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Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

help.obsidian.md

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Re: Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

#171

Post by aaronharding »

kepano wrote: post #52
eric-p7 wrote: post #41

I wish I could use Obsidian to edit single markdown files. 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.

Yeah we'll add that at some point. 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.

i am not sure its that tricky, just have some user settings that are loaded when you open individual markdown files. show a different ui or hide some parts of the ui if need be!

Re: Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

#172

Post by wiether »

wellthisisgreat wrote: post #168
wiether wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsidian with Dropbox can work on an iOS device? With Obsidian Sync you manage everything directly in Obsidian: sync status, activity, history, selective sync... And "it just works" across platform, without having to think about/set something else up.

it's not per-vault is it? I have multiple vaults I'd like to sync selectively (50% of files in one vault for one machine, and 100% on another etc.) No space restrictions?

I only use a single vault, so I'm afraid I can't answer to your question.

So when I talk about selective sync, it's about what is synced within a vault, and more specifically Obsidian settings/plugins...

I don't have the need to selectively sync only some of my vault's content, so never looked into it.

I just know that Obsidian Sync does what I'm expecting it to do.

And to add some context: I'd rather they just add a regular "Obsidian" sub that included vault sync; instead of giving away Obsidian for free, and selling add-ons. Because on itself, Obsidian Sync is quite expensive. If I'm willing to pay that much for that little, it's because, to me, I'm paying first for the development of Obsidian in itself.

But I understand why they wanted to go this way.

I don't know if it is/was the best move; because I see lots of people not willing to use Obsidian just because they are "scamming" people on their expensive Sync add-on.

Re: Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

#173

Post by wiether »

4diii wrote: post #166
wiether wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsidian is plain Markdown and JSON files. 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.

someone reverse engineered obsidian sync a couple years ago, but obsidian ended up “patching” it. Saw some recent discussion on here about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44768641

Seems fair to me.

Obsidian Sync has always been presented as a paid add-on, here to provide income for the company building Obsidian and giving it for free.

If they provided a direct BYOS(ync/erver) mechanism, less people would pay for the add-on, which is their source of income.

Instead, they let you use your own sync mechanism by only relying on text files.

I understand why some people could get upset about this, but they've always been transparent :

- no proprietary format ; can migrate at anytime without effort

- free but closed-sourced software

- add-ons for income

Re: Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

#174

Post by ozlikethewizard »

kcrwfrd_ wrote: post #51
manmal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 just pay for the sync. 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.

Another option is obsidian lets you set which folders should sync. So I have everything in one vault, and in my trusted environment I let have everything synced, work machine only gets the work folder, and windows gaming machine only gets required non-confidential stuff (i.e notes about stuff that isnt me).

Its nice to be able to review it all from one machine though

Re: Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

#175

Post by zoul »

kepano wrote: post #36

Oh! I worked on this project. If anyone has questions, I'll do my best to answer them!

Is there or do you plan to add some kind of webhook to notify interested parties that a vault has changed? I think it would go together nicely with the headless sync.

Re: Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

#176

Post by TheDong »

Terretta wrote: post #118
TheDong wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> it died with apple making it impossible to offer any sort of generic filesystem API or even background sync Apple's cloud storage remained WebDAV a very very long time. Apple's iOS has a pluggable Files system. Use Working Copy to give other apps access to folders sync'd with git: https://workingcopy.app Or a dedicated app like GitSync: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gitsync/id6744980427

> Or a dedicated app like GitSync

Which gates "sync" behind an expensive "premium" paywall.

It feels criminal to charge that much for the sync feature when it also can't possibly work, iOS actively does not want apps to run in the background, and does not offer a viable method for this libgit wrapper to execute libgit on, for example, a filesystem inotify event or write or whatever.

https://github.com/ViscousPot/GitSync/issues/807#issuecommen...

What do you know, people are observing it doesn't really work.

> Apple's iOS has a pluggable Files system.

Okay, excellent, maybe you can tell me how to do this.

I have opened the builtin iOS notes app. It by default can sync notes with iCloud. I would like to have it store my notes in Git or Dropbox or anything else, and be able to also edit them on another machine and have the changes sync.

I won't hold my breath on how to do this because like clearly things are not pluggable, the builtin iOS apps don't work with anything but iCloud and the filesystem is obviously not pluggable or generic.

Re: Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

#178

Post by input_sh »

neutralx wrote: post #167
corysama wrote: post #12

Also new: Obsidian joins the CLI gang 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.

This got me thinking if it’s possible to use Obsidian as taskwarrior. I’ve used taskwarrior in the past but it’s CLI interface which is fine for simpler tasks. Lately, I’ve been trying to use Obsidian as task manager and addition of Bases paved path for taskwarrior like usage, but in GUI. Having options to use it as CLI and as GUI offers flexibility. I also used some plugins like bugwarrior to sync Jira/GitHub ticket…

Look at the video, it explicitly starts with dealing with tasks in Markdown files. Unintuitively if I might say so, but it does.

I agree that now that this is a possibility, some sort of a wrapper would be great to see.

Re: Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

#179

Post by jorgejiro »

manmal wrote: post #17
corysama wrote: post #12

Also new: Obsidian joins the CLI gang 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'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've been using Obsidian since the beginning, and it's the best money I can spend annually. It works perfectly, and I've never had any problems.

Re: Obsidian Sync now has a headless client

#180

Post by kandros »

system2 wrote: post #88
ravila4 wrote: post #70

Nice! I rely on Obsidian a lot for syncing knowledge while working with Claude agents, such as storing research and daily logs to catch up on the prior day’s work. It already works quite well with a custom skill that I build, but this may make the workflow smoother. I also built a cli tool to index embeddings in LanceDB and do semantic search. It helps agents create better internal links between notes. https://github…

How does this affect your token/quota usage?

For just text notes is very low token usage, i use Opus for everything and a whole week of notes is like 30m of a coding session
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