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 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/
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, ...
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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!
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 !
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 71.5 ms ] threadhttps://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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Also, is the Obsidian CLI available when obsidian-headless is installed? Or is obsidian-headless only a sync client at this time?
Because this is 99% going to be used by AI Agents =)
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.
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 !
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).
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