Ollama Notes Chat

A right-sidebar chat panel that lets you chat with your notes using a remote Ollama server over its native chat API. Local-first — nothing leaves your LAN.

Features

• Right-sidebar chat — opens from the left ribbon (chat-bubble icon), the command palette, or the editor right-click menu.
• Native Obsidian look — styled with theme CSS variables, so it adapts to any light/dark theme automatically.
• Streaming responses — tokens arrive live over NDJSON.
• Context modes — chat about the current note, the current selection, the current note plus its one-hop linked notes, the whole current folder, retrieved passages from across the vault (RAG), or no context at all. Pick a mode from the context dropdown in the subheader.
• Quick model switch — a model dropdown in the subheader changes the active Ollama model on the fly, without opening settings.
• Retrieval (RAG) — embed your question and pull the most relevant passages from anywhere in the vault. Citations render as real [[Note#Heading]] links you can click. Index builds incrementally in the background; edits and renames re-embed automatically with a 2s debounce. Embedder model is configurable and independent from the chat model.
• Markdown rendering — AI responses are rendered with Obsidian's own Markdown renderer: code blocks, callouts, tables, and [[wikilinks]] all work.
• Slash commands — /summarize, /expand, /rewrite, /brainstorm out of the box, fully editable in settings.
• Per-note overrides — add ai: { model: ..., systemPrompt: ... } to a note's frontmatter to override global settings when chatting with that note.
• Save as note — dump the conversation to a Markdown file (Chats/YYYY-MM-DD — <title>.md by default).
• Insert into note — one click to paste an AI response at the cursor in the active editor.
• Regenerate — redo the last response with the same prompt.
• Token estimate — rough context-budget warning turns amber/red as you approach the model's limit.
• Multi-session history — keep as many parallel chats as you want. The header's history icon opens a drawer listing every conversation with its preview and "last updated" stamp; click any row to switch, click the title to rename in place, trash icon to delete. New chat via the + icon or command palette.
• Auto-titled conversations — new chats derive their title from your first message (slash-command prefix stripped). Manual rename sticks forever; the auto-titler never overwrites it.

Screenshots

Screenshots pending capture. The shot list and exact filenames live in assets/README.md; drop the PNGs into assets/ and uncomment the block below to enable this section.

Prerequisites

1. Ollama running on another PC on your LAN. On the host:

   # macOS
   launchctl setenv OLLAMA_HOST "0.0.0.0:11434"
   launchctl setenv OLLAMA_ORIGINS "app://obsidian.md"
   # restart Ollama
   
   # Linux (systemd)
   sudo systemctl edit ollama.service
   # add under [Service]:
   #   Environment="OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0:11434"
   #   Environment="OLLAMA_ORIGINS=app://obsidian.md"
   sudo systemctl restart ollama
   
   # Windows
   # Set OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0:11434 and OLLAMA_ORIGINS=app://obsidian.md in System Environment Variables,
   # then restart the Ollama app.
   

   Obsidian needs OLLAMA_ORIGINS set so it can make streaming fetch requests to Ollama across the LAN. Prefer app://obsidian.md — it scopes access to Obsidian only. OLLAMA_ORIGINS=* also works and is convenient for troubleshooting, but it's less restrictive, so avoid leaving it as * on a host exposed to your LAN. Comma-separate the value to allow multiple origins.

2. At least one Ollama chat model pulled, plus (if you want retrieval / RAG) an embedder model:

   ollama pull llama3.1:8b           # chat
   ollama pull nomic-embed-text      # embedder — only needed for the retrieval context mode
   

Install

From Obsidian's Community plugins browser (recommended):

1. Open Settings → Community plugins and turn off Restricted mode if prompted.
2. Click Browse, search for "Ollama Notes Chat", and click Install.
3. Click Enable.

Then configure it:

4. Open Settings → Ollama Notes Chat:
   • Set the Base URL to your Ollama host, e.g. http://192.168.1.50:11434.
   • Click Test — you should see "Connected — N models available".
   • Pick a model from the dropdown.
5. Click the chat-bubble icon in the left ribbon to open the sidebar, and start chatting.

Build from source (development)

Only needed if you want to hack on the plugin or run an unreleased build. Requires Node.js (brew install node on macOS).

1. Clone and build:

   git clone https://github.com/tdmarchetta/obsidian-ollama-notes-chat.git
   cd obsidian-ollama-notes-chat
   npm install
   npm run build
   

   This produces main.js alongside manifest.json and styles.css.

2. Copy (or symlink) the plugin folder into your vault's plugins directory. The folder name must match the plugin id, ollama-notes-chat:

   ln -s "/path/to/obsidian-ollama-notes-chat" \
          "/path/to/vault/.obsidian/plugins/ollama-notes-chat"
   

3. In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins, turn off Restricted mode if needed, reload plugins, and enable Ollama Notes Chat. Then set the Base URL as described above.

Retrieval / RAG setup (optional)

If you want to chat with the whole vault instead of a single active note:

1. In Settings → Ollama Notes Chat, scroll to the Retrieval section.
2. Pick an embedder model from the dropdown (nomic-embed-text is the small, fast default). This is separate from your chat model.
3. Leave auto-index on load on (default) or click Reindex vault to build the index manually. Progress appears in the same panel.
4. In the chat view, open the context dropdown in the subheader and choose "Retrieved passages".
5. Ask a question. The response will include From [[Note#Heading]] citations you can click to jump to the source.

Index is stored at .obsidian/plugins/ollama-notes-chat/index.json. It updates incrementally when notes change (2-second debounce) and invalidates automatically if you change the embedder model. On large vaults the cold reindex can take several minutes — you can click Cancel at any time and resume later.

Keyboard shortcuts

Obsidian doesn't bind a default hotkey — assign one in Settings → Hotkeys by searching for "Ollama Notes Chat". The most useful commands to bind: "Open chat", "New chat", and "Open chat history".

Per-note overrides

In any note's frontmatter:

---
ai:
  model: llama3.1:70b
  systemPrompt: "You are a code reviewer. Be blunt and specific."
---

When this note is the active context, the plugin uses these values instead of the global settings for that send.

Troubleshooting

• "Cannot reach server" — check that Ollama is running and that OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0:11434 and OLLAMA_ORIGINS=app://obsidian.md are set on the host. Restart Ollama after setting them. (If it still won't connect, temporarily try OLLAMA_ORIGINS=* to rule out an origins issue.)
• Streams but errors partway — the response may have hit the model's context window or max-tokens limit. Raise max tokens in settings or use a larger model.
• Model dropdown is empty — click the refresh button next to it. If still empty, run ollama list on the host to verify models are installed.
• Context is too long warning — switch the context mode to "Current selection" to only include highlighted text, or raise the truncation limit in settings.
• "Index is empty — run reindex in settings" — retrieval mode is selected but no embeddings exist yet. Open settings, scroll to Retrieval, and click Reindex vault.
• "Embedding failed — check your server is reachable" — the embedder model isn't available on the Ollama host, or the host is down. Run ollama list on the host and pull nomic-embed-text if missing.
• Retrieval returns stale results after edits — edits debounce for 2 seconds before re-embedding. If you need an immediate rebuild, click Reindex vault.

Architecture

• main.ts — plugin entry; registers the view, ribbon icon, commands, editor menu, settings tab. Owns the conversation store + persistence (including the one-shot 0.1.0 → 0.2.0 migration) and, since 0.3.0, the RAG vector store + indexer.
• src/view/ChatView.ts — the sidebar ItemView that owns the chat UI, streaming, and rendering.
• src/view/HistoryDrawer.ts — overlay controller for the multi-session history drawer (mounted inside the chat view, not a separate ItemView).
• src/chat/ConversationStore.ts — CRUD layer over ConversationSnapshot[]; filters empty conversations out of persistence.
• src/chat/Conversation.ts — per-conversation state, auto-titling, and ConversationSnapshot shape.
• src/ollama/OllamaClient.ts — fetch-based native /api/chat client with NDJSON streaming generator (keeps Ollama's timing fields for the stats modal) plus requestUrl-based /api/embed and /api/tags.
• src/context/NoteContext.ts — builds the context block from the active note/selection/linked notes/retrieved passages.
• src/rag/Chunker.ts — heading-first markdown chunker with fixed-size fallback.
• src/rag/VectorStore.ts — in-memory map, flat JSON persistence at index.json, atomic tmp+rename writes, inline cosine top-K.
• src/rag/Indexer.ts — vault walk, mtime-diff, batched embedding, debounced event handlers.
• src/settings/ — typed settings, defaults, and the settings tab.
• styles.css — scoped under .ollama-chat-view / .ollama-chat-settings; uses only Obsidian theme variables.

Changelog

Release history is in CHANGELOG.md.

Support

Ollama Notes Chat is free and open source. If it makes your notes more useful and you'd like to support continued development, you can buy me a coffee:

☕ buymeacoffee.com/tdmarchetta

100% of contributions go to the developer.

License

MIT