Save Term

Save term

Save a term or phrase as a Term note in 02-Evergreen/Terms/. Two modes:

1. Encountered — a term lifted from a book, article, conversation, or other external source. Body anchors on a source citation + quote.
2. Coined — a term that emerged during conversation (often a compact replacement for a wordy phrase, or a fresh concept the user wants to lock in). Body is a brief gloss with a usage example or context.

This skill is not for general note-taking. It writes one specific shape of note — short, atomic, and aligned with the existing vault Term convention. For broader capture, use save-napkin-note.

Defer to AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md

Vault layout, metadata semantics, and tool-choice rules live in the vault's AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md. This skill only adds the procedure for writing one note type. When unsure about a field's meaning or which tool to use for vault writes, read those first.

Arguments

• $ARGUMENTS: the term or phrase to save. If omitted, ask. If the term contains punctuation tricky for filenames (/, :, etc.), confirm a filesystem-safe variant before writing.

Process

1. Determine mode

Ask if not obvious from context:

• Encountered — user is referencing something external (a book, article, person they're quoting, web clipping). Need a source.
• Coined — emerged in this conversation, no external source. Likely came out of a phrase-revision pass or a fresh framing.

2. Gather what the body needs

For encountered terms:

• Source citation — wikilink to an existing vault note if possible ([[Source note title]]), otherwise a markdown link to the URL with the article/book title as link text. Check 04-Entities/ and 03-Records/Clippings/ for an existing source note before defaulting to a raw URL.
• Quote — verbatim passage from the source that defines or illustrates the term. Use a blockquote (>). Don't paraphrase.
• Optional: brief framing sentence above the quote if needed for context, though most existing Term notes go straight to the quote.

For coined terms:

• Gloss — 1–2 sentences defining the term in plain language. The user's own wording is preferable to your phrasing — pull from the conversation if a clean definition already exists there.
• Usage example or context — optionally, the wordy phrase it replaces (if it came from a phrase-revision pass) or a sentence showing it in use.
• Optional source — if it was inspired by something external, link or cite it lightly.

3. Pick an icon (optional but encouraged)

Existing Term notes usually have a Lucide icon in frontmatter (e.g., icon: LiFilter, icon: LiWaves). If you can suggest a fitting one, do — otherwise leave the field blank rather than guessing badly. The suggest-lucide-icons skill is the right tool when the user wants help picking one.

4. Find related notes

Search the vault briefly for adjacent Term notes or concept notes (02-Evergreen/) that this term connects to. Two or three is plenty — these populate ## See also. Don't force connections; if nothing obvious comes up, leave the section empty or omit it.

5. Write the note

Path: 02-Evergreen/Terms/{term}.md

Filename casing: match the user's preference if they specified one; otherwise default to sentence case for multi-word terms (Bottleneck optimization.md) and lowercase for single common-noun terms (burnout.md). Existing examples are mixed — don't agonize over it.

Filename collision: before writing, check if the file exists. If it does, surface to the user — don't silently overwrite. Options: append to the existing note, pick a more specific filename, or abort.

Frontmatter shape (matching existing Term notes):

---
icon: Li{LucideIconName}     # optional
publish: false
related:                      # optional, omit if empty
  - "[[Adjacent term]]"
tags:
  - {topical tags}
  - evergreen
  - terms
created: {ISO timestamp}
modified: {ISO timestamp}
---

evergreen and terms tags are required — they're how the vault identifies these notes.

Body shape — encountered mode:

[[Source note]]:
> Verbatim quote that defines or illustrates the term. Multiple paragraphs of the source can be stacked as separate blockquote lines.
> Another excerpt if relevant.

## See also
- [[Related term]]
- [[Related concept]]

Body shape — coined mode:

1–2 sentence gloss in plain language. The phrase or context that prompted it can sit below as a usage example or as a quoted line.

> Optional: original phrase being replaced, or a sentence using the term.

## See also
- [[Related term]]

6. Confirm

Show the resulting wikilink ([[Term name]]) and a one-line summary of what was saved. If a daily-log bullet is warranted (per the vault's write-back discipline), mention it but don't auto-write — that's a separate decision.

Tool choice

Per AGENTS.md, prefer Obsidian CLI when the desktop app is running. For new file creation in a known location, the Write tool is fine and direct. Read existing Term files with obsidian read file="<term>" to check for collisions and to study tone/length when in doubt.

Examples

Encountered:

User: /save-term affordance
[skill asks for source]
User: From Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things — there's a clipping at [[The Design of Everyday Things - Norman]]
[skill drafts the note with that source + a quote pulled from the clipping]

Coined (post phrase-revision):

User: /save-term ambient drafting
[skill confirms it's coined, asks for a quick gloss]
User: writing in the background while doing other things — the prose accretes rather than gets composed
[skill drafts a short coined-mode note, suggests `LiPenLine` for icon]

What not to do

• Don't paraphrase source quotes in encountered mode. Verbatim only.
• Don't invent metadata fields not in the existing convention (no category, no type, etc.) — keep frontmatter minimal.
• Don't write ambient prose around the term. Term notes are tight scrapbook entries, not essays.
• Don't set publish: true on a new Term note. Default is publish: false so the note can ripen privately first; the user flips it on themselves when it's ready.
• Don't auto-update STATUS or other vault state. This skill writes one file.