Companion for Claude

Claude, inside your Obsidian vault.

Chat with your notes as context, render gallery-grade interactive artifacts right inside your notes, and capture your Claude Code sessions back into Markdown. Your vault stays the single source of truth — and nothing leaves your machine except the call to Anthropic.

▶ Install from the Obsidian community store · Latest release · Claude Code plugin

Desktop & mobile · MIT · Bring your own Anthropic key · Local-first

What it does

🗂 Chat that knows your vault — streaming, Markdown-rendered replies grounded in your active note, selection, linked & backlinked notes, or a keyword vault search (lightweight RAG, no embeddings). Copy, insert, save as note, or regenerate any answer.

✨ Interactive artifacts, inline — Claude emits a claude-html block and Companion renders it live in a sandboxed iframe — dashboards, diagrams, roadmaps — that you can open in the browser or save as a portable note that stays interactive.

🔁 Capture your Claude Code work — pull your Claude Code CLI sessions into clean, secret-sanitized digest notes (conversation, tools run, files touched, provenance), so the work and the knowledge live in the same vault.

See it in action

A claude-html artifact, rendered inline	A ranked manifest roadmap

The same design system, a different shape — a workflow's working map:

Install

From the Obsidian community store: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search "Companion for Claude" → Install → Enable. Or open it directly.

Then open Settings → Companion for Claude and add your Anthropic credential (below).

Authentication — bring your own credential

Companion talks to the Anthropic Messages API with your credential — nothing is sent anywhere else. Three modes:

• API key (default, recommended) — a standard sk-ant-api… key from console.anthropic.com. The community-store path.
• Long-term OAuth token (power users) — paste a token from claude setup-token (sk-ant-oat…) to authenticate as your Claude subscription; usage draws on your plan rather than pay-as-you-go API credit.
• Import from environment — read ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN (+ ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL) from the environment, the way the CLI does.

An optional base-URL override points any mode at a gateway/proxy.

Session memory

Run Claude Code from inside your vault, then in Obsidian:

• Capture session memory… (command, ribbon icon, or /capture) opens a picker of this vault's Claude Code sessions — choose one and it becomes a digest note in your memory folder (default Claude/Sessions).
• Tick the ingest checkbox next to Save to also file the current conversation into memory whenever you save a chat.
• The Session memory sidebar lists every capture, with open / re-ingest.

Every text field is run through a secret scrubber before anything is written — API keys, tokens, and credentials in tool output are redacted, not persisted. Captures are idempotent: re-ingesting updates the existing note.

Slash commands

Type / in the composer for a fuzzy palette. Each command works on your active note (or selection) unless noted; aliases are in parentheses.

Create from your notes

• /summarize (/sum, /tldr) — concise bullet summary, key takeaways first
• /artifact (/dashboard, /viz) — turn the note/selection into a beautiful HTML artifact
• /plan — generate an implementation plan from the active note
• /diagram (/map, /flow) — a clear visual diagram artifact
• /table — a clean Markdown table
• /outline (/structure) — a tight outline of the note
• /brainstorm (/ideas) — options from the note or a typed topic
• /explain — explain a topic you type after the command

Work the vault

• /ask (/search, /vault, /find, /q) — ask a question answered across your whole vault
• /links (/backlinks, /related) — suggest useful internal links for the note
• /extract (/actions, /todos) — pull out decisions, tasks, risks, and follow-ups
• /compare (/contrast) — compare the note/selection against another topic
• /daily (/today, /journal) — draft or improve today's daily note
• /improve (/polish, /rewrite) — improve clarity, flow, and concision

Workflows, memory & handoff

• /workflows (/manifest, /roadmap) — run a vault workflow (see below)
• /capture (/memory, /session) — capture a Claude Code session for this vault into memory
• /build — hand off the current plan note to Claude Code

Manage the chat

• /new (/clear) · /history (/resume) · /save · /delete

Workflows

A Workflows picker (the grid icon in the chat header, the /workflows command, or the ribbon) runs grounded, vault-wide playbooks and returns an artifact or linked Markdown:

• Manifest personas — Product roadmap, Vault audit, Content plan, Research agenda, Risk register, Feature backlog, Infra design: each prioritizes and synthesizes across your notes into a ranked claude-html artifact.
• Daily rollup — a skimmable review of recent activity (decisions, changes, open tasks).
• Map of Content — a hub note grouping and annotating notes on a topic.
• Source digest — a cited evidence/comparison table across your source notes.
• Harvest tasks · Vault synthesis — consolidate scattered tasks; synthesize what your vault says on a topic, cited.

These are the same playbooks the companion claude-obsidian Claude Code plugin offers — now available directly in the chat, no terminal required.

Interactive artifacts

When Claude returns a fenced ```claude-html block, Companion renders the document inside a **sandboxed** iframe (allow-scripts but **not** allow-same-origin) with a restrictive CSP — interactions and scripts run, but the artifact can't touch your vault, cookies, network, or forms. Set a height with ```claude-html height=720. Saving an artifact writes a Markdown note containing that block, so it lives in your vault and re-renders in Reading view.

You can author them by hand too:

```claude-html height=600
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html><head><meta charset="utf-8"><title>Hello</title></head>
<body style="font-family:ui-serif;background:#FAF9F5;padding:40px">
  <h1 style="color:#141413">It renders inline.</h1>
</body></html>
```

Unified bridge (MCP server)

Companion can expose your vault as a local MCP server, so Claude Code and Claude Desktop work against the same knowledge base you chat with here. Enable it in Settings → Companion for Claude → Unified bridge (MCP server). It binds to 127.0.0.1 only, requires a bearer token, exposes read tools always (vault_search, note_read, list_recent, vault_tags) and write tools (note_create / note_append) only when Allow writes is on, and shows ready-to-paste connection snippets.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http obsidian-vault \
  http://127.0.0.1:22360/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer <token>"

Credits & license

The artifact design system takes its aesthetic cues from Thariq Shihipar's “unreasonable effectiveness of HTML” gallery — an original reformulation, not a copy. See the NOTICE for full attribution.

Developed in the open at cavi-ai/claude-obsidian (this repo is the published release mirror). MIT — see LICENSE.