Cuaderno

Cuaderno (cdno) is a command-line vault manager for the Research Logbook Method (RLM) — a way of running long-horizon knowledge work out of a folder of plain Markdown files. It is built for researchers and other deep-work practitioners, and is deliberately friendly to ADHD working styles: it leads with what is there, not what is missing — no guilt counters, no angry overdue badges, explicit permission to park or drop work.

You drive it from a terminal, and an AI assistant (Claude and other MCP clients) can drive it too, through the bundled MCP server.

What it gives you

• A dated, append-only log as the single source of truth for what you did.
• Projects with a current state, next actions, milestones, and waiting-on items — capped at five active at a time so you can’t overcommit.
• Evidence portfolios: per-question dossiers that accumulate papers, experiment results, and notes over months and years.
• Important questions kept front-and-centre and re-read often.
• Stewardships: small, bounded, long-haul responsibilities (health, finances) with optional habit tracking.
• A commitments register — promises with dates, aggregated from everywhere they live.
• Full-text search, frontmatter linting, and a JSON mode so every read and write verb is scriptable.

Two ways to use it

Both operate on the same Markdown vault — the files on disk are always the source of truth (the SQLite index is just a rebuildable cache).

How this guide is organised

• Getting started — install, create a vault, run the daily loop, and wire up Claude.
• Concepts — the mental model: the method, the twelve note types, the vault layout, and the rules the tool enforces.
• Tutorials — task-oriented walkthroughs of each workflow.
• CLI reference — every command, flag, and example.
• MCP server reference — every tool exposed to AI clients.
• Appendix — JSON shapes, frontmatter fields, the full config file, recurrence syntax, and troubleshooting.

This guide documents the shipped behaviour of Cuaderno. New to it? Read The Research Logbook Method for the why, then jump to the Quickstart for the how.