LinkOpen

Sharing Obsidian links

An obsidian:// link opens a specific note in a vault. Inside Obsidian it just works. Paste it into Notion, Slack, Gmail or a GitHub README, though, and it turns into plain text, because those tools only make web links clickable.

Copy the link to a note

Obsidian builds the link for you. Any of these works:

  • Command palette: Copy Obsidian URL for current file.
  • In the note, open More options and choose Copy path › as Obsidian URL.
  • On desktop, right-click the note in the file explorer and choose Copy path › as Obsidian URL.

You get something like obsidian://open?vault=Notes&file=Projects%2FRoadmap. Spaces become %20 and slashes become %2F. If you edit the link by hand, keep that encoding or Obsidian may not find the note.

Link to a heading or block

Add the heading to the end of the file value, after an encoded # (%23). For a block, use %23%5E (an encoded #^) and the block ID:

  • obsidian://open?vault=Notes&file=Projects%2FRoadmap%23Q3
  • obsidian://open?vault=Notes&file=Projects%2FRoadmap%23%5Eabc123

The deep link builder does this encoding for you. If you use the Advanced URI community plugin, it has its own format with separate parameters, for example obsidian://adv-uri?vault=Notes&filepath=Roadmap&heading=Q3, and it can also open a note at a given line.

Make it clickable in other apps

Notion, Slack, Gmail, GitHub, Linear and Confluence all drop obsidian:// links. The compatibility checker has the details for each. To get around it, wrap the link in an https address:

  1. Paste the Obsidian link into the LinkOpen converter and copy the result.
  2. Paste that https link wherever you need it. In Markdown: [Open in Obsidian](https://linkopen.app/s/…).
  3. Clicking it opens a page on linkopen.app, which passes the original link on to Obsidian.

What the other person needs

The link only names a vault and a note, so it works for someone who has Obsidian installed, a vault with the same name, and the note at the same path. In practice that means a shared vault, kept in sync through Obsidian Sync, iCloud or git.

Links written with a vault ID (vault=ef6ca3e3b524d22f) instead of a name may not match on someone else’s computer, so use the name for links you share. For people who don’t have the vault at all, an Obsidian link can’t help; publishing the note as a web page, with Obsidian Publish or an export, is the way to go.