https://help.obsidian.md/cli

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently using AI CLIs with Obsidian. No plugins necessary because it’s just a directory tree of markdown files.

> The retention period for your version history depends on your Obsidian Sync plan. On the Standard plan, notes are retained for 1 month, while on the Plus plan, they are kept for 12 months. After this period, older versions of your notes are deleted.

If my project has a readme.md I don't want to create an obsidian vault with its configuration files in my project, just to open it.

I also built a cli tool to index embeddings in LanceDB and do semantic search. It helps agents create better internal links between notes. https://github.com/ravila4/obsidian-semantic-search

Before opening HN this morning and seeing this post, I actually wrote a post about how I'm experimentally using headless to publish my blog: https://utf9k.net/blog/obsidian-headless/

Well, that post was my experiment but I'll be looking forward to trying it out going forward.

There are of course many alternatives and I'm sure this workflow may have its pains but for now, it feels like a lot less friction between actually writing and having it published.

I've used plain Git for many years of course but I've also tried other rube goldberg machines such as various Git-inside-Obsidian plugins and so on but there's always just a bunch of "stuff" between writing and putting it online.

I wanna be able to talk to a document and iterate on it just like chatgpt with canvas but inside obsidian.

I've been digging around and haven't quite found anything to do that.

One potential challenge is I'm not sure how easy it would be to let it do tool calling to edit the document rather than spitting out the whole document each time (with risk of minor changes).

Damn… I’m doing it all wrong!!

- Automate remote backups

- Automate publishing a website

- Give agentic tools access to a vault without access to your full computer

- Sync a shared team vault to a server that feeds other tools

- Run scheduled automations e.g. aggregate daily notes into weekly summaries, auto-tag, etc

...all while having the speed, privacy, customizability, end-to-end encryption of Obsidian Sync.

[1]: https://x.com/kepano/status/2027485552451432936

As such, on iOS the native sync is the only one that works cleanly and seamlessly, and so you're incentivized to pay for it.

There was a little while, when dropbox was big, where it seemed like the future of computing would be "your data is in the cloud, and every app you use can share that data, and those two things are independent integrated through some common filesystem layer".

And then it ended up that no, your data's in a cloud-per-service, where your emails live in googles cloud, your documents in microsoft 365's cloud, your images in "adobe creative cloud"'s cloud, your photos in Apple's cloud, your passwords in 1Password's cloud, and your knowledgebase in Obsidian's cloud.

The dream of the filesystem API being able to expand to clouds, of being able to choose dropbox or google or apple as the owner of your data, and other applications seamlessly integrating with any of them, it died with apple making it impossible to offer any sort of generic filesystem API or even background sync.

And so, that's why you'd use obsidian sync over git, because you're cursed with using a phone.

Unless you're saying "why not pay for obsidian sync, but then sync it into a git repo in CI and commit there to see the diffs", not "why not use git as the underlying sync protocol", in which case ignore everything I wrote, you totally could do that.

That said, I’ve switched one vault to git and have had no issues there.

also, thanks for the great product, bought the vip catalyst as a show of support.

It's a bit trickier than it seems because a lot of Obsidian configuration and app functionality is vault-specific. E.g. what theme should be used? What plugins should be available? Does autocomplete for [[links]] or properties do anything? Etc.

Definitely will be looking at the official Obsidian sync plan now.

Ive been surprised at how few people are interested in an obsidian browser tool, but its great if I want to read / write notes from a corporate laptop for example.

Also, is the Obsidian CLI available when obsidian-headless is installed? Or is obsidian-headless only a sync client at this time?

Claude helped me vibe code a small rust editor : https://github.com/Karalix/markzap it's tuned to my usage, you should make your own too !