obsidian

Obsidian

Manage Obsidian vaults via direct markdown file access and the obsidian-cli tool. Obsidian vaults are plain markdown files — most operations work without any special CLI.

Prerequisites

Option 1: Direct file access (no install needed) Obsidian vaults are directories of .md files. Read/write them directly with Bash.

Option 2: obsidian-cli for richer operations:

npm install -g obsidian-cli

Or using the community obsidian-export tool:

cargo install obsidian-export

Configure vault path:

export OBSIDIAN_VAULT="$HOME/Documents/ObsidianVault"

Add to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc for persistence.

Commands

Direct File Operations (no CLI needed)

Operation	Command
List all notes	`find "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT" -name "*.md" -type f`
Search note content	`grep -r "<query>" "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT" --include="*.md" -l`
Read a note	`cat "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT/<Note Name>.md"`
Create a note	Write to `"$OBSIDIAN_VAULT/<Note Name>.md"`
Append to note	`echo "\n<content>" >> "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT/<Note Name>.md"`
List by folder	`ls "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT/<Folder>/"`

Wikilinks (Obsidian's link format)

[[Note Name]]                  ← Link to another note
[[Note Name|Display Text]]     ← Link with custom text
[[Note Name#Heading]]          ← Link to a heading

Frontmatter (YAML metadata)

---
tags: [project, meeting]
date: 2026-03-21
aliases: [alternative name]
---

Daily Notes

# Create or open today's daily note
TODAY=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
NOTE_PATH="$OBSIDIAN_VAULT/Daily Notes/$TODAY.md"

Usage Examples

Create a new note with frontmatter:

cat > "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT/Projects/New Idea.md" << 'EOF'
---
tags: [idea, project]
date: 2026-03-21
---

# New Idea

## Summary
Brief description here.

## Links
- [[Related Note]]
EOF

Search vault for a topic:

grep -r "machine learning" "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT" --include="*.md" -l

Append to an existing note:

echo "\n\n## Update 2026-03-21\nNew information here." >> "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT/Projects/New Idea.md"

Find all notes tagged with "meeting":

grep -r "tags:.*meeting" "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT" --include="*.md" -l

List all notes in a folder:

ls "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT/Projects/"

Rules

Always check that OBSIDIAN_VAULT is set: [ -z "$OBSIDIAN_VAULT" ] && echo "Not configured"
If not set, ask the user for their vault path and suggest adding it to ~/.zshrc
Prefer direct file access over CLI tools for simple read/write operations
When creating notes, always use proper Markdown formatting with YAML frontmatter for tags/metadata
When reading long notes (> 100 lines), display only the first 50 lines and save full content to workspace/
Use Obsidian wikilink syntax [[Note Name]] for internal links, not regular markdown links
Preserve existing frontmatter when appending to notes — read the file first
File names should match Obsidian conventions: avoid special characters except - and _
Keep responses concise: confirm file path and action in 1-2 lines