Noesis

Noesis for Obsidian

Noesis turns your Obsidian vault into something you can have a conversation with.

Ask a question, get an answer drawn from your actual notes — not a guess. Runs locally on your own LLM so your data never leaves your machine. External AI providers supported if you prefer them. No technical configuration required.

✅ Fully local — your notes never leave your machine ✅ No external transmission, analytics, or tracking ✅ Use local LLMs: Qwen3, Gemma, DeepSeek, Mistral, and more

Network and Privacy Disclosure

• By default, Noesis is local-first and can run entirely with a local model endpoint (for example LM Studio on localhost).
• Noesis does not include client-side telemetry, analytics SDKs, ad networks, or a self-update mechanism.
• If you configure an external provider endpoint, your prompts and selected note context are sent only to that endpoint to fulfill your request.
• External endpoints are user-configured and user-managed. Noesis does not operate or proxy external AI services.

Example Queries

"What did Frank say about the Q3 roadmap in our last meeting?" "What are my notes on retrieval-augmented generation?" "Summarize everything I've written about productivity systems" "What did I write about machine learning?" "When did I first meet Jacob?" "I have to have a difficult conversation with a friend — read my journal entry and help me approach it compassionately" "Help me think through this journal entry like a good friend would"

Getting Started

Go to Settings → Community Plugins Search Noesis and click Install Click Enable

Noesis will index your vault on first run. Once complete, open the Noesis panel and start asking.

Supported Local Backends

BackendNotesLM StudioRecommended for most usersllama.cppFor advanced local deploymentExternal providersOpenAI, Anthropic, and compatible APIs

Status

This plugin is in Early Access (RAG Beta).

Core focus: local chat + vault-aware retrieval (RAG) Current scope: privacy-first local workflows and reliable note context retrieval Advanced note automation and agent-like actions are planned next

Features

Easy Setup: Quick setup and model swapping with LM Studio Cross Platform: Supports most modern Mac and Windows machines Integrated Vault Search: Automatically searches your Obsidian vault for relevant context and cites specific notes behind every answer Open Tab Context: Focus your conversation on a specific note for targeted insights Performance Tuning: Customize models, search parameters, token limits, and more to match your hardware

Known Limitations

Retrieval quality depends on your embedding model and vault structure Large vault indexing can take time on first run Advanced edit and agent workflows are still under active development

Development

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please feel free to submit issues and pull requests.

Attributions

This project respects and is compatible with the original licenses of all code and dependencies used.

Development Tools

esbuild — MIT License — Used for bundling the plugin TypeScript — Apache-2.0 License — Used for type safety Obsidian API — MIT License — Official Obsidian plugin API

Dependencies

All development dependencies are used under their respective open-source licenses (MIT, Apache-2.0, ISC, BSD) and are properly externalized in the build process.

Third-Party Services

This plugin integrates with local LLM services but does not include any of their code:

LM Studio — Proprietary — Local LLM interface

Noesis (νόησις) comes from the verb νοεῖν (noeîn), meaning "to perceive intellectually" or "to think." It denotes the act of understanding or the process of intellectual perception.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.