Obsidian URI: Your Vault Has an API You're Not Using

Most Obsidian capture workflows stop at the app boundary. You have templates, hotkeys, maybe a QuickAdd macro that files things perfectly — and all of it requires you to already be in Obsidian. So the idea you had while reading a changelog in your browser goes into a scratch file, and the note you meant to append from a terminal never gets appended.

The fix has been sitting in the app since the beginning. Obsidian registers a custom URI protocol on your OS, which means anything that can open a link can also drive your vault. No plugin, no HTTP server, no API key.

The core protocol, no plugin required ​

Obsidian URIs follow a single shape:

obsidian://action?param1=value&param2=value

The built-in actions are open, new, daily, unique, search, and choose-vault. That covers more than it sounds like:

# Open a specific note
open "obsidian://open?vault=my%20vault&file=projects%2Froadmap"

# Create a note with content, in a new tab
open "obsidian://new?vault=my%20vault&name=meeting%20notes&content=Hello&paneType=tab"

# Append the clipboard to today's daily note without stealing focus
open "obsidian://daily?vault=my%20vault&clipboard&append&silent"

# Run a search
open "obsidian://search?vault=my%20vault&query=tag%3A%23inbox"

That third one is the sleeper. clipboard pulls content from the system clipboard instead of the URL, append adds to the existing note rather than replacing it, and silent means Obsidian does the write without pulling you out of whatever you were doing. Chained together, that's a full capture pipeline in one line.

A few details that will bite you if you skip them. Encoding is not optional: a bare / in a path or a space in a vault name will break the parse, so percent-encode everything (%2F, %20). The .md extension can be omitted from file. paneType accepts tab, split, or window. And there's a shorthand if you're hand-writing links inside notes — obsidian://vault/my vault/my note is the same as the long open form.

Where Advanced URI picks up the slack ​

The core protocol can create and append. It cannot overwrite a specific heading, run a command, or do a regex search-and-replace. That's what Advanced URI is for. It uses its own scheme, obsidian://adv-uri, and adds a mode parameter:

# Append to a specific heading in today's daily note
open "obsidian://adv-uri?vault=my%20vault&daily=true&heading=Log&data=Deployed%20v2.1&mode=append"

# Overwrite a file outright
open "obsidian://adv-uri?vault=my%20vault&filepath=status&data=green&mode=overwrite"

mode takes write (only if the file doesn't exist), overwrite, append, prepend, and new (always creates, appending an incrementing number on collision). Append and prepend default to a newline separator, but separator=, or anything else works if you're building a list.

Two features are worth the install on their own. The first is running commands by ID:

obsidian://adv-uri?vault=my%20vault&filepath=notes%2Fdraft&commandid=workspace%3Aclose

That switches to the tab holding notes/draft and then fires the "Close current tab" command — so you can close an arbitrary tab by path. Any command in the palette works. Prefer commandid over commandname; names get reworded between plugin releases, IDs almost never do.

The second is the uid identifier. Instead of filepath, you reference a note by a UUID stored in its frontmatter:

obsidian://adv-uri?vault=my%20vault&uid=d43f7a17-058c-4aea-b8dc-515ea646825a

Rename or move the note and the link still resolves. If you're embedding Obsidian links into task managers, calendar events, or a codebase, this is the difference between links that survive a vault reorg and links that quietly rot.

Making it actually useful ​

The protocol is only worth it if something else is calling it. A shell function is the lowest-effort win:

jot() {
  local text
  text=$(python3 -c 'import sys,urllib.parse; print(urllib.parse.quote(sys.argv[1]))' "$*")
  open "obsidian://daily?vault=my%20vault&content=- ${text}&append&silent"
}

Now jot "check why the build cache missed" lands in today's daily note from any terminal, and Obsidian never comes to the foreground. The same URL works as a browser bookmarklet, an iOS Shortcut action, a Raycast script, or a step in a cron job.

One nicety before you start hand-writing these: Advanced URI ships helper commands in the palette that generate and copy a correct, fully encoded URI for the current file, daily note, command, or search-and-replace. Use those to get a working URL, then edit it — it's a lot faster than debugging your own percent-encoding at midnight.

Sources: Obsidian URI (official help), Advanced URI documentation.