General-purpose Obsidian vault skill — use this whenever the user wants to do anything with their vault or personal notes. Covers reading notes by name, searching vault content, creating new notes, appending to existing ones, checking backlinks, and working with daily notes. Trigger immediately on phrases like: "look up my note on X", "add this to my vault", "what does my note say about Y", "find notes about Z", "log this to my vault", "update my daily note", "create a note for...", "what links to X", "search my vault for...", "show me what I know about...", "check my notes on...", or any time the user mentions Obsidian, their vault, or personal notes. If the user is asking about something they might have written down, reach for this skill first.
Use the obsidian CLI to interact with the user's Obsidian vault. The vault is called Personal.
Run all commands via bash. Always use single quotes for argument values — double quotes cause a known parser issue and will silently fail.
# Read a note by its wikilink name (no path, no .md extension)
obsidian read file='Note Name'
# Search the vault
obsidian search query='search term' limit=10
# Create a new note (silent suppresses auto-open in Obsidian)
obsidian create name='Note Name' content='# Title\n\nContent here' silent
# Append to an existing note
obsidian append file='Note Name' content='New content to add'
# Get everything that links to a note
obsidian backlinks file='Note Name'
# Read today's daily note (to get its name/path)
obsidian daily:read
# Append to the daily note: read it first to get the note name, then use append
# daily:append is unreliable — use append file='...' with the actual note name instead
obsidian append file='2026-04-16' content='Entry text'
# List all tags or open tasks across the vault
obsidian tags
obsidian tasks
Obsidian must be running for any CLI command to work. If you get a connection error, ask the user to open Obsidian first.
The user's phrasing is often loose — your job is to figure out which operation(s) to run.
Reading a specific note: If the user gives you a note name or enough context to guess it, try obsidian read directly. If the exact name is unclear, search first then read the best match.
Searching: When the user wants to find notes about a topic, or isn't sure which note they mean, search with a short keyword query. Return the matching paths and briefly describe what each is, then offer to read any of them.
Logging / capturing: When the user wants to save something new ("log this", "capture this idea", "add a note about X"), use obsidian create with a clear, descriptive note name — think about how they'd search for it later.
Updating an existing note: When the user wants to add to something they already have, find it with search if needed, then obsidian append. Don't overwrite with create unless they explicitly ask to replace the note.
Daily note: Requests like "log to today", "add this to my daily", or "what's in my daily note" → first run obsidian daily:read to get today's note name, then use obsidian append file='<note-name>' content='...' to add to it. The daily:append command is unreliable and should be avoided.
Tracing connections: "What links to X" or "what references this note" → obsidian backlinks file='Note Name'.
When creating notes, use title case and be descriptive. Good names are searchable: Gemma CLI Quoting Bug, Developer Advocacy 2026 OKRs, CatalystForms Launch Checklist. Avoid generic names like Ideas or Notes.
After any create or append operation, commit the change:
VAULT="$HOME/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/Personal"
git -C "$VAULT" add -A && git -C "$VAULT" commit -m "docs: [brief description of what was written]"
Use conventional commit style. Examples:
docs: log session entry 14:32docs: write today's focus to 2026-04-17 daily notedocs: append EOD audit to 2026-04-17docs: create note Gemma CLI Quoting Bug