create

name	create
description	Write a note into the current Obsidian vault. Use when content is already in hand and needs saving as a note — including when another skill (such as notes:clip) has fetched content and needs it filed. Handles frontmatter, folder placement, filename sanitising, and collision avoidance.

Create Note

Write a Markdown note into the Obsidian vault Claude Code is running in. This skill owns vault conventions — callers supply content, not layout.

Input

$ARGUMENTS:

• --title (required) — note title, also the filename
• --content (required) — Markdown body
• --folder (optional) — subfolder within the vault; defaults to the vault root
• --frontmatter (optional) — JSON object of extra frontmatter fields

Step 1 — Locate the vault

Walk up from the current working directory looking for a .obsidian/ directory. The first ancestor containing one is the vault root.

d="$PWD"
while [ "$d" != "/" ]; do
  [ -d "$d/.obsidian" ] && { echo "$d"; break; }
  d="$(dirname "$d")"
done

If no .obsidian/ is found, stop and say so — do not guess a path and do not write outside a vault. Ask the user to run from inside their vault or to name the target vault explicitly.

There is no config file. The vault is wherever the session is.

Step 2 — Read the vault's conventions

If the vault root has a CLAUDE.md, read it first and follow any conventions it states — folder layout, frontmatter fields, tagging, wikilink rules, daily-note behaviour. A vault's own documented conventions override the defaults below.

Reading it is not optional and neither is acting on it. Delegation here has silently failed before: a clipping was written correctly and its daily-note link was never added, because "follow any conventions it states" was treated as advisory. Steps 3a and 3b make the two that are almost always stated explicit.

Step 3 — Build the note

Filename — from the title, with / \ : * ? " < > | replaced by -, and whitespace trimmed. If the file already exists, append 2, 3, … rather than overwriting.

Frontmatter — always include title and created (today, YYYY-MM-DD), then merge in anything from --frontmatter. Preserve the caller's values on conflict.

Folder — --folder if given, else the vault root. Create the folder if it does not exist.

Links in the body — if the vault documents an entity-linking rule (stock tickers as [[$AAPL]], people as [[@Name]], dates as [[YYYY-MM-DD]]), apply it to the content you were handed. The caller supplies text; converting bare mentions into the vault's link syntax is this skill's job, because this skill is the one that read the conventions.

Step 4 — Write the file

Step 5 — Link it into today's daily note

Most vaults want every new note discoverable from the day it was made. Unless the vault's CLAUDE.md says otherwise:

1. Find today's daily note — commonly Daily Notes/YYYY-MM-DD.md. Match the vault's actual folder and date format; do not assume.
2. Append a link to the new note: - [[Note Title]].
3. If the daily note does not exist, create it from the vault's daily-note template if there is one.

Step 6 — Verify, then report

Check before claiming. Every [[wikilink]] written should resolve to a real file, or be a deliberate stub the vault's conventions call for. Escaped pipes in tables ([[Target\|Alias]]) produce false "broken" hits — strip the trailing backslash before comparing. Every embedded image path should exist on disk.

Say what happened to the daily note either way — "linked into Daily Notes/2026-08-24.md", or that you did not and why. Never leave the caller to assume it happened.

Then print the path as the final line in machine-parseable form so callers can chain on it:

OUTPUT_FILE:/absolute/path/to/vault/Folder/Note Title.md

Print a human-readable confirmation before that line if useful, but the OUTPUT_FILE: line must be last.

Errors

• No vault found — stop, explain, do not write.
• Missing --title or --content — stop and say which.
• Folder missing — create it.
• File exists — never overwrite; suffix the name.