Lettuce Docs Tags Graph

Frontmatter

#docs#concepts#reference
~3 min read

Frontmatter

Lettuce reads YAML frontmatter at the very top of any note. It’s optional — a note without frontmatter is perfectly valid — but a few keys unlock useful behaviour.

---
title: My note
tags: [project, urgent]
date: 2026-05-28
published: true
---

# My note
...

Keys Lettuce recognises

Key Type Effect
title string Display name in sidebar (overrides filename)
tags list of strings Added to the tag index; can also use inline #tag
published bool If true, included in the static site build
description (or summary) string Used for <meta> description / OpenGraph on the published page (falls back to the note’s lead text)
aliases list of strings Alternative names that [[link]] resolves to
date date or datetime Shown in the note’s meta row and used for recency ranking
updated (or modified) date or datetime Shown in the note’s meta row; takes precedence over date for recency
author string Shown in the note’s meta row
enhance bool or ai Opt-in: restructure into a TOC + collapsible sections at publish time (ai adds LLM summaries)
dropcap bool Opt-in decorative drop-cap on the first paragraph when published

A couple of keys are read only from the vault’s root index.md: lint: (the tag/alias schema a folder enforces) and immutable: (the write-once path list). (marp: is a per-note slide directive read by the deck renderer, not a folder-index key — see [[CLI cookbook/00 Overview|lettuce slides]].)

Unknown keys are preserved verbatim — Lettuce never strips fields it doesn’t recognise. Use this freely for your own conventions (status: in-progress, mood: focused, etc.).

Why frontmatter, why YAML

Common patterns

Status tracking

status: draft       # or "in-review", "published", "archived"
owner: bbot
last-reviewed: 2026-05-01

Then in any note, query with:

search(query: "status: draft")

Custom dates

deadline: 2026-06-15
shipped: 2026-05-20

status: draft and deadline: 2026-06-15 are both queryable strings to search. Lettuce doesn’t enforce a schema — that’s deliberate.

Multi-line strings

description: >
  This is a multi-line description that flows
  onto a second line and gets joined with spaces.
notes: |
  This preserves
  newlines exactly.

Editing safely

The inspector’s Frontmatter tab gives you a typed editor. Use it for keys with complex types (lists, dates) — much safer than hand-editing the YAML, which is easy to break.

For agents, prefer patch_section with target_type: "frontmatter" over write_note — it preserves the rest of the file’s structure and rewrites only the frontmatter block.

Gotchas