SilverBullet

Best Practices

3 min read

guide

Let’s be clear upfront: your space is your own, you can structure it however you like. That said, over the years a few “best practices” of how to structure your space have emerged.

If you don’t have strong preferences coming in, consider following them.

Flat name space

While SilverBullet will dynamically create Folders when you use slashes (/) in your page names, the typical SilverBullet user tends to use this feature lightly.

Organization is achieved through incrementally adding Frontmatter and Hashtags, rather than investing in a very structured folder structure upfront. This is also why, by default, SilverBullet does not ship with the classic file tree — it would be very boring to look at.

The advantage of this approach is multi-fold:

  1. Reduces “decision fatigue”: you create a new page, where should you put it? Answer: top level.
  2. Whereas a page can only ever live in a single folder, it can be tagged with an unlimited number of hashtags. This gives more flexibility.

As a result, this means that most content pages tend to live at the “top level” (see this space as an example).

A few exceptions:

These make sense to split out, and keep contained in their own folders, away from other areas of your space.

Frontmatter and tags

When adding a Frontmatter section to a page, it becomes cleaner to move any Hashtags you previously put in your page to the tags attribute:

---
role: Data analyst
tags: sometag anothertag
---

Page conventions

  • Title-Case page names: name a page as you’d write its title in prose: Customer Persona, not customer-persona. See Names for additional rules and hard constraints.
  • No top-of-page H1: the page name is already the title, don’t restate it as an # H1.
  • First line is a one-sentence summary: the opening body line defines or summarises the page, this is what link previews and catalogs quote.
  • Absolute wiki links: links are paths from the space root: [[Folder/Page]]. This way, links stay valid no matter where the linking page lives or moves. See Link.

Querying your space

SilverBullet’s Object Index is the engine behind every live query:

  • Prefer index.contentPages() over tags.page for page lists and lint sweeps — it filters out Meta Pages (pages tagged meta or meta/*) so Library and configuration pages do not pollute your results. See Object Index.
  • The index is asynchronous — after editing a page, expect a few seconds before queries reflect the change. Re-run before drawing conclusions. See Object Index.
  • For cross-cutting collections (all open questions, all ADRs), use the aggregator page + tagPage pattern instead of hand-maintained lists. See Aggregator Pages.
  • Find broken or forward-references via the aspiring-page tag. See Aspiring Pages.

Authoring Space Lua

When developing on a space-lua based feature, follow the edit, reload, check (browser) logs, verify loop: edit a script, run System: Reload (Ctrl-Alt-r) to re-execute all definitions, then check the console logs. A successful reload does not mean the script is healthy, Lua errors surface in logs, not always as a visible reload failure. For a programmatic “reboot to ready” call that also drains the index queue, see API/system > system.reboot().

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