I recently posted My Notes Setup using Obsidian – but I have made some changes to my note-taking workflow that I’m excited about and thought I would briefly document.

I like Vim but you could really replace Vim in this article with any preferred text editor that can interact with the filesystem.

Using Vim with Obsidian

I really like the Obsidian app on mobile but it doesn’t really give me much on the desktop side of things. I still prefer vim over anything else. Out of the box, if I wanted to use vim in conjunction with Obsidian and the Obsidian Livesync community plugin I would need to keep the Obsidian app open all the time so it could monitor changes.

A few weeks ago I opened an issue on the obsidian-livesync repository to see if I could get some help in using the livesync functionality without needing the Obsidian desktop app to run on my machine. The author vrtmrz was gracious enough to build out all the functionalityI requested in the filesystem-livesync repository.

Running filesystem-livesync

I created a Docker image for filesystem-livesync and am using that to sync with the CouchDB instance that I’m using to livesync.

In this example, I will assume that you want your vault synced at ~/Documents/obsidian/Notes/vault. Replace that path with your preferred path. Although filesystem-livesync can sync multiple vaults, I would recommend repeating this process for each vault you want to sync if you have multiple vaults.

Create ~/Documents/obsidian/Notes/config.json with the following content:

{
    "vault_1": {
        "server": {
            "uri": "http://couch_db_uri/database_name",
            "auth": {
                "username": "couch_db_username",
                "password": "couch_db_password",
		"passphrase": "vault_passphrase"
            }
        },
        "local": {
            "path": "/data/vault",
            "initialScan": true
        },
        "auto_reconnect": true,
	"sync_on_connect": true 
    }
}

Now run the following command to run a Docker container on your machine to monitor file changes:

docker run --name=obsidian-notes -d --restart=always -e CHOKIDAR_USEPOLLING=1 -v ~/Documents/obsidian/Notes:/data heywoodlh/filesystem-livesync:2022_04

Note: the CHOKIDAR_USEPOLLING variable allows filesystem-livesync to poll the filesystem. If you don’t set this variable, the container will not see any changes to files unless you edit the files from within the container.

The container will then use ~/Documents/obsidian/Notes/config.json as it’s config file and it should create your vault in your filesystem at ~/Documents/obsidian/Notes/vault. I would recommend making a shortcut or symlink to the directory so it’s not as buried.

Again, if you have multiple vaults, I would recommend repeating this process for each vault and create a new config file, directory and container per vault. The CHOKIDAR_USEPOLLING variable makes syncing a bit slower.

And that’s all you need to use an external text editor with the Obsidian Livesync plugin!