| name | obsidian-search |
| description | Search past Claude session logs and captures in the Obsidian vault. Use when someone says "find my notes about X", "search obsidian", "what did I log about X", "find that capture", "look up session from last week", "search my Claude notes". Returns matching entries with excerpts and wikilink references. Read-only.
|
Obsidian Search
Search everything Claude has logged in your vault. Results are scoped to the
current project by default — pass --global (or ask "search all projects") to
search the entire vault.
Step 1 — Check configuration
Read OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH from the environment:
- Bash:
bash -c 'echo $OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH'
- PowerShell:
$env:OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH
If empty, stop and tell the user:
"OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH is not set. Re-run install.sh and provide your vault
path when prompted, or add it manually to ~/.claude/settings.json under
the env key."
Also read:
OBSIDIAN_PROJECTS_FOLDER (empty string if unset)CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR (or fall back to current working directory)
Step 2 — Determine search scope
If the user passed --global or asked to search "all projects" / "everywhere":
- Search scope:
<OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH>/Claude/**/*.md
- If
OBSIDIAN_PROJECTS_FOLDER is set, also include:
<OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH>/<OBSIDIAN_PROJECTS_FOLDER>/**/*.md
Default (project-first):
- Compute
project_slug: basename of CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR (or cwd), lowercase,
non-alphanumeric chars replaced with hyphens, max 30 characters.
- Use
OBSIDIAN_PROJECTS_FOLDER if set, otherwise default to Claude/Projects.
- Search
<OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH>/<effective_folder>/<project_slug>/**/*.md
If the project folder does not exist or returns no results, automatically fall
through to the global scope and note that you expanded the search.
Step 3 — Get search term
If the user has not already provided a search term, ask:
"What are you looking for?"
Step 4 — Search
Use the Grep tool on the determined scope for the search term (case-insensitive).
For each matching file, read 3–5 lines of context around the match.
If there are more than 10 matching files, sort by most recently modified and
show only the top 10.
Step 5 — Present results
For each match, show:
- Wikilink — relative to the vault root, no
.md extension, forward slashes:
[[Projects/agent-pack/sessions/2026-05-14-1430-agent-pack]]
- Excerpt — one line of match context
- Type —
session, capture, daily, or memory-snapshot
If no matches are found in the project scope, try the global scope automatically.
If no matches found globally, say:
"No results found for '' in your Claude notes. Try a broader term, or
note that session logs are written automatically when Claude Code stops (also
/obsidian-recap and /obsidian-capture write notes you can search)."
Step 6 — Open best match (optional)
If OBSIDIAN_CLI_MODE is "rest-api" and there are results, offer to open
the best match in Obsidian:
"Would you like me to open the top result in Obsidian?"
If yes, compute the vault-relative path (forward slashes, URL-encoded), then call:
curl -sk "https://127.0.0.1:${OBSIDIAN_REST_API_PORT:-27124}/open/<url-encoded-vault-relative-path>"
Gotchas
- Read-only. Never modify any vault files.
- Wikilinks must be relative to the vault root — strip the
OBSIDIAN_VAULT_PATH
prefix, convert backslashes to forward slashes, and remove the .md extension.
- If there are many matches (more than 10), show the 10 most recently modified
files first.
- Memory snapshot files (
memory-snapshot.md) can also contain useful context —
include them in search results.
