receipt}: chunks is what fits (some as full sections, some as cheaper abstracts), truncated is the manifest of what was left out with scores — follow up on a dropped item with --section instead of raising the budget blindly. Add --semantic to fuse an embedding score for fuzzy matches.

How to work

Check it's installed: command -v glance. If missing, point the user at the install steps (brew install md4c notcurses pkg-config, clone, make install) and stop.
Answer questions with --context first; only fall back to --section / whole-file reads when you need a specific exact slice. Cite note#heading.
For "how does this connect", use --graph / --neighbors for hubs, orphans, and clusters before reasoning about content.
To change a note, use --edit — declare the heading and the text; glance splices it in and saves atomically. Don't reconstruct the file yourself.
Run commands synchronously (never backgrounded), and parse the JSON as ground truth.

For a persistent integration (Claude Desktop, Cursor, the SDK), glance mcp exposes all of the above as native MCP tools — see docs/MCP.md.