I've been using iCloud to sync Obsidian, and have consistently run into the problem that iCloud file container access needs full disk permissions that I don't want to give the agent (or Ghostty). Does everybody use Obsidian's paid sync instead or what? Or SyncThing?
I used to use SyncThing, then Dropbox, then iCloud. But then I just caved and paid for Obsidian Sync and it is the best money spent aside from Claude. I don't have to tinker with weird settings anymore or deal with sync issues, it just works.
I can't wonder if that's by design to make it hard for a plugin to have it's own sync mechanism. Definitely not proof of this that I know of, but a thought.
There can't be a will from the devs to make it hard to sync.
It's just that unlike git or Dropbox or whatever, that are just generic "syncing" tools, Obsidian Sync has been built to provide the best experience with Obsidian.
I use this and a self-hosted couchdb. So far it seems to be good, but I haven't spent more than a few hours with it yet. I do have what appears to be a working setup on ios, macos, and linux. Obsidian's large number of plugins and control surfaces is a bit hazardous.
Okay, so my command line fu is not what it perhaps should be, but if I could use obsidian without the bloated app, I'd be even more in love.
How would I be able to search obsidian links from the command line?
Like, to travel between notes in the app of course I can just click on connecting links or search, but I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do that in a cli.
Is there some handy way to search the current folder and subfolders for text in a file with regex? Like some kind of >find term for all of my [[term]] entries in markdown files ?
Are there plans to support scoped token permissions (specific folders or even specific notes)? I'd love to try setting up something that automatically updates a specific Obsidian note on a state change or cronjob, but I'd want to avoid giving access to the rest of the vault.
also, thanks for the great product, bought the vip catalyst as a show of support.
Thanks for your support! Sync is end-to-end encrypted so the server doesn't know about specific paths in your vault. You would have to set those permissions at the filesystem level, or with the tool you're using.
No question. Just wanted to drop by and say Obsidian is actually pretty cool. An absolute joy to use, and I only wish I learned about it earlier than I did.
It's a bit trickier than it seems because a lot of Obsidian configuration and app functionality is vault-specific. E.g. what theme should be used? What plugins should be available? Does autocomplete for [[links]] or properties do anything? Etc.
VSCode opens single files outside of projects. What do they do? Personally I wouldn’t mind if it just defaulted to the settings of the last-used vault.
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
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.
Yes, but just because it has version history doesn't mean it is closer to git than to Postgres. You can also do versioning in Postgres. You can even search more easily in the history.
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?
I had this happen a bunch when I was using iCloud sync on multiple devices. I think it was mostly solved by setting the directory to “keep downloaded” (right click on it in finder and it’s the second option).
That said, I’ve switched one vault to git and have had no issues there.
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/
This reply does not address parents question at all.
A key feature of Obsidian is that it stores your notes in an open folder structure on your file system.
A very valid question is whether there are benefits to using a special note sync application rather than a standard file system sync application, and if so, what those benefits are.
iOS makes it painful to use third-party sync protocols and servers, like syncthing can't run in the background, a git sync service can't run in the background, only iCloud gets to run in the background.... and whatever sync protocol the app itself has blessed so it can run immediately on opening the app.
As such, on iOS the native sync is the only one that works cleanly and seamlessly, and so you're incentivized to pay for it.
There was a little while, when dropbox was big, where it seemed like the future of computing would be "your data is in the cloud, and every app you use can share that data, and those two things are independent integrated through some common filesystem layer".
And then it ended up that no, your data's in a cloud-per-service, where your emails live in googles cloud, your documents in microsoft 365's cloud, your images in "adobe creative cloud"'s cloud, your photos in Apple's cloud, your passwords in 1Password's cloud, and your knowledgebase in Obsidian's cloud.
The dream of the filesystem API being able to expand to clouds, of being able to choose dropbox or google or apple as the owner of your data, and other applications seamlessly integrating with any of them, it died with apple making it impossible to offer any sort of generic filesystem API or even background sync.
And so, that's why you'd use obsidian sync over git, because you're cursed with using a phone.
Unless you're saying "why not pay for obsidian sync, but then sync it into a git repo in CI and commit there to see the diffs", not "why not use git as the underlying sync protocol", in which case ignore everything I wrote, you totally could do that.
If you have automation that dumps things int your vault, that you built with their new CLI (which lets you create/tag docs etc. without running the full electron app), I guess this lets you sync those changes and propagate them to all of your obsidian sync clients also without having to open aforementioned full electron app.
Only in 2nd-brain mythology, which holds that you'll discover connections between your notes that you didn't realize was there. I think it started as eye candy to confuse prospective users considering Roam Notes. They later did something similar with their "Canvas" feature. So, these are features you get with their lack of coherent vision, rather than basic usability and a safe plugin ecosystem, neither of which Obsidian plans to deliver..
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!
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.
https://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 like that I can have some vaults that sync to both my personal and work laptops and other vaults that only sync to one or the other.
It’s awfully convenient without any vendor lock in since I can just take my plain markdown files and leave anytime.
Its one of the few subscriptions where it actually feels like money well spent
There can't be a will from the devs to make it hard to sync.
It's just that unlike git or Dropbox or whatever, that are just generic "syncing" tools, Obsidian Sync has been built to provide the best experience with Obsidian.
How would I be able to search obsidian links from the command line?
Like, to travel between notes in the app of course I can just click on connecting links or search, but I wouldn't have the faintest idea how to do that in a cli.
Is there some handy way to search the current folder and subfolders for text in a file with regex? Like some kind of >find term for all of my [[term]] entries in markdown files ?
https://help.obsidian.md/cli
also, thanks for the great product, bought the vip catalyst as a show of support.
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.
It's a bit trickier than it seems because a lot of Obsidian configuration and app functionality is vault-specific. E.g. what theme should be used? What plugins should be available? Does autocomplete for [[links]] or properties do anything? Etc.
> 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.
That said, I’ve switched one vault to git and have had no issues there.
- Built-in version history
- Cross-platform support, especially on mobile
- Fine-grained control (e.g. different theme/plugins/settings per device)
- Sharing your vaults with other users
Obsidian is a note and wiki syncing system.
You should use an obsidian syncing system if you want to sync notes and wikis. You should use a file syncing system if you want to sync files.
A key feature of Obsidian is that it stores your notes in an open folder structure on your file system.
A very valid question is whether there are benefits to using a special note sync application rather than a standard file system sync application, and if so, what those benefits are.
As such, on iOS the native sync is the only one that works cleanly and seamlessly, and so you're incentivized to pay for it.
There was a little while, when dropbox was big, where it seemed like the future of computing would be "your data is in the cloud, and every app you use can share that data, and those two things are independent integrated through some common filesystem layer".
And then it ended up that no, your data's in a cloud-per-service, where your emails live in googles cloud, your documents in microsoft 365's cloud, your images in "adobe creative cloud"'s cloud, your photos in Apple's cloud, your passwords in 1Password's cloud, and your knowledgebase in Obsidian's cloud.
The dream of the filesystem API being able to expand to clouds, of being able to choose dropbox or google or apple as the owner of your data, and other applications seamlessly integrating with any of them, it died with apple making it impossible to offer any sort of generic filesystem API or even background sync.
And so, that's why you'd use obsidian sync over git, because you're cursed with using a phone.
Unless you're saying "why not pay for obsidian sync, but then sync it into a git repo in CI and commit there to see the diffs", not "why not use git as the underlying sync protocol", in which case ignore everything I wrote, you totally could do that.
- Automate remote backups
- Automate publishing a website
- Give agentic tools access to a vault without access to your full computer
- Sync a shared team vault to a server that feeds other tools
- Run scheduled automations e.g. aggregate daily notes into weekly summaries, auto-tag, etc
...all while having the speed, privacy, customizability, end-to-end encryption of Obsidian Sync.
[1]: https://x.com/kepano/status/2027485552451432936
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.