Cursor and Obsidian

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The other day I found a youtube video diving into showing how someone had set up using Cursor to index their obsidian vault and leverage the built-in AI features to not only update notes or add new context to notes but also to extract context from existing notes and connections that might be in your vault.

I've been using this setup only a couple of days now, but I found it really useful to ask natural language questions against my notes to try to recall some of the things that I've captured in the past.

A good example is the other day I captured some notes on how to launch a local development site within our projects internally at work and then also where to see the local development site in my browser. I was trying to recall that today and was about to use the built-in search within Obsidian to find that and I realized that it's not going to know how to translate my natural language query into the notes that I took. And so I jumped into my Cursor window that contains my vault and asked it the question in its chat feature and it immediately recalled the information I was looking for.

The setup is pretty simple, you can open a new cursor window and then from there navigate to wherever your vault is stored on your file system. I would also recommend going into cursor settings and ensuring that it indexes your vault completely. And that way it will have the context of your vault "oh-hand" when handling questions within the Chat feature.

You may need to preface your queries in the chat feature with an @Codebase tag so it knows to ground whatever response it gives to you based on the code within the current cursor project which is your vault.

This setup isn't necessarily particular to Obsidian. Even if you're managing your notes separately, e.g. in some raw markdown files and using a different editor. You can still get the same features out of this setup.

In many ways it starts to get closer to some of the features that other knowledge management systems like Notion and etc. also offer out of the box.


Have you tried this setup out? Or similar setups in terms of asking natural language queries against your notes/vault? I'd be curious to find out!