🧘 Purpose

Obsidian is great, but it doesn't offer the first-class Neovim experience that some of us just can't seem to do without. In the scenario where we edit notes in Neovim and view them rendered in Obsidian we would also like Obsidian to automatically follow navigation we do on the Neovim side.

That's where obsidian-bridge.nvim comes in. It mirrors navigation events in Neovim in the Obsidian app. If you open a note in Neovim the Obsidian App will show the same note automatically. If you navigate to another one or navigates to another Neovim buffer, the Obsidian app will show the corresponding note.

This is accomplished by leveraging the Local REST API plugin for Obsidian.

🎥 Demo

🧑‍🔧 Installation

1. Make sure you have curl installed on your system and available on your PATH.

2. Install and enable the Local REST API community plugin in Obsidian. Important: The default configuration of obsidian-bridge.nvim will try to connect to the non-encrypted server variant so remember to enable that in the Local REST API settings if you want to use it. See SSL/HTTPS Setup below for more information.

3. Set the environment variable OBSIDIAN_REST_API_KEY to the API key found in the Local REST API settings within Obsidian. For example:

# In your .bashrc or .zshrc
export OBSIDIAN_REST_API_KEY="your_api_key_here"

4. Install obsidian-bridge.nvim, here are examples for some popular package managers:

Lazy

{
  "oflisback/obsidian-bridge.nvim",
  opts = {
    -- your config here
  },
  event = {
    "BufReadPre *.md",
    "BufNewFile *.md",
  },
  lazy = true,
  dependencies = {
    "nvim-lua/plenary.nvim",
  },
}

Packer

require('packer').startup(function()
    use {
      'oflisback/obsidian-bridge.nvim',
      requires = { "nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim" }
      config = function() require('obsidian-bridge').setup() end
      requires = {
        "nvim-lua/plenary.nvim",
      },
    }
end)

vim-plug

Plug 'nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim'
Plug 'oflisback/obsidian-bridge.nvim'
  Plug 'nvim-lua/plenary.nvim'

⚙️ Configuration

You have access to some configuration options. The table below represents the default settings. They will be used if you don't provide any settings.

You may pass a config table as the argument to the setup function, or set it as the opts field iff you are using lazy.nvim. Any given settings will override the defaults. Untouched defaults will be kept.

If you change the server's address inside the Obsidian Local REST API settings, you must set the correct obsidian_server_address in this plugin. If you wish to use SSL, you also need to pass a different address. When passing the address, make sure to copy it directly from Obsidian into your obsidian-bridge configuration. Take care to not have any trailing slashes / after the port number!

-- default settings
local bridge_settings = {
  obsidian_server_address = "http://localhost:27123",
  scroll_sync = false, -- See "Sync of buffer scrolling" section below
  cert_path = nil, -- See "SSL configuration" section below
  warnings = true, -- Show misconfiguration warnings. Recommended to keep this on unless you know what you're doing!
}

-- If you are using lazy in your config,
-- for example in lua/plugins/bridge.lua
return {
  "oflisback/obsidian-bridge.nvim",
  dependencies = { "nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim" },
  opts = bridge_settings,
  event = {
    "BufReadPre *.md",
    "BufNewFile *.md",
  },
  lazy = true,
}

-- Or you may call setup directly:
require("obsidian-bridge").setup(bridge_settings)
-- Note: There's nothing special about the bridge_settings variable.
-- You can pass a table directly if you prefer.

🔑 SSL/HTTPS Setup

Saving The Certificate

To use an encrypted connection, you will need the CA certificate from the Local REST API plugin. This is because the plugin's certificate is self-signed, and we must instruct curl to treat it as a trusted certificate authority.

Note: The name and extension of the certificate file does not matter as long as its contents are correct!

Save Directly

You can find it under the Local REST API settings panel in Obsidian. Simply click the "this certificate" link as seen below to save the certificate file:

Next, move the file to any location on your system, and remember the path because you will need it for the next step. _It is not recommended to store it among your dotfiles if you track them with git, ~/.ssl/obsidian.crt works well.

Copy Into File

In certain Linux environments, the above link might not do anything. In that case, you can copy the certificate's contents from the settings panel directly. You need to enable the "Advanced Settings" option at the bottom of the settings panel:

Next, scroll to the bottom and look for the Certificate field. Take care to select the entire contents of the text box and copy it to your clipboard without modifying it.

Then, simply create a new file anywhere on your system (~/.ssl/obsidian.crt works well), and paste the certificate inside of it. As above, remember this path!

Configuring obsidian-bridge

Now that you've saved the certificate, you need to point obsidian-bridge to the correct HTTPS server address. The default address is shown below, and you can also find it in the REST API settings panel labeled "Encrypted (HTTPS) API URL". Please note that localhost will not work for SSL, and you must replace it with 127.0.0.1!

You also must set the cert_path option to the full path to the certificate file you saved in the previous step:

opts = {
    obsidian_server_address = "https://127.0.0.1:27124",
    cert_path = "~/.ssl/obsidian.crt",
}

SSL should now be ready to use. obsidian-bridge will warn you about any detected misconfigurations when it's loaded.

⌨️ Commands

• :ObsidianBridgeDailyNote takes you to your daily note or generates it for you if it doesn't already exist. Make sure to have the Daily Notes core plugin enabled in Obsidian for this to work. Since it internally uses the Daily Note plugin to create the note for you, templates will work the same way as if it was triggered from within Obsidian.
• :ObsidianBridgeOpenGraph opens the graph view in Obsidian, as long as the Graph core plugin is enabled.
• :ObsidianBridgeOpenVaultMenu opens the Obsidian vault selection dialog. Obsidian does not expose a way to switch to another vault programmatically (yet?).
• :ObsidianBridgeTelescopeCommand lists all the executable commands in Telescope. Execute the selected one.
• :ObsidianBridgeOn activate plugin.
• :ObsidianBridgeOff deactivate plugin, this will prevent calls towards Obsidian.
• :ObsidianBridgeToggle toggle plugin active/inactive.

💡 Feel free to suggest additional useful commands via issue or PR.

📜 Sync of buffer scrolling

Ideally scrolling within a note in neovim should also make the scroll position be centered in Obsidian. This is possible, but requires a patched version of Local REST API so we'll have to build it ourselves. For more info about the patch's status see this discussion.

Two ways of doing this, either use BRAT build or build the forked version

A) Use BRAT to install my forked version of obsidian-local-rest-api

1. Install the Obsidian BRAT plugin.

2. In the settings for BRAT, select "Add beta plugin with frozen version".

3. Add https://github.com/oflisback/obsidian-local-rest-api with release version tag v1.0.0. The added plugin is called "Local REST API with scroll".

B) Build a forked version of obsidian-local-rest-api

Specifically what's required is a build based on this fork which hopefully can get integrated in the upstream project eventually.

Start off by cloning the patched fork to a folder named obsidian-local-rest-api-with-scroll:

git clone https://github.com/oflisback/obsidian-local-rest-api obsidian-local-rest-api-with-scroll

Then do npm install followed by npm run build inside that folder.

Now that you've built your own version of the plugin, place the obsidian-local-rest-api-with-scroll in your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ folder and enable the "Local REST API with Scroll" plugin in the Obsidian settings panel.

After either completing (A) or (B)

The final thing to do is to set scroll_sync = true in your obsidian-bridge.nvim configuration and update the OBSIDIAN_REST_API_KEY value to what was generated for the new version of the plugin.

Now scrolling a note in neovim should also result in scrolling in Obsidian. Note however that this only works if the note is in editing mode in Obsidian. Any suggestions on how to make it work also in view mode would be very appreciated, until then make sure that notes are opened in editing mode by default via the Obsidian setting Editor -> Default view for new tabs -> Editing view.

📚 Other projects for Neovim + Obsidian

• obsidian.nvim Lets us interact with Obsidian vaults directly via the filesystem. 🧠

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Contributing

Contributions, bug reports and suggestions are very welcome.

If you have a suggestion that would make the project better, please fork the repo and create a pull request.