obsidian-vault-intelligence

Obsidian Vault Intelligence

Provides smart vault search, health reporting, and Dataview query access — all powered by the obsidian CLI (Obsidian 1.12+). Falls back to direct file access when the CLI is unavailable.

Prerequisite: The obsidian-cli skill must be loaded. Verify with:

obsidian version 2>/dev/null && echo "CLI available" || echo "CLI unavailable — will use fallbacks"

---

Capability 1: Smart Vault Search

Use Obsidian's indexed search engine instead of grep to find thematically related notes. The index understands tags, aliases, backlinks, and property values — not just literal text.

When to use

• Finding vault connections for a new note (youtube-summarizer, book notes, etc.)
• Locating notes about a person, project, or concept
• Searching by tag, frontmatter property, or link relationship

How to search

# Basic full-text search
obsidian search query="<keywords>" format=json limit=20 2>/dev/null

# Tag-based search
obsidian search query="tag:#negotiation OR tag:#communication" format=json 2>/dev/null

# Search within a folder
obsidian search query="<keywords>" path="BOOKS/" format=json 2>/dev/null

# Find notes that link to a specific note
obsidian backlinks file="BOOKS/Never Split the Difference.md" format=json 2>/dev/null

# Parse JSON results for paths
obsidian search query="<keywords>" format=json 2>/dev/null \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json; data=json.load(sys.stdin); [print(r.get('path','')) for r in data]"

Query syntax:

• term1 term2 — both terms
• "exact phrase" — phrase match
• tag:#tagname — by tag
• term1 OR term2 — either term
• -term — exclude
• property:value — frontmatter property value
• path:folder/ — restrict to path prefix

Fallback when CLI unavailable

# Search BOOKS/ and PROJECTS/ with thematic keywords
grep -rl "<keyword>" "<vault_root>/BOOKS" "<vault_root>/PROJECTS" \
  --include="*.md" 2>/dev/null | head -20

# Search full vault
grep -rl "<keyword>" "<vault_root>" \
  --include="*.md" \
  --exclude-dir=SCRIPTS --exclude-dir=DATAVIEW_SCRIPTS \
  2>/dev/null | head -20