🌿 Git History for Obsidian

Version control for your vault, with an intuitive interface and no terminal required.

Every note you edit is tracked. You can look back at what changed and when, undo a change you regret, and keep a backup copy somewhere safe. The plugin shows all of it as a visual timeline inside Obsidian — point, click, done.

⭐ Like it? If this plugin keeps your notes safe, please give it a star on GitHub and tell a friend who writes in Obsidian. Stars are how other people find it.

🌱 New to Git? Start here

Git is a tool that remembers every version of every file. Three ideas cover almost everything you will do:

A typical day needs one habit: write what changed, press Commit, press Push. Everything else in this plugin is there for the moment you want to look back.

If your vault is not a Git repository yet, run the Initialize Git repository command from Obsidian's command palette and the plugin sets one up for you.

What you get

📋 Source control panel

Your changed notes, grouped and ready to commit.

• See at a glance which notes changed, and by how much
• Click a changed note to open it; its diff is one button or right-click away
• Stage individual notes, whole folders, or everything at once
• Open or close a folder and everything under it in one click, at any depth
• Commit with a message, amend the last one, or commit and push in one step
• One main button that does what the vault needs next: Commit while notes are changed, then Push, Publish branch for a new one, or Sync when the remote has moved on as well
• Pull, push, fetch and stash from the toolbar, with progress while they run
• Keep up with other computers on its own: Auto-fetch checks the remote in the background, and Auto-pull takes in what it finds — only as a fast-forward, and only while nothing of yours is uncommitted or unpushed
• Switch or create branches
• Refreshes itself when you edit notes or come back to the window

🌳 Commit graph

The history of your vault as a timeline.

• Every commit with its author, date, and how much changed
• Branches and merges drawn as coloured lanes
• Click a commit to expand it and see what it contained
• Read a commit's files as a folder tree or a flat list, with the same folding controls as the changes list
• Search by message, author, or commit ID

A compact version lives in the sidebar, so you can glance at recent commits without leaving what you were doing.

🕰️ File history

Pick any note and see only the commits that touched it — including the ones from before you renamed it. Available from the command palette and from the right-click menu in the source control panel.

🔍 Diff viewer

See exactly what changed in a note: old and new side by side, or as one annotated text. You can stage or undo a single block of changes instead of the whole file.

• The words that changed inside a line are marked, so a fixed typo does not look like a rewritten paragraph
• Renamed notes show up as a rename, not as one note deleted and another added
• Open current file next to the path takes you from the diff to the note

💻 Terminal

A shell inside Obsidian, opened in a panel below your note, starting in your vault's folder — for the occasional command that has no button.

• Opens with Cmd/Ctrl+J, from the terminal ribbon icon, the commit graph toolbar, or the Open terminal command
• Starts in your vault's folder, so git and everything else act on your notes
• Uses your own login shell, with your prompt, colours, and aliases
• Several sessions side by side, listed as icons along the edge of the panel. Drag the icons to reorder them
• Sessions outlive the panel: close the terminal tab in the middle of a build and the shell keeps running, with its scrollback, until you open it again. A shell that exits stays in the list, greyed, with its last output readable
• Give each session its own icon and colour from its right-click menu, so a row of identical shell icons stays readable. The icons are grouped by what the session is for — shells and pipelines, mail and meetings, documents and spreadsheets, presenting and recording, the business and the trip
• Find in the terminal with Cmd/Ctrl+F: a bar over the session with a match counter, Enter and Shift+Enter to step through the matches, toggles for match case and regular expressions, and Escape to get back to the shell. Anything selected in the terminal is what the search starts from
• A startup script in the settings is loaded into every session, in the place your own .zshrc would put it — aliases, environment variables and functions are there before the first prompt
• Finds the programs it needs the way your own shell would — Homebrew, pyenv and the like — instead of the stand-ins macOS hands to apps, and falls back to a second way of opening the shell if the first one does not work
• Desktop only, like the rest of the plugin

If a shell does not start, the panel says which program it tried to use and what that program printed, with a Try again button next to it. The Check terminal setup command reports the same thing at any time: which search path is in use, which git and which interpreter were found, and what the terminal can do with them. Something still off? Tell me about it.

🧩 Requirements

• Obsidian 1.7.2 or later
• Git installed on your computer (how to install)
• Desktop only — Git cannot run on mobile

⌨️ Commands

Available from Obsidian's command palette (Ctrl/Cmd + P).

Both shortcuts can be changed or cleared under Settings → Hotkeys. Cmd/Ctrl+F is not a global binding: it belongs to the terminal while the terminal has the focus, so the editor's own search is untouched everywhere else.

⚙️ Settings

Identity

The name and email address Git records on every commit you make. These are not plugin settings: they are read from git config, showing whichever value applies here — your global one, or a value set for this vault, which overrides it.

An edit is written for this vault only. Your global config is read, never written: the name every other repository on your computer commits under is not something a vault's settings should change.

Each row carries a badge saying where its value comes from — This vault, Global Git config, or Not set — so an inherited value and one set for these notes are never the same box with nothing to tell them apart. An inherited one also says what an edit will do: give this vault its own value and leave the original alone.

If neither is set anywhere, the plugin offers to set them when it loads, and again if a commit fails for the lack of them. That prompt writes for this vault too. Both are worth having: without them, Git either refuses to commit or invents a name and an address from your computer's user name and hostname — and puts those on your commits, where no Git host can match them to your account.

Remote repository

Where the vault is pushed to and pulled from: its copy on GitHub, GitLab or a server of your own. Like the identity, this is not a plugin setting but what git remote holds in this vault, and editing it runs git.

Every remote is one row: its name, which host it is on, and its address in a field you can edit. Press + to add one — paste the address the host's clone button gives you, and the name is filled in as origin for the first. An address that is not one Git can use is refused with the reason, rather than stored and failing at the first push.

Commits and sync

Changes and diffs

Advanced

Terminal

🔒 What the plugin does on your computer

Obsidian lists what a plugin is capable of, so here is what those capabilities are used for:

• Runs the git command. That is how every action works — it is the same program you would use in a terminal, run inside your vault's folder only.
• Writes to the clipboard. Only when you use "Copy SHA" or "Copy path".
• Starts a shell, if you open the terminal. Only then, and only the shell you already use, started in your vault's folder. Whatever you type into that panel runs with your own user account, exactly as it would in Terminal or iTerm. Nothing runs there on its own.

Nothing leaves your machine unless you press push, and then only to the backup location you set up yourself.

⭐ Support the project

Git History is free and runs entirely on your own computer. If it is useful to you:

• Star it on GitHub — it takes a second and helps other Obsidian users find it
• Recommend it to someone whose notes deserve a history
• Report a bug or ask for a feature
• Buy me a coffee ☕

License

MIT