Metalayer

When you install this package, you will get a command line tool called metalayer.

To initialize your knowledge repo, run the following command, which will walk you through the process:

metalayer init

When you've initialized the knowledge repo, run the following command:

metalayer run

This will start recording your screen(s) and printing a bunch of stuff. Once you start looking at stuff related to the folders you created, files should start appearing in those folders. After a few minutes, open up your Knowledge Repo folder up in Obsidian to explore the notes!

To stop the metalayer. Type q + enter in the terminal window where you ran metalayer run. This stops the program gracefully, but if you need to hard-stop just type ^C (control + c).

Manual Set-up (Optional)

This section is OPTIONAL. Ignore unless you want/need to set up the metalayer manually.

Permissions

For each of the following pages in the settings app, you need to check the box next to Terminal or add Terminal.

• System Preferences > Privacy & Security > Screen Recording
• System Preferences > Privacy & Security > Accessibility
• System Preferences > Privacy & Security > Input Monitoring

If you're using chrome, you also need to enable apple events since metalayer uses those to get the title of the active tab and other metadata. To do this, open chrome then click View > Developer > Allow JavaScript from Apple Events.

Setting up your knowledge repo

The tutorial in metalayer init will walk you through this, but in case you want to do it yourself this heres how:

Before you start recording your screen and saving auto-generated markdown notes to a folder, you need to first create the folder. I call mine Knowledge Repo. To set your folder as the obsidian vault root, run:

metalayer set-vault-dir <path-to-your-folder>

Then, create a subfolder for each topic you want to record notes for. NOTE: for each subfolder, you need to create a file called _desciption.md, which should have a 1-3 sentence description of what you want to be indexed into that folder. A more specific description will make filtering quality better. Here's an example from my repo:

Knowledge Repo
├── Control Theory
│   ├── _description.md
│   └── Model Predictive Control
│       └── _description.md
└── Evolutionary Algorithms
    └── _description.md

Evolutionary Algorithms/_description.md:

Everything related to evolultionary algorithms an genetic algorithms, including motiviation, 
parallels to biological evolution, computational properties, implementation, variants, applications, etc.