Obsiduous

Your whole Obsidian vault, in the bar, answered from memory.

Obsiduous keeps your notes resident in RAM, so search answers every keystroke instead of walking the filesystem again for each letter.

What it does

• Indexes the whole vault once, in a single background process shared by every bar on every monitor, and refreshes only the notes that changed.
• Ranks the way you meant it. Exact matches in a title, then a path, then the body; a fuzzy subsequence match (pfsnb finds pfSense Networking Bible) is offered underneath, never above, a genuine hit.
• Learns what you open. Notes you return to rise in the ranking, with a 30-day half-life so last month's obsession fades on its own.
• Filters: tag:project, path:Journal, in:daily, combined with text.
• Previews the note beside the results, so reading four lines does not mean starting Obsidian.
• Captures a thought into today's daily note, or as a new note. Both follow the vault's own Obsidian settings — the Daily Notes folder and date format, and the new-note location — rather than inventing a folder of their own.
• Finds your vaults by itself, from Obsidian's own configuration, including the registered vault name that obsidian:// links need.
• Switches vault from the search field. Type vault: for the list, with note counts, and press Enter.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/weedwhitesandwine/obsiduous.git --enable

Enabling it puts the icon in the bar. Move it to a section you prefer with:

omarchy bar move io.github.weedwhitesandwine.obsiduous --section right

Using it

Click the bar icon (or press its hotkey) and start typing.

Vaults are listed under the gear icon, read from Obsidian's own config. The choice is remembered in ~/.local/state/omarchy/obsiduous/settings.json.

Query filters

tag:, path: and in: combine with each other and with free text.

Several vaults

One vault is indexed at a time, and switching between them happens in the search field rather than in settings, because realising you are in the wrong vault happens mid-search.

Type vault: to replace the results with the list of vaults Obsidian knows about, each with its note count and the current one marked. Keep typing to filter the list by name, press Enter to switch, or Escape to leave the switcher. vault: has to start the query, so whatever you were searching for is already gone by the time the list appears; Escape clears the field rather than restoring it. The vault you switch to is indexed immediately — a vault of a few thousand notes takes well under a second — and the field is left empty ready for the new one.

A vault whose folder no longer exists is listed as missing and cannot be selected. A vault set by hand, rather than through Obsidian, appears in the list too.

Notes you open are ranked per vault, so returning to Inbox.md in one vault does not push a differently-owned Inbox.md up the list in another.

Capturing a note

Ctrl+N, or the + in the panel, opens a small editor with three buttons.

Save as daily note appends - **HH:MM** what you typed to today's daily note, creating it if it does not exist yet, using the folder and date format from the vault's own .obsidian/daily-notes.json.

Save as note writes a new Markdown file wherever Obsidian is configured to put new notes — its newFileLocation setting, so the vault root for most people, or the folder you nominated. It is named for the title you gave it, or a timestamp if you gave none, and an existing file is never overwritten.

Appending is the normal case and leaves the file exactly as it was apart from the line added at the end. When today's daily note does not exist yet, Obsiduous creates it with a date heading and your line.

If you use a daily-note template, let Obsidian make the file — open today's daily note there once, and capture into it afterwards. Obsiduous deliberately does not run templates: a Templater template is arbitrary JavaScript, and a plugin that executed half of one would hand you a file that looked right and was not.

A hotkey

Settings, under HOTKEY: click the field and press the combination you want — one or more of SUPER, CTRL, ALT, SHIFT and one other key — then press Bind. The field records what you press rather than asking you to spell it out.

Nothing is suggested for you, because any combination this plugin picked would sooner or later be one you had already bound to something else. A combination Hyprland already uses is intercepted before it reaches the panel, so nothing appears when you press it — which is a reliable way of telling that a key is taken. hyprctl binds lists them all.

The hotkey is written as a marked block in ~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua:

-- >>> obsiduous hotkey (managed by Obsiduous settings — change it there)
-- If Obsiduous has been uninstalled these lines do nothing: delete them.
o.bind("SUPER + ALT + N", "Obsiduous", "omarchy-shell shell toggle io.github.weedwhitesandwine.obsiduous")
-- <<< obsiduous hotkey

Only that block is ever replaced or removed, and only when you press Bind or Clear. If the two markers are not a matched pair — a hand edit, a merge conflict in a dotfiles repository — the file is left exactly as it is and the reason is printed, rather than guessing where the block ended.

A hotkey is modifiers plus one key. Anything else is refused rather than escaped, both in the settings card and again in the script, because the value ends up inside a Lua string. The same script can be run directly:

bash obsiduous-ctl.sh bind "SUPER + ALT + N"
bash obsiduous-ctl.sh unbind

What it writes, and when

These are every path Obsiduous can write, and nothing else is touched. The last two are only reachable by pressing a button in settings.

Every one of those writes works the same way: the destination directory is checked to be yours and not group- or world-writable, a stage file is created under a random name in that same directory — never a predictable one, which is what a pre-planted symlink turns into the truncation of its target — and it is renamed into place in a single step, so an interrupted write can never leave half a file. bindings.lua and shell.json are resolved through any symlink first, so a dotfiles repository keeps both its link and its content, and the stage file is created beside the real file rather than across a filesystem.

Processes it runs:

The daemon reads the vault you selected — its Markdown, and its own .obsidian/daily-notes.json for the daily-note folder and date format — plus Obsidian's obsidian.json to list your vaults, its .obsidian/app.json for where new notes belong, and its own opens.json back from the state directory. The settings reader reads settings.json. The control script reads bindings.lua and shell.json before rewriting its own part of them. Every path it reads is named above and every process it starts is in the table; all of them are on this machine.

Reading limits

The daemon and the shell both live for days, so every value crossing into them is bounded where it enters:

• Each note is read to a 512 KB ceiling; the whole in-memory corpus stops at 96 MB and 20,000 notes, and the panel says when the index was truncated.
• Every file the daemon and the settings reader open uses O_NOFOLLOW|O_NONBLOCK and checks for a regular file on the descriptor before a byte is read, so a planted symlink is refused rather than followed and a named pipe cannot stall the process. shell.json is read the same way. bindings.lua is the exception by design: it is resolved with realpath and its target and directory checked to be yours and not group- or world-writable, because a dotfiles manager legitimately symlinks it.
• Replies from the daemon are measured before they are written, and again before the shell parses them.

The index

The vault is read once into memory and kept there, which is what makes a keystroke cost a millisecond rather than a filesystem walk. Keeping it current is automatic: a stat walk runs every couple of seconds while the panel is open and every thirty seconds when it is closed, notes that appear or disappear are picked up, and a note is re-read whenever its timestamp or size has changed.

Settings shows how many notes are indexed, and a Rebuild button that re-reads every note from disk. You should not normally need it. It exists for one case the incremental scan cannot see: a note whose contents changed while both its timestamp and its size stayed the same, which is what happens when a file arrives from a sync tool that preserves timestamps.

Requirements

• Omarchy with the Quickshell-based shell
• python3, bash, setpriv (util-linux) and coreutils, all already present on Omarchy
• hyprctl, only to apply a hotkey once you set one
• Obsidian, to open notes through obsidian:// links
• A vault of Markdown files. Obsidian itself can be closed while you search.

Update

omarchy plugin update io.github.weedwhitesandwine.obsiduous

Remove

omarchy plugin remove io.github.weedwhitesandwine.obsiduous

If you bound a hotkey, take it out first. Removing a plugin deletes it and runs nothing belonging to it, so the block would stay in your bindings.lua:

bash ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/io.github.weedwhitesandwine.obsiduous/obsiduous-ctl.sh unbind

A block left behind is inert — it toggles a plugin id that no longer resolves — and it carries a line saying so, and saying to delete it, for anyone who finds it later.

Your vault is untouched by removal. Notes captured into it are ordinary Markdown files and stay where they are. To clear the plugin's own state:

rm -rf ~/.local/state/omarchy/obsiduous

Development

omarchy plugin validate .
python3 -m py_compile obsiduous-indexd.py

The daemon speaks JSON lines on stdin and stdout and can be driven by hand:

echo '{"c":"search","id":1,"q":"tag:recipe"}' | python3 obsiduous-indexd.py ~/vault

Licence

MIT

Built with Claude Code.