#desktop

A Meta Space is one of your local spaces that SilverBullet Desktop underlays into all the others, so its configuration, libraries and templates are available everywhere.

SilverBullet Desktop supports unlimited spaces. That's great for keeping contexts separate. The downside: anything you want available everywhere — a shared snippet of CONFIG.md, a Space Lua library you wrote once and want to reuse — has to be copied into every space, and kept in sync. Not great.

The Meta Space is the way out. It's a SilverBullet+ feature available with Desktop Pro that lets you nominate one of your spaces as a shared underlay for all the others. Anything you put in your meta space (config, libraries, custom commands, templates) automatically becomes available in every other space. The dashboard currently labels it a beta feature.

How it works

Conceptually, every space in SilverBullet is a stack of layers. At the top is your folder on disk, which you can read and write freely. Underneath sits a bundle of built-in libraries and plugs that implement a lot of SilverBullet core functionality. The meta space slots in between: your own folder on top, your meta space's files in the middle, the built-ins underneath.

When you open a space that has the meta space underlaid:

  • Files in your meta space show up in the file list just like your own pages.
  • They are read-only — to edit them you switch to the meta space itself, where they behave like normal pages.
  • If a file in your own space has the same name as a meta-space file, your own version wins. The meta space is a fallback, not an override.

CONFIG.md and METACONFIG.md

The meta space contains an ordinary CONFIG page and any other page. When the meta space is underlaid into another space, the space files are merged (where the meta space's CONFIG page is renamed to METACONFIG to avoid clashes with local CONFIG changes). Since SilverBullet will load space-lua from anywhere in the space, both will be activated.

Setting it up

  1. Create a new space, for example one called META.
  2. Open it and set it up like any other space: tweak your configuration via the Configuration Manager or by editing a CONFIG.md manually. Install libraries as you see fit as well.
  3. Open the SilverBullet Desktop dashboard and go to the Pro tab.
  4. Under Meta space, pick META from the dropdown.

All other spaces will now load the meta space as well (you may have to reopen some windows). In each you will see a METACONFIG.md and library files appear in the file list.

To switch which space is your meta space, just pick a different one from the dropdown. To turn the feature off, pick <None>.

Notes

Editing your meta space takes effect live: changes to its CONFIG.md or library pages are picked up by your other spaces the next time you System: Reload, the same way any local file change is detected.

See also Licensing.