"and if Anthropic decides to source me in an LLM response, I’ll be as delighted as when Google does."
That's so funny because I'm here because Claude cited your article when I asked it about the advantages of the Claudian plugin vs. simply having Claude Code in the Obsidian vault folder.
Claude's answer: "One alternative worth mentioning: the Terminal plugin by polyipseity — it just embeds a real terminal in Obsidian's sidebar, and you run claude in it. That gets you the "don't leave the app" benefit without the plugin-specific limitations. That's actually what the Eleanor Konik post I found landed on after comparing both."
It's really a game changer to save time to take keyword notes and get your sections written based on what files you have modified to do follow up of your progress and so on, just make sure you got it source version controlled in case it goes bananas.
Next challenge is really to make it let you free your time and go over your most important things and remind you to do it better in time instead.
“You can pry my em-dashes out of my cold dead hands”
👏 Good on ya – long live em! 🥳
Loved the article too! I’m in the midst of a debate with myself to move from ChatGpt + Notion to – wait for it – Claude + Obsidian.
The only difference is I do have written stuff that I want to keep private, so I’m looking to set up two instances of Claude – one for private local use, and one for general internet queries.
Glad you enjoyed the article! I think ChatGPT is a fine tool for what it's good at, but for _writing_ Opus is clearly superior. Similarly, Notion is fantastic for collaboration, but I prefer Obsidian when I want something fast I don't need to share with a team.
As far as local LLMs and sandboxing, you're already ahead of me! The only local LLM I have is for voice-to-text. I use OpenWhispr and it saves me a bit of time when I've got a lot to say and I know exactly what I want to say and could say it faster than typing, which is relatively rare, but I did actually end up switching to voice for the last part of this comment ;)
Thank you for writing this! I've been wanting to play around with AI + Obsidian for a while now, but haven't really had the time to sit down and tinker.
I love hearing about both what real life things you've done with it and your philosophy on where AI fits in your personal workflow.
Love this, have been using Claude Code with Obsidian excessively. I generally just open up a terminal fullscreen and in the vault directory and get to work that way because I don't want to give Claude any window space in Obsidian. Plan mode is absolutely a game changer for a lot of big sweeping changes as well, so highly recommend enabling that.
MCP servers are great *and* they eat up context so beware.
My latest love is using the Claude Chrome plugin (using it with Brave though because I like that alternative), and having it do research for me has been another game changer. All of that research gets dumped back into Obsidian and linked off in the end.
And because I wrote the original voicenotes sync plugin (the VoiceNotes team has recently taken over maintenance), I have another command which is just /process-voicenotes and it reads the note, pulls out relevant TaskNotes, updates any notes about People, or projects that make sense and we have a little discussion.
how big is the monitor? I've taken to wanting Claude Code to help with Obsidian, or launching a skill to do some deep research on a person in LinkedIn or on the web somewhere, and I can give it more skills and access to chrome and other things that I think might get a little lost in the Obsidian interface?
Or maybe I just like the terminal (Ghostty) a lot :)
It uses xterm.js under the hood, and manages getting Claude Code up and running in the terminal for you. It's still beta (install with BRAT), and still doesn't integrate operationally with Claude Code (as the official Claude Code VS Code extension does, for instance), but as you've found, terminal mode works pretty well with Claude Code and Obsidian.
Monitor the repo home page while it's in beta; Mac and Linux are supported, but Windows is experimental, and after a quick test, the input was currently too slow to be practical.
If you're on Mac or Linux, I don't think you need to switch if polyipseity's Terminal plugin is working for you, but as other readers want to try Claude Code in Obsidian, they may want to check out Obsidian Claude Sidebar.
"and if Anthropic decides to source me in an LLM response, I’ll be as delighted as when Google does."
That's so funny because I'm here because Claude cited your article when I asked it about the advantages of the Claudian plugin vs. simply having Claude Code in the Obsidian vault folder.
Claude's answer: "One alternative worth mentioning: the Terminal plugin by polyipseity — it just embeds a real terminal in Obsidian's sidebar, and you run claude in it. That gets you the "don't leave the app" benefit without the plugin-specific limitations. That's actually what the Eleanor Konik post I found landed on after comparing both."
Oh man, that's surreal and awesome, thank you for telling me! Also: Claude is totally right, the terminal plugin gets you everything you need imo.
It's really a game changer to save time to take keyword notes and get your sections written based on what files you have modified to do follow up of your progress and so on, just make sure you got it source version controlled in case it goes bananas.
Next challenge is really to make it let you free your time and go over your most important things and remind you to do it better in time instead.
I would argue that the real trick is to figure out what is really important to you 😅 harder than it sounds!
Wealth loops, elevated awareness, transformations for better longevity and work with very inspirational and driven leaders and entrepreneurs :)
Thanx. Going to install claude ... excited to see the results.
I hope it helps! I've found it to be a genuinely useful tool :)
“You can pry my em-dashes out of my cold dead hands”
👏 Good on ya – long live em! 🥳
Loved the article too! I’m in the midst of a debate with myself to move from ChatGpt + Notion to – wait for it – Claude + Obsidian.
The only difference is I do have written stuff that I want to keep private, so I’m looking to set up two instances of Claude – one for private local use, and one for general internet queries.
Glad you enjoyed the article! I think ChatGPT is a fine tool for what it's good at, but for _writing_ Opus is clearly superior. Similarly, Notion is fantastic for collaboration, but I prefer Obsidian when I want something fast I don't need to share with a team.
As far as local LLMs and sandboxing, you're already ahead of me! The only local LLM I have is for voice-to-text. I use OpenWhispr and it saves me a bit of time when I've got a lot to say and I know exactly what I want to say and could say it faster than typing, which is relatively rare, but I did actually end up switching to voice for the last part of this comment ;)
Thank you for writing this! I've been wanting to play around with AI + Obsidian for a while now, but haven't really had the time to sit down and tinker.
I love hearing about both what real life things you've done with it and your philosophy on where AI fits in your personal workflow.
It's definitely worth playing with if you can carve out a little time. My new index files alone are worth the effort.
Thank you so much
Love this, have been using Claude Code with Obsidian excessively. I generally just open up a terminal fullscreen and in the vault directory and get to work that way because I don't want to give Claude any window space in Obsidian. Plan mode is absolutely a game changer for a lot of big sweeping changes as well, so highly recommend enabling that.
MCP servers are great *and* they eat up context so beware.
My latest love is using the Claude Chrome plugin (using it with Brave though because I like that alternative), and having it do research for me has been another game changer. All of that research gets dumped back into Obsidian and linked off in the end.
And because I wrote the original voicenotes sync plugin (the VoiceNotes team has recently taken over maintenance), I have another command which is just /process-voicenotes and it reads the note, pulls out relevant TaskNotes, updates any notes about People, or projects that make sense and we have a little discussion.
Out of curiosity why don't you want to give Obsidian window space? I personally have a huge monitor so I love having the embedded terminal.
how big is the monitor? I've taken to wanting Claude Code to help with Obsidian, or launching a skill to do some deep research on a person in LinkedIn or on the web somewhere, and I can give it more skills and access to chrome and other things that I think might get a little lost in the Obsidian interface?
Or maybe I just like the terminal (Ghostty) a lot :)
I have a Dell UltraSharp 43 4K USB-C Hub Monitor, heh. I use iterm when I want to work purely in the terminal, it just depends on what I'm doing.
Yeah I live in the terminal all day so easier 43 is a BEAST!
Yeah I used to have three monitors and now I just have this thing + the laptop screen and it's really nice in this time of apps with so many panels
I still have 2 27s and the laptop screen. That looks intense and awesome though, one day maybe
Awesome as always!
I've been using and showing people Claude Code for knowledge work. It's really great with Obsidian and Git, so I'm right there with you.
A quick note, with Obsidian I'm using Obsidian Claude Sidebar, https://github.com/derek-larson14/obsidian-claude-sidebar
It uses xterm.js under the hood, and manages getting Claude Code up and running in the terminal for you. It's still beta (install with BRAT), and still doesn't integrate operationally with Claude Code (as the official Claude Code VS Code extension does, for instance), but as you've found, terminal mode works pretty well with Claude Code and Obsidian.
Monitor the repo home page while it's in beta; Mac and Linux are supported, but Windows is experimental, and after a quick test, the input was currently too slow to be practical.
If you're on Mac or Linux, I don't think you need to switch if polyipseity's Terminal plugin is working for you, but as other readers want to try Claude Code in Obsidian, they may want to check out Obsidian Claude Sidebar.
Thanks for the tip! There have definitely been some Windows folks struggling with the terminal, it turns out 😅 I'll pass your comment along to them!
And thank you for the kind words 🙏