oterm

oterm

[!WARNING] oterm is no longer maintained, and has been removed from the Obsidian community store.

If you already have it installed it will keep working — nothing is being taken away from you — but it will receive no further updates, fixes, or compatibility work.

Please switch to one of these instead. Both are actively maintained and do more than oterm ever did.

If you want…	Use
A terminal inside Obsidian	Lean Terminal	Same xterm.js + node-pty foundation, plus session persistence, themes, tab management, vault integration, and startup commands
To run Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI in your vault	Agent Client	Full ACP client with note mentions, permission prompts, and multi-agent sessions

Thanks to everyone who installed it. — @mgriffen

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What this was

A full terminal emulator for Obsidian, powered by the same technology as VS Code's terminal (xterm.js + node-pty). It supported PowerShell, WSL, zsh, oh-my-zsh, tmux, powerlevel10k, and rich CLI tools.

It was built over ten days in April 2026, published to the community store, and then — honestly — forgotten about. By the time I looked again, Lean Terminal had been started two weeks earlier on the same stack and had gone considerably further. There is no good reason to run two of these, so this one stops.

What it did

• Full terminal emulation — xterm.js v6 with WebGL rendering, truecolor, Unicode 11
• Multiple tabs — create, switch, close, rename (double-click)
• Cross-platform — Windows (PowerShell, Git Bash, WSL), macOS (zsh, bash), Linux (zsh, bash)
• Shell presets — auto-detects available shells, categorized dropdown in settings
• Find in terminal — search through terminal output with next/previous navigation
• Sidebar integration — docks in the right sidebar with a persistent icon
• Clickable links — URLs in terminal output are clickable
• Verified native binaries — mandatory SHA256 checksum verification, HTTPS-only, redirect-downgrade rejection

For anyone building something similar

The one hard-won thing worth passing on:

Obsidian's Electron blocks ConPTY worker threads. On Windows the terminal must run with useConpty: false and fall back to winpty. Anyone attempting a PTY-backed Obsidian plugin will hit this.

The rest of the shape, if useful: xterm.js v6 + node-pty v1.1 (the VS Code pairing), esbuild bundling xterm.js, node-pty loaded at runtime from prebuilt binaries across five targets (win32-x64, darwin-arm64, darwin-x64, linux-x64, linux-arm64), macOS x64 cross-compiled on an ARM runner with --arch x64. Release tags must not carry a v prefix, or the community store won't match them — and if your native-binary workflow triggers on v* only, your releases will silently ship without binaries.

Source is MIT. Take whatever is useful.

Existing installs

Nothing to do. Your copy keeps working.

If you want to remove it: Settings → Community plugins → oterm → Uninstall.

Manual install (archival)

The releases remain downloadable for anyone who needs them.

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release
2. Create <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/oterm/ and place the files there
3. Enable oterm in Community Plugins

On first terminal open, oterm downloads a platform-specific native binary (~20–400 KB) from GitHub Releases. Behind a proxy or firewall, fetch it manually: download node-pty-<platform>.zip from the release and extract to <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/oterm/native/<platform>/.

Commands

Settings

Shell (detected presets or a custom path) · Working directory (vault root or home) · Open location (right sidebar, bottom panel, editor tab) · Font family (a Nerd Font is needed for powerlevel10k) · Font size · Cursor style · Cursor blink · Scrollback · WebGL rendering · Copy on select

Network disclosure

oterm made network requests to GitHub (github.com, objects.githubusercontent.com) to download prebuilt native binaries on first terminal open — checksums.json and node-pty-<platform>.zip. No telemetry, no analytics, no other requests. All downloads over HTTPS with mandatory checksum verification.

Desktop only

Requires Node.js APIs (node-pty). Does not load on mobile.

License

MIT