Open in Terminal

Open in Terminal

A simple Obsidian plugin that adds palette commands for launching the current vault in your preferred terminal or cli tooling.

Features

• Always-available Open in terminal command that opens a new window of your configured terminal at the vault directory.
• Optional commands for Claude Code, Codex cli, Cursor cli, Gemini cli, and OpenCode that you can enable individually — each reuses the same terminal app and runs claude, codex, agent, gemini, or opencode respectively.
• Optional Git commands:
  • Git: commit and push runs git add . && git commit -m "<default message>" && git push in a newly launched terminal.
  • Git: pull runs git pull in a newly launched terminal.
  • Git commands always use the vault root as their working directory, even when note-folder launching is enabled.
• Cross-platform launch strategy with clean defaults (simple launches avoid extra shell commands).
• Optional working-directory and macOS app-instance settings.

Commands

• Open in terminal – activates the configured terminal app and opens it at the vault root without running extra commands.
• Open in Claude Code – when enabled, opens the terminal app and runs claude from the vault directory.
• Open in Codex cli – when enabled, opens the terminal app and runs codex.
• Open in Cursor cli – when enabled, opens the terminal app and runs agent.
• Open in Gemini cli – when enabled, opens the terminal app and runs gemini.
• Open in OpenCode – when enabled, opens the terminal app and runs opencode.
• Git: commit and push – when enabled, opens the terminal app and runs git add . && git commit -m "<default message>" && git push.
• Git: pull – when enabled, opens the terminal app and runs git pull.

Settings

The plugin adds a settings tab under Community Plugins → Open in Terminal with:

• Terminal application – text field for the current platform's terminal app name (macOS examples: Terminal, iTerm; Windows: cmd.exe, powershell; Linux: gnome-terminal, alacritty). Settings are stored per platform for cross-device sync.
• Open at current note's folder – uses the active note's folder as the working directory; falls back to the vault root when no note is open.
• Reuse existing terminal instance (macOS only) – uses open -a by default so macOS reuses the configured terminal application. Disable it to use open -na and force a new application instance.
• Enable Claude Code / Codex cli / Cursor cli / Gemini cli / OpenCode – toggles that add the corresponding commands to the palette.
• Git commands:
  • Default commit message – used by Git: commit and push (default: update).
  • Enable Git: commit and push – adds the Git commit+push command to the palette.
  • Enable Git: pull – adds the Git pull command to the palette.
• Use WSL for commands (Windows only) – run terminal and command launches inside WSL.

Commands warn if the terminal application name is empty.

Platform notes

• macOS – launches use open -a <app> by default (or open -na <app> when the reuse setting is disabled); when running a cli command, the plugin creates a temporary .command script that is cleaned up after launch, avoiding AppleScript permissions.
• Windows – uses start to launch cmd.exe, powershell, wt.exe, or other shells with the vault directory preselected; cli commands append the respective tool invocation or fall back to cmd.exe /K when necessary.
• Linux / BSD – simple launches spawn the terminal directly with the vault as the working directory; cli commands fall back to <terminal> -e bash -lc 'cd "$PWD"; …' with tweaks for GNOME Terminal and Konsole.

Development

1. Install dependencies: npm install
2. Build once: npm run build
3. For watch mode while developing: npm run dev

Copy the generated manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css (if added) into your vault's .obsidian/plugins/open-in-terminal/ folder to test locally.

Release workflow

• Tag commits with the format X.Y.Z to trigger the GitHub Actions release pipeline defined in .github/workflows/release.yml; keep the tag and manifest version in sync.
• The workflow installs dependencies, builds the plugin, packages manifest.json, main.js, and optional styles.css, and attaches them (as well as a zip archive) to the GitHub release.
• Follow Obsidian's submission checklist before opening or updating the community plugins PR.

About the author

I'm chenfeng. Besides Obsidian plugins I build small, permission-light Mac apps — like Command Reopen, which fixes Cmd+Tab for minimized windows. If this plugin saves you time, you can buy me a coffee.