The Obsidian CLI enables many scenarios not possible with the Markdown files alone: building and debugging plugins, running commands, controlling Obsidian, querying bases, accessing the Obsidian index, ...
I've been using iCloud to sync Obsidian, and have consistently run into the problem that iCloud file container access needs full disk permissions that I don't want to give the agent (or Ghostty). Does everybody use Obsidian's paid sync instead or what? Or SyncThing?
This got me thinking if it’s possible to use Obsidian as taskwarrior. I’ve used taskwarrior in the past but it’s CLI interface which is fine for simpler tasks. Lately, I’ve been trying to use Obsidian as task manager and addition of Bases paved path for taskwarrior like usage, but in GUI. Having options to use it as CLI and as GUI offers flexibility.
I also used some plugins like bugwarrior to sync Jira/GitHub tickets locally. This is perfect when working on multiple projects/repos.
But I guess moving from Unix one tool for each job to swiss knife tool makes Obsidian overwhelming. Maybe it’s better to bridge these two tools in some way (plugins) rather than misuse Obsidian features.
Are there plans to support scoped token permissions (specific folders or even specific notes)? I'd love to try setting up something that automatically updates a specific Obsidian note on a state change or cronjob, but I'd want to avoid giving access to the rest of the vault.
also, thanks for the great product, bought the vip catalyst as a show of support.
Is there or do you plan to add some kind of webhook to notify interested parties that a vault has changed? I think it would go together nicely with the headless sync.
No question. Just wanted to drop by and say Obsidian is actually pretty cool. An absolute joy to use, and I only wish I learned about it earlier than I did.
I’m using a couchdb instance to sync a bunch of local obsidian installs and use an obsidian plugin to keep them synced- would this change that or make it easier?
This will save me the overhead of running it in a docker container (I think it used mono or something) so that’s cool.
I am still split using Evernote mostly because the experience feels a little more purpose built. I have some annoying usability issues with Obsidian. Control-N starts a new note not in the folder I’m in, but at the top level. Then I have to go move it by hand.
Having multiple vaults open winds up with multiple individual windows. A hack is to have one meta vault that encompasses all the sub vaults, but that itself is weird.
I would love to have an official multi-vault option. I have separate vaults so I can have work specific things or other things that aren’t exposing the fact I have other vaults tied to my account. However I have some systems I want all of my vaults available, but not multiple instances of obsidian running rather than one instance addressing all vaults - there is a workaround but it feels a too brittle and unofficial. The editor is a little rough comparatively too, even with a couple plugins to help, and I’m not even someone who cares to embed images, pdfs, other things directly in notes. Evernote is overkill and obsidian feels slightly off. Almost there. I’m sure it can be customized better, for example <li> items render well in Evernote but obsidian shows them as markdown and the switching between view, edit and realtime seems difficult to get right.
So I’m still paying for both… and I’d prefer not to. Obsidian feels like a better fit overall, I don’t care about all those Evernote features or AI or crazy rich experiences…
"obsidian shows them as markdown" = try editor settings ("Live Preview")
in terms of embedded vaults, I agree there should be better native support -- but I was also delighted to discover Relay (https://relay.md) which supports directory-level (not just vault-level) sync.
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.
Yeah I often find myself with this need too and I really didn't want to open a huge Electron app each time I need to visualize or edit a simple md file.
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 !
Obsidian is my favorite new tool. I started a new job last week and decided to spin it up on day one to help me onboard and learn their system. It’s been wildly successful, the missing piece I needed to really turn Claude Code into the learning and documentation tool I dreamed about.
This was my most-wanted Obsidian feature, so I’m thrilled to see this. It’s going to be great for server-side automation and RAG against Obsidian vaults.
Oh neat, I had come across the headless client yesterday (and submitted a now-fixed bug report for it after running into some issues).
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.
It would be good since I don't use obsidian on my desktop but I do on my phone, so that way I can use it for syncing and then open the documents on Neovim on my desktop
Nice! I rely on Obsidian a lot for syncing knowledge while working with Claude agents, such as storing research and daily logs to catch up on the prior day’s work. It already works quite well with a custom skill that I build, but this may make the workflow smoother.
The thing is that there already is a very good self-hosted option for sync - Livesync. I won't say it's not eccentric and confusing (it is!) but once you get it to work, it actually works extremely well and is lightning fast too. I use syncthing as well for backups but livesync has the obvious advantage of working natively inside Obsidian.
I'm so done with subscriptions for cloud based solutions and between livesync and syncthing, you've got a very robust set of options to use.
iCloud sync actually messed up every file I opened due to the lag between remote copy and local edits. iCloud would delete the last few edits whether I was in the file or after closing the file. Sometimes I would be typing something and I'd watch it delete what I just typed. It was a complete disaster.
Kinda related, does anyone have a favorite obsidian plugin for AI editing on mobile?
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).
This is great, but as convenient as Obsidian Sync is, it'll never replace plain Git (for me) until it has unlimited version history:
> 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.
I have sync to support the amazing devs, and for convenience, and an automatic git-based backup that runs in the background. It's good to double dip sometimes
Nice to see an official headless option. If anyone is looking to do headless syncing specifically to their own Synology NAS, I created an open-source alternative for that here: https://pypi.org/project/obsidian-synology-sync/
iOS makes it painful to use third-party sync protocols and servers, like syncthing can't run in the background, a git sync service can't run in the background, only iCloud gets to run in the background.... and whatever sync protocol the app itself has blessed so it can run immediately on opening the app.
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.
If you have automation that dumps things int your vault, that you built with their new CLI (which lets you create/tag docs etc. without running the full electron app), I guess this lets you sync those changes and propagate them to all of your obsidian sync clients also without having to open aforementioned full electron app.
Using a headless client allows for easier management of changes in a structured way, especially in collaborative environments. While git is effective for versioning, Obsidian Sync may manage the graph's unique metadata and relationships more elegantly.
I use Obsidian with my Claude (and Codex) but not sure what additional value the CLI would provide since it's just markdown files. What am I missing that a CLI provides for AI? And not sure how the sync fits into it unless there's a copy of the vault that the AI is working with over CLI? Can use a tip.
For some reason obsidian sync consitently empties random recently opened notes for me. I think it might be some kind of race condition between icloud sync and obsidian sync. File gets touched before obsidian gets to it so the empty note is seen as a new file. That theory doesn't quite hold up though because the same thing happens to me using the android client. Has anyone here had this problem?
I had this happen a bunch when I was using iCloud sync on multiple devices. I think it was mostly solved by setting the directory to “keep downloaded” (right click on it in finder and it’s the second option).
That said, I’ve switched one vault to git and have had no issues there.
Ha! Just yesterday I set up a git repo to sync my Obsidian vault with my Ubuntu VPS for LLM use. Part of me wishes this had come out one day sooner, though honestly, I've grown to like the git workflow. The deal-breaker is mobile: it just doesn't play nicely there, so I'll keep using native sync for that.
Isn't there a script or a plugin to sync your vault to github, already?
(may be even to sync several vaults, for example to share vaults between colleagues)
This tool should finally make it possible to setup a good web interface to my obsidian notes. I have a hacky setup using github as the backend storage system but its slow.
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.
I did the same, but sync takes it to another level - the conflict resolution is far better, especially when you have it on both desktop and mobile, and for multiple users on a team you can work on the same doc at the same time without worrying or having to check if Dropbox is working. Add the version history and it's a no-brainer.
Mobile app is pretty good, my biggest complaint is it won't sync in the background. It only syncs when you open it up. But it's well designed and fully functional.
There is a self-hosted live sync plugin. It's rough around the edges but it mostly works and is actively maintained, if you are willing to self-host a sync server.
I say mostly works, because there are a lot of "gotchas" and the configuration and set up are a bit intimidating for the clients (the server is simple to host).
I used it for a while and it was fine, but I decided the cost of a coffee per month is worth not having to maintain it, and I switched to paying for their sync service.
However, there is also a git sync plugin that works really nicely. But it is not a real-time sync and it is not supported on mobile (officially). I mainly use that as a way to keep long running backups of my vaults in a self-hosted gitea instance (the default paid tier only keeps one month of history).
Interesting...I've been thinking for a while that doing instructions and logs through my obsidian notes would be really helpful and a great way to do more agentic work. I've paid for obsidian sync as a way to support their team for the last 3 years, but color me impressed that there are some more tangible benefits to it!
This is huge. I built SidianSidekicks and it is based on git because we don't want to lose your notes and thoughts, but convenience of Obsidan Sync are something that makes everything easy. I get this is in beta, and we will stick to git, but love what they are doing and looking forward to it.
Essentially Sync while you can emulate it on desktop, for mobile it is not good experience without Sync. And we want to have and record our thoughts with us all the time.
That will never happen; their only money-making method is to limit the iOS app to sell their cloud. Otherwise, the desktop is already free with your own vault folder.
They are trying their hardest to prevent users from using Google Drive or other services natively. While it is just a small option to add, it will make everyone drop their $4 cloud subscription.
I really love Obsidian and the direction they’re going with CLI. I think one of the most important things we can do while waiting for super intelligent assistants is capturing more of our thoughts and knowledge. Obsidian has been the tool I do that with.
corysama|1 day ago
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.
dSebastien|14 hours ago
manmal|1 day ago
mihaelm|1 day ago
neutralx|12 hours ago
I also used some plugins like bugwarrior to sync Jira/GitHub tickets locally. This is perfect when working on multiple projects/repos.
But I guess moving from Unix one tool for each job to swiss knife tool makes Obsidian overwhelming. Maybe it’s better to bridge these two tools in some way (plugins) rather than misuse Obsidian features.
giancarlostoro|1 day ago
jadbox|1 day ago
unknown|1 day ago
[deleted]
kepano|1 day ago
Langley|1 day ago
Definitely will be looking at the official Obsidian sync plan now.
armsaw|21 hours ago
Also, is the Obsidian CLI available when obsidian-headless is installed? Or is obsidian-headless only a sync client at this time?
lukasb|1 day ago
8cvor6j844qw_d6|1 day ago
also, thanks for the great product, bought the vip catalyst as a show of support.
zoul|10 hours ago
ewidar|22 hours ago
surgical_fire|1 day ago
Veen|1 day ago
Vaslo|23 hours ago
Mountain_Skies|1 day ago
fuckinpuppers|2 hours ago
I am still split using Evernote mostly because the experience feels a little more purpose built. I have some annoying usability issues with Obsidian. Control-N starts a new note not in the folder I’m in, but at the top level. Then I have to go move it by hand.
Having multiple vaults open winds up with multiple individual windows. A hack is to have one meta vault that encompasses all the sub vaults, but that itself is weird.
I would love to have an official multi-vault option. I have separate vaults so I can have work specific things or other things that aren’t exposing the fact I have other vaults tied to my account. However I have some systems I want all of my vaults available, but not multiple instances of obsidian running rather than one instance addressing all vaults - there is a workaround but it feels a too brittle and unofficial. The editor is a little rough comparatively too, even with a couple plugins to help, and I’m not even someone who cares to embed images, pdfs, other things directly in notes. Evernote is overkill and obsidian feels slightly off. Almost there. I’m sure it can be customized better, for example <li> items render well in Evernote but obsidian shows them as markdown and the switching between view, edit and realtime seems difficult to get right.
So I’m still paying for both… and I’d prefer not to. Obsidian feels like a better fit overall, I don’t care about all those Evernote features or AI or crazy rich experiences…
chrisweekly|11 minutes ago
in terms of embedded vaults, I agree there should be better native support -- but I was also delighted to discover Relay (https://relay.md) which supports directory-level (not just vault-level) sync.
eric-p7|1 day ago
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.
kepano|1 day ago
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.
krlx|14 hours ago
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 !
aerhardt|13 hours ago
sickcodebruh|15 hours ago
segphault|1 day ago
spondyl|23 hours ago
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.
shepherdjerred|3 hours ago
kelvinjps10|1 day ago
ravila4|1 day ago
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
thejdeep|1 day ago
system2|1 day ago
agentic_lawyer|6 hours ago
I'm so done with subscriptions for cloud based solutions and between livesync and syncthing, you've got a very robust set of options to use.
iCloud sync actually messed up every file I opened due to the lag between remote copy and local edits. iCloud would delete the last few edits whether I was in the file or after closing the file. Sometimes I would be typing something and I'd watch it delete what I just typed. It was a complete disaster.
shepherdjerred|2 hours ago
raybb|23 hours ago
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).
dimitri-vs|20 hours ago
dispersed|1 day ago
> 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.
jon-wood|1 day ago
shminge|17 hours ago
qwertox|1 day ago
deniskim|1 day ago
mtucker502|1 day ago
theptip|1 day ago
TheDong|1 day ago
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.
boomskats|1 day ago
articsputnik|1 day ago
- 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
wiether|1 day ago
hrmtst93837|9 hours ago
jatari|1 day ago
breakyerself|1 day ago
loufe|22 hours ago
scalemaxx|19 hours ago
sn0n|20 hours ago
Damn… I’m doing it all wrong!!
madmod|1 day ago
_neil|1 day ago
That said, I’ve switched one vault to git and have had no issues there.
js98|1 day ago
rubslopes|1 day ago
lolive|1 day ago
bshaughn|1 day ago
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.
abra0|1 day ago
Axsuul|15 hours ago
abrookewood|1 day ago
kepano|23 hours ago
And generally help the continued development of Obsidian so we can stay 100% user-supported.
https://stephango.com/vcware
johnorourke|5 hours ago
Subdivide8452|1 day ago
AbstractH24|23 hours ago
Along with sync that was the other blocker for me always.
dcchambers|22 hours ago
NamlchakKhandro|21 hours ago
RyanShook|1 day ago
beart|14 hours ago
I say mostly works, because there are a lot of "gotchas" and the configuration and set up are a bit intimidating for the clients (the server is simple to host).
I used it for a while and it was fine, but I decided the cost of a coffee per month is worth not having to maintain it, and I switched to paying for their sync service.
However, there is also a git sync plugin that works really nicely. But it is not a real-time sync and it is not supported on mobile (officially). I mainly use that as a way to keep long running backups of my vaults in a self-hosted gitea instance (the default paid tier only keeps one month of history).
us-merul|1 day ago
ILearnAsIGo|1 day ago
It does not work well for sharing to a mobile env but works great for desktop.
setopt|1 day ago
I no longer use Obsidian, so not sure what’s the best option for e.g. Linux <-> iOS sync except their service.
xRyen|1 day ago
cuechan|1 day ago
adilmoujahid|1 day ago
caycep0llard|1 day ago
TheGRS|1 day ago
desireco42|1 day ago
Essentially Sync while you can emulate it on desktop, for mobile it is not good experience without Sync. And we want to have and record our thoughts with us all the time.
aradox66|23 hours ago
sciencesama|1 day ago
abnry|1 day ago
jFriedensreich|23 hours ago
semiinfinitely|1 day ago
pdntspa|1 day ago
system2|1 day ago
They are trying their hardest to prevent users from using Google Drive or other services natively. While it is just a small option to add, it will make everyone drop their $4 cloud subscription.
bdhcuidbebe|1 day ago
[deleted]
abhitriloki|13 hours ago
[deleted]
cleak|22 hours ago