| name | obsidian |
| description | Read, write, search and reorganise notes in the local Obsidian vaults. Use for anything touching ~/Documents/R3_vault, ~/Documents/Synechron or ~/Documents/My_Obsidian_Vault/Privat — finding notes, adding or editing content, renaming/moving notes without breaking links, and daily notes. Triggers on "my notes", "my vault", "Obsidian", "write this up in my notes", or a request to look something up in personal documentation. |
Obsidian vaults
Three vaults, ~2950 notes. They are plain Markdown directories, so Read,
Write, Edit, Grep and Glob are the primary tools — use them directly.
The CLI below exists for the two things file tools cannot do safely.
| Vault | Path | Notes | Registered in Obsidian? |
|---|
| R3 | ~/Documents/R3_vault | 872 | No |
| Work | ~/Documents/Synechron | 996 | Yes |
| Private | ~/Documents/My_Obsidian_Vault/Privat | 1085 | Yes |
Ask which vault if the request is ambiguous. Content hints: Synechron holds
work/Jira/Confluence material and a NixOS/ folder; Privat holds AI/,
Linux/, Nixos/, CV/ and the only Daily Notes/ folder; R3 holds
Chats/, Context/, GitHub/, Interview/.
Conventions that actually hold here
These were measured across the real vaults, not assumed. Do not impose
conventions the vaults do not use.
- Links are mostly standard Markdown, not wikilinks. 2039
[text](file.md)
vs 357 [[wikilink]]. Match whatever the file you are editing already uses;
do not convert one style to the other.
- Frontmatter is rare — about 5% of notes have any, and most of what exists
is plugin residue (
sticker, copilot-command-*) or Kubernetes manifests
(apiVersion/kind/spec). Do not add YAML frontmatter to a note that
has none. Only touch frontmatter if the note already has it or the user asks.
- No tag taxonomy.
#word occurrences are markdown headings and shell
comments, not Obsidian tags. Do not invent tags.
- Filenames are mostly descriptive with no spaces and no date prefix.
Follow the naming of sibling files in the target folder.
.obsidian/ is app state — never edit it.
Normal work: just use the file tools
- Find a note:
Glob **/*keyword*.md, or Grep for content
- Read:
Read
- Create:
Write (place it beside similar notes; match their heading style)
- Edit:
Edit
Nothing about a vault makes these unsafe. Prefer them.
Use notesmd-cli for these two things only
Installed as notesmd-cli, with ob as a short alias (upstream
renamed the binary; the repo is still called obsidian-cli).
Do not reach for obsidian-cli — that name belongs to a different tool
bundled inside pkgs.obsidian, which drives the running desktop app and
currently fails on NixOS with "unable to find Obsidian". Likewise obs is OBS
Studio.
1. Renaming or moving a note
This is the one operation that is genuinely unsafe by hand: a rename must
rewrite every reference across ~2950 files, including heading anchors.
notesmd-cli move --vault Synechron "Old Note Name" "New Note Name"
Verified behaviour:
| Before | After |
|---|
[[Old]] | [[New]] |
[Old](Old.md) | [Old](New.md) — target rewritten, display text kept |
[[Old#Heading]] | [[New#Heading]] |
Display text is deliberately preserved; if the user wants it renamed too, that
is a separate Edit.
Never do a rename with mv + sed. It misses heading anchors, block refs
and aliases, and corrupts links silently.
2. Daily notes
notesmd-cli daily --vault Privat
Only the Privat vault has a Daily Notes/ folder. For the others, create a
dated note by hand in a sensible location.
Constraint: move needs the vault registered with Obsidian
move reads ~/.config/obsidian/obsidian.json, not just the CLI's own
registry. R3_vault is not in it, so move fails there with:
Vault not found in Obsidian config file. Please ensure vault has been set up in Obsidian.
Options when that happens, in order of preference:
- Use the vault's registered name exactly as it appears in
obsidian.json
(notesmd-cli list-vaults shows what the CLI knows).
- Tell the user R3_vault must be opened once in the Obsidian app to register
it — do not try to hand-edit
obsidian.json.
- Do the rename manually only if the user accepts the link-breakage risk, and
say so explicitly first.
Other subcommands
create, delete, open, print, search, search-content, frontmatter,
list, list-vaults, add-vault, remove-vault, set-default-vault.
Most duplicate what the file tools already do better in this context —
search-content is a plain substring search, so Grep is usually a better
choice. open launches the desktop app and should only be used when the user
asks to see a note in Obsidian.
Safety
- Renames touch many files at once. State which vault and which note before
running
move.
- Never bulk-rewrite links with
sed across a vault.
- Deleting notes: prefer confirming with the user;
delete is not reversible
from here and these vaults hold years of work.
