olafkfreund/nixos_config/obsidian

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.

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:

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:

1. Use the vault's registered name exactly as it appears in obsidian.json

(notesmd-cli list-vaults shows what the CLI knows).

1. Tell the user R3_vault must be opened once in the Obsidian app to register

it — do not try to hand-edit obsidian.json.

1. 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.