Written in Rust · GPL-3.0 · works on the vault you already have
Same folder. Same notes. Same [[links]]. Read, write and wander
through them without ever reaching for the mouse, and keep Obsidian open on
the other screen while you do.
Rather use brew, npm or cargo? All four are two lines down.
Half a minute in a real terminal. Nothing sped up, nothing cut.
Ctrl+K for backlinks,
the graph settling under Ctrl+G, and two of the eighteen themes.
The same layout, drawn live. Try a theme:
Eighteen themes ship with it, including Obsidian's own light and dark, and a
terminal theme that simply inherits whatever palette you've already
spent years tuning. Drop a TOML file next to your config to add one more.
Point it at a folder of Markdown files and it just works. No import step, no sidecar database, no proprietary format waiting to trap you.
Obsidian can stay open on the same vault at the same time. Edit here, edit there; they're the same files on the same disk.
No telemetry, no analytics, not even an update check. Unless you turn the assistant on, it never opens a socket.
What's inside
Live preview in Obsidian's dialect: [[wikilinks]] that dim when
they don't resolve yet, #tags, - [ ] tasks,
> [!note] callouts, tables, and fenced code with syntax
highlighting. Frontmatter is optional: a stray .md file you
dragged in from somewhere else shows up like everything else.
A backlinks pane showing the exact line each link sits on, an outline, and a tag browser. Follow a link to a note that doesn't exist and it gets written for you. Rename a note and every wikilink pointing at it is rewritten too.
Force-directed with Barnes-Hut repulsion, so it stays smooth on a big vault and stops burning CPU the moment it settles. Notes that are only linked to show up hollow, usually the most useful thing on screen, because those are the notes you meant to write.
Obsidian's light and dark, Catppuccin, Tokyo Night, Gruvbox, Nord, Solarized,
Dracula, Rosé Pine, Everforest, plus a terminal theme that just
uses your palette. Your own theme is a TOML file; anything you leave unset is
inherited from whatever it extends.
A chat panel that acts on the vault through the very same commands you use. It
can search, read, create, edit, rename, link and delete notes, and put one on
your screen. Every tool call appears in the transcript, so you're reading what
it actually did rather than trusting a summary of it.
Type / for slash commands that never reach the model:
/model switches backend, /save and /resume
keep a conversation for tomorrow, /compact buys back context.
Bring an Anthropic key, point it at Ollama on localhost, or leave it switched off entirely; nothing else in the app depends on it.
Ctrl+G
Every vault accumulates them: a link you typed in a hurry to a note you never got around to. In the graph they're the hollow circles, pulled into place by everything that points at them, waiting for you.
Ctrl+Shift+G narrows it down to just the neighbourhood of the note you have open, which is usually the question you were actually asking.
Straight off the terminal
Every frame here was captured from the recording above, in a stock terminal against a small demo vault. None of it was redrawn by hand — open any one of them for the full-size capture.
Ctrl+K cycles the right panel through outline, backlinks and tags, each with its line of context.
Ctrl+G for the whole vault, f to fit it. Orphans sit on their own, where you can see them.
catppuccin-latte here — one of eighteen, Obsidian's own light and dark among them.Privacy, in plain words
obsidian-tui makes no network connections at all unless you use the assistant. Only one crate in the whole workspace has an HTTP dependency: the vault, the editor and the graph physically cannot reach the network.
include_active_note is onThat's the entire list. It goes to the provider you configured, under that provider's terms, and nothing is ever sent in the background.
[agent]
provider = "openai"
base_url = "http://localhost:11434/v1"
model = "llama3.1"Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM: anything OpenAI-shaped. Or set provider = "offline" and the assistant simply isn't there.
Your API key is read from the environment and is never written to the
config file, never logged, and never included in an error message. Set
allow_writes = false to leave the assistant with search and read only.
Muscle memory
Nothing new to learn on day one. A hint bar above the status line shows the keys that apply to wherever you're standing, and ? opens the full list. When it starts feeling like training wheels, turn it off from the command palette.
q is careful about where it quits from. Anywhere you might be typing (the editor, the chat box, a search field), it stays an ordinary letter, and CtrlQ is the way out instead.
In the graph the keys are its own: hjkl pans, + and - zoom, f fits the whole thing on screen, Tab steps between nodes, c recentres on the one you've picked, and L, u and t toggle labels, unresolved links and tags.
And if you'd rather point at things: the ribbon icons are buttons, notes and folders and tabs are clickable, graph nodes select, and the scroll wheel scrolls whichever pane is under your pointer, not the focused one.
Two minutes, tops
macOS and Linux. Works out which build fits your machine, downloads it and checks it against its published checksum before anything moves. OTUI_BIN_DIR chooses where it lands; OTUI_VERSION pins a release. Piping a script into a shell is worth a read first; here it is in full.
macOS and Linux, from the project's own tap.
Try it without installing anything. npm install -g obsidian-tui when you decide to keep it.
Needs Rust 1.88 or newer. This is also the route for Intel Macs, which build from source.
obsidian-tui ~/Notes # a specific vault
obsidian-tui # whatever Obsidian had open last
obsidian-tui --list-vaults # everything Obsidian knows about
It also answers to the obsidian:// URIs the desktop app registers, so a
link or a script that opens Obsidian opens this too:
obsidian-tui 'obsidian://open?vault=Notes&file=Ideas'. And for the days
you don't want a UI at all:
obsidian-tui ~/Notes --prompt "which notes mention the Q3 migration?"
Prebuilt for Apple silicon, Linux x86_64 and aarch64, and
Windows x86_64.
Reasonable worries
It reads a plain folder of Markdown files: no import, no database, no lock-in. It writes when you ask it to: saving a note, creating one by following a link that didn't resolve, or renaming one, which also rewrites the wikilinks pointing at it. Nothing happens behind your back.
Yes, and that's the point. It's the same folder on the same disk, and both apps are happy to be in it at once. Use whichever one suits the moment.
They do different jobs. Obsidian's
official CLI is a remote control for the
desktop app: it gives you commands, not an interface, and every one of them runs
against a full Obsidian instance, which it launches if you haven't. obsidian-tui is
the interface, reading the vault's files directly, so it starts in a second on a
box with no display at all. They get along: when the obsidian binary is on your
PATH, /obsidian open (or "Open this note in Obsidian" in
the command palette) hands the note you're reading to the desktop app for the one
thing only it can do. If the CLI isn't enabled, obsidian-tui says so and carries on.
Only if you want the assistant. Without one the panel still opens and explains how
to set it up, and every other part of the app carries on exactly as before. Set
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (or OPENAI_API_KEY) and restart.
Yes. Set provider = "openai" with a base_url pointing at
Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM or anything else that speaks the OpenAI shape, and nothing
leaves your laptop.
Plugins are Obsidian's, and they stay there; this reads the files underneath, so anything a plugin wrote is just text you can see. Themes are separate: eighteen ship with the app, and you can write your own in TOML, borrowing from any of them.
Binaries are published for Apple silicon, Linux x86_64 and
aarch64, and Windows x86_64. Intel Macs build from source
with cargo. Config lands in the usual place for your OS on first run,
with every default spelled out so you can see what you're changing.
Now you don't have to leave the terminal to think in them.
A star is how a project like this gets found, and it costs you nothing. Or just read the source first.