Tinymist for Obsidian

Write Typst in Obsidian. Properly.
A real Typst editor, a live preview in your workspace, and PDFs that stay ordinary vault files.

Typst is a modern typesetting system — the power of LaTeX without the pain. This plugin makes .typ files a first-class document type in your vault, backed by Tinymist, the Typst language server.

Your papers, theses, and reports live beside your notes. Not in another app.

Source on the left, the real rendered document on the right, updating as you type.

What you get

Install

From Obsidian — open Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for Tinymist, install, and enable. Or use the directory page.

Then install Tinymist itself. The plugin drives the real Typst engine, which you install separately — Obsidian's developer policies do not allow a plugin to install or update its own dependencies.

Check it worked:

tinymist -V     # tinymist 0.15.8

That is the whole setup. The plugin finds it automatically, including the package-manager locations a desktop app does not normally see.

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.13.0+, desktop. The plugin launches a native executable, which Obsidian mobile cannot do.
• A vault stored on the filesystem.
• Tinymist 0.13.0+.

Using it

Open any .typ file. Tinymist starts on first use, and the status bar shows what it is doing.

Press the book button in the editor's tab bar to open the preview beside your source. Everything else lives in the command palette:

No default hotkeys are set, so nothing collides with yours. Bind your own under Settings → Hotkeys.

The preview's own controls float over the page: refresh, open source, and a theme button that steps between following the app, light, and dark.

To start a document, right-click any folder in the file explorer and choose New Typst file, or run Typst: Create new Typst file. Obsidian's own New note always makes Markdown and its menu cannot be extended, so Typst files get their own entry right beside it.

The status bar

Not only papers

Typst does full layout — columns, floats, images, colour, and the package ecosystem. Anything Typst can typeset, this previews.

Projects

Typst resolves imports and absolute paths against a project root, which is not necessarily your vault root. By default the root is the nearest folder containing a typst.toml, and otherwise the document's own folder:

vault/
├── notes/
└── papers/
    └── distributed-systems/
        ├── typst.toml          ← makes this folder a project
        ├── main.typ
        ├── bibliography.bib
        └── figures/

Without a typst.toml, papers/distributed-systems/main.typ still gets its own folder as the root — so two papers never collide.

The alternatives are Always the vault root (one project; /-absolute imports reach anywhere) and A folder I choose. Changing this restarts Tinymist, which reads it at startup.

PDF export

Export writes a normal file into your vault, and Obsidian takes it from there. This plugin does not register a PDF view, intercept .pdf files, or bundle a PDF renderer — opening any PDF uses Obsidian's own viewer.

• By default the PDF lands beside its source; set a folder in settings to collect them elsewhere.
• With Replace existing PDFs off, an existing name.pdf is never clobbered: the export goes to name-1.pdf.
• Intermediate files stay in the plugin's own folder, never in your notes.

Settings

Privacy and network use

This plugin makes no network requests. No telemetry, no analytics, no accounts, no remote code or styles. Once Tinymist is installed, everything works offline.

Obsidian's automated review flags two capabilities. Both are inherent to driving an external compiler, and here is exactly what they amount to:

• It launches one external program. child_process.spawn starts the Tinymist executable, always with shell: false and an argument array, so no string from a document, filename, or setting is ever handed to a shell. No shell is run, and no program other than the one you configured.
• It has no filesystem access outside your vault. The plugin imports no filesystem module at all — node:child_process is the only Node module in the bundle. Everything it reads or writes in your vault goes through Obsidian's Vault API.

Inside your vault it reads the .typ files you open, writes PDFs you export, and keeps its settings in .obsidian/plugins/tinymist/.

What Tinymist itself reads once launched is Typst's own behaviour: system fonts, and Typst's package cache for any #import from a package. Tinymist may fetch a Typst package the first time a document imports one — a Typst feature, outside the plugin's control, and the only route by which anything here reaches the internet.

The preview runs a loopback HTTP server that Tinymist starts on an ephemeral port while a preview tab is open. It is not reachable from other machines, and has no authentication, so on a shared machine another local process could read a document you are previewing.

grep -c 'fetch(\|XMLHttpRequest\|new WebSocket\|requestUrl' main.js   # 0
grep -o 'require("[^"]*")' main.js | sort -u                          # no http module

Troubleshooting

Tinymist is not found

If tinymist -V works in a terminal but the plugin says it is missing: an app launched from Finder, the Dock, or a desktop shortcut does not inherit your shell's PATH. On macOS it gets /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin, which excludes Homebrew's /opt/homebrew/bin.

which tinymist        # /opt/homebrew/bin/tinymist
launchctl getenv PATH # usually empty — the GUI default is used instead

The plugin works around this by also searching where package managers install (Homebrew, MacPorts, Cargo, ~/.local/bin, Snap, Flatpak, scoop, winget). If yours lives elsewhere, set the full path in settings — that always wins.

The developer console is full of preview messages

Lines like recv diff-v1 1388 and parse 0.20 ms, rerender 2.20 ms come from Tinymist's preview frontend, not from this plugin. They are prefixed (index) and originate from http://127.0.0.1:<port>.

The preview deliberately runs in a cross-origin iframe, which is what keeps rendered documents away from Obsidian's DOM and APIs, and a page cannot silence the console of a frame it does not share an origin with. Filter the console on [tinymist: to see only this plugin's output.

Something else is wrong

Set Logging to debug in settings, reproduce, and open the developer console (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+I). Plugin lines are prefixed [tinymist:…]. Document contents are never logged.

Then open an issue.

Known limitations

• Desktop only.
• Obsidian's find bar does not reach the Typst editor; CodeMirror's own search panel (Ctrl/Cmd+F) is provided instead.
• Markdown features — backlinks, tags, the outline — do not apply to .typ.
• Only one plugin can own the .typ extension. Do not enable another Typst editor plugin in the same vault.
• Changing the executable, project, font, or formatter settings restarts Tinymist.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup, and SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability privately.

Credits

Built on Tinymist by Myriad-Dreamin, and Typst. Typst syntax highlighting comes from codemirror-lang-typst.

This is an independent, unofficial integration. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Tinymist project, the Typst project, or Obsidian.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Third-party components are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. Tinymist is Apache-2.0 and is not bundled with or modified by this plugin.