What is claude-obsidian?
claude-obsidian is a Claude Code plugin and a portable set of Agent Skills for personal knowledge management. It turns captured sources into linked Markdown pages, indexes and maps of content while preserving untouched copies of the original files. Researchers, students, writers and teams can query their accumulated notes with citations and explicitly save useful answers back into the vault.
The package runs locally against a separate, user-owned vault. Obsidian is optional, providing Graph view, Canvas boards and Bases tables rather than hosting the underlying knowledge. Installation requires Python and a compatible AI host, with Bash needed for setup scripts. Notes remain ordinary files, but content read through Claude Code is sent to Claude for processing.
Changes are previewed before application and pass through a transaction core with content-hash conflict checks and recovery journals. Read-only agents supply drafts and reports rather than writing directly. The core does not extract text from PDFs, EPUBs or images; semantic extraction, OCR and web fetching require separately configured tools.
claude-obsidian screenshots
Explore the interface. Open a screenshot to view it at full size.
Key capabilities
- Source preservation Keeps immutable, content-addressed copies of captured local files and records provenance for generated notes.
- Linked note generation Builds cited pages, indexes and maps of content connected to the existing vault.
- Vault questions Answers from existing notes without modifying files, with a separate explicit workflow for saving answers.
- Local retrieval Provides deterministic BM25 search with optional model-based reranking and explicit controls for remote processing.
- Vault maintenance Detects broken links, orphan pages, missing metadata and empty sections through read-only linting.
- Reviewed writes Applies approved changes through journaled transactions, rejects changed targets and supports recovery after interrupted writes.
Where claude-obsidian fits
claude-obsidian fits between source collection and ongoing research or project documentation. It can initialize a knowledge base or adopt an existing Obsidian vault without moving existing notes. Generic, LYT, PARA and Zettelkasten modes control where new notes are filed without reorganizing older content.
Before deployment, users should check AI-host data handling, extraction requirements, filesystem suitability and backup arrangements. Linux and macOS support vault writes; Windows requires WSL for mutation, while native Windows is limited to inspection, retrieval and previews. The local lock does not coordinate other devices or external editors, so synchronized vaults still need operational care.
Install
claude plugin marketplace add AgriciDaniel/claude-obsidian
claude plugin install claude-obsidian@agricidaniel-claude-obsidianReviews of claude-obsidian
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