Similar Notes is an Obsidian plugin that surfaces related notes in a sidebar using local TF-IDF + cosine similarity via @watthem/quarrel. It is designed to be fast, private, and explainable: no network calls, no accounts, and no black-box ranking.
Manual install is available from GitHub Releases. The plugin is not yet listed in Obsidian's Community Plugins directory.
- Local-first: Indexing and ranking happen entirely on-device.
- Explainable results: Similarity is based on TF-IDF terms and cosine similarity, not embeddings.
- Keyword chips: Promote terms from the active note to quickly bias the ranking.
- Change detection: See when notes have changed since the last index build and rebuild in one click.
- Optional auto-reindex: Rebuild automatically after vault changes with a configurable delay.
- Download
main.js,manifest.json, andstyles.cssfrom the latest release. - Create a folder at
.obsidian/plugins/quarrel-similar-notes/inside your vault. - Copy the three release files into that folder.
- Reload Obsidian and enable Similar Notes in Settings -> Community plugins.
- Open the Similar notes view from the ribbon or the command palette.
- Build the index the first time you open the plugin.
- Switch between notes to see related notes update in the sidebar.
- Click keyword chips to boost specific terms in the ranking.
- Rebuild the index after large vault changes, or enable auto-reindex in settings.
Show similar notes panel: Open the sidebar view.Rebuild similarity index: Rebuild the TF-IDF index for the current vault.Check for changes: Show how many notes changed since the last index build.
| Setting | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum results | 5 | Number of similar notes to show (1-20). |
| Minimum similarity | 15% | Minimum score required for a result to appear (0-50%). |
| Hash dimensions | 2048 | Vector size used for hashing. Higher is more precise but slower. |
| Content excerpt length | 1500 | Characters of note content to analyze. |
| Open panel on start | Off | Open the view automatically when Obsidian starts. |
| Auto-reindex on changes | Off | Rebuild automatically when notes change. |
| Auto-reindex delay | 30s | Debounce window before an automatic rebuild. |
Similar Notes builds a TF-IDF index across markdown files in your vault:
- Tokenize each note into meaningful terms.
- Weight terms by how distinctive they are across the vault.
- Hash the term weights into fixed-size vectors.
- Rank notes by cosine similarity.
This favors notes that share distinctive vocabulary, which makes the ranking easier to inspect and reason about than embedding-based approaches.
This plugin follows Obsidian's disclosure guidance for community plugins.
| Concern | Status |
|---|---|
| Network calls | None |
| External APIs | None |
| Accounts required | None |
| Telemetry or analytics | None |
| External file access | Reads markdown files from the current vault only |
| Local storage | Stores the index in the plugin data folder inside the vault |
| Dependencies | @watthem/quarrel only |
| Payments | None |
| Ads | None |
| Closed-source components | None |
git clone https://github.com/watthem/quarrel-similar-notes.git
cd quarrel-similar-notes
npm install
npm run devUseful commands:
npm run buildbuilds the release bundle.npm testruns the test suite.npm run releasecopies release assets todist/release/.
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome in GitHub Issues. If you want to discuss ranking behavior or UX, the Obsidian forum is a good place to start a thread.
MIT. See LICENSE.