Getting the path to the note I have open in Obsidian

I have a bunch of Python scripts I use to clean up text files, and I call them by passing the path to the text file as an argument, for example:

$ python clean_up_text.py /path/to/text/file.md

This is mostly fine, but finding that path is a bit annoying when I want to run them on a note I have open in Obsidian. It’s not hard, it just takes a few steps – open the “More options” menu, click “Reveal in Finder”, drag the file from Finder into terminal. I wanted a way to make it a bit quicker.

I’ve written a little script which gives me a path to the note I currently have open in Obsidian, so now I can run something more like:

$ python clean_up_text.py $(path_to_frontmost_obsidian_note)

I’ve managed to do this with a bit of AppleScript and Python, even though Obsidian doesn’t have any AppleScript support.

The inspiration for this script was another script I have for getting the frontmost URL from my web browser. The crux of that script is a single line of AppleScript that controls Safari:

tell application "Safari" to get URL of document 1

Unfortunately this isn’t quite as simple in Obsidian – it doesn’t have any AppleScript support, so you can’t do anything with tell application "Obsidian".

(The lack of AppleScript is annoying, but understandable. It’s a niche technology on a marginal platform, and Apple seems to have completely forgotten it exists. Much as I find AppleScript useful, it’s hard to justify the time/effort to add support for it in a new app today.)

But even if Obsidian doesn’t have its own AppleScript dictionary, it is still visible from the AppleScript universe – as a process in System Events. We can’t see much, but we can see its windows, for example:

tell application "System Events"
    tell process "Obsidian" to get title of front window
end tell

The window title has three parts, separated by hyphens: the name of the note, the name of the vault, and the Obsidian version:

Short story ideas - textfiles - Obsidian v1.4.16

This is the same title that shows up in the “Window” menu – it’s a bit of Obsidian poking into macOS where AppleScript can see it. Because Obsidian always uses the title as the filename (e.g. this file is called Short story ideas.md), we can use this to find the path to the Markdown file.

To find the Markdown file, you match the vault name to a folder on disk, then you search for files that match the note title. There are a bunch of ways you could do this; I picked Python because that’s what I’m familiar with, but you could use another language just as easily.

This is the script I wrote, which I named obnote. Hopefully the comments are enough to explain what’s going on:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""
Print the path to the Markdown file which is currently open
in Obsidian (if any).

This relies on knowing the on-disk locations of my Obsidian vaults,
so you won't be able to use this without changing it for your own setup.

Note: this will print the *first* file with the same name as your
open note, which may cause issues if you have multiple notes with
the same title.
"""

import os
import subprocess


def get_file_paths_under(root=".", *, suffix=""):
    """
    Generates the absolute paths to every matching file under ``root``.
    
    See https://alexwlchan.net/2023/snake-walker/
    """
    if not os.path.isdir(root):
        raise ValueError(f"Cannot find files under non-existent directory: {root!r}")

    for dirpath, _, filenames in os.walk(root):
        for f in filenames:
            p = os.path.join(dirpath, f)

            if os.path.isfile(p) and f.lower().endswith(suffix):
                yield p


def get_applescript_output(script):
    """
    Run an AppleScript command and return the output.
    """
    cmd = ["osascript", "-e", script]

    return subprocess.check_output(cmd).strip().decode("utf8")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    window_title = get_applescript_output("""
        tell application "System Events"
            tell process "Obsidian" to get title of front window
        end tell
    """)

    # The window title will be something of the form:
    #
    #     Short story ideas - textfiles - Obsidian v1.4.16
    #
    note_title, vault_name, _ = window_title.rsplit(" - ", 2)

    # Match the vault name to a path on disk.
    #
    # This is very specific to my setup, so if you want to use it on
    # your computer, you'll need to customise this bit.
    if vault_name == "textfiles":
        vault_root = os.path.join(os.environ["HOME"], "textfiles")
    else:
        raise ValueError(f"Unrecognised vault name: {vault_name}")

    # Find Markdown files that match the name of this note.
    for path in get_file_paths_under(vault_root, suffix=".md"):
        if os.path.basename(path) == f"{note_title}.md":
            print(path, end="")
            break
    else:  # no break
        raise RuntimeError(f"Could not find note with title {note_title}")

This does assume that notes have unique titles – that I won’t, for example, have two notes in different folders both called Short story ideas.md. That’s true in my vault, but you might want to be careful using it if you reuse note titles.

Now I can invoke my text cleanup scripts like so:

$ python clean_up_text.py $(obnote)

This is especially useful when I want to run the same cleanup script on multiple notes in quick succession. I can run this command once, switch to Obsidian and select a new note, then return to my terminal and press up-arrow and enter to run the cleanup on my new note.

There are lots of other ways you could solve this problem – for example, I realised as I wrote this post that you could look at the .obsidian/workspace.json file – but this works for me, and I had a bit of fun while writing it.