Similar Notes

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.

Status

Manual install is available from GitHub Releases. The plugin is not yet listed in Obsidian's Community Plugins directory.

Features

• 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.

Installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Create a folder at .obsidian/plugins/quarrel-similar-notes/ inside your vault.
3. Copy the three release files into that folder.
4. Reload Obsidian and enable Similar Notes in Settings -> Community plugins.

Usage

1. Open the Similar notes view from the ribbon or the command palette.
2. Build the index the first time you open the plugin.
3. Switch between notes to see related notes update in the sidebar.
4. Click keyword chips to boost specific terms in the ranking.
5. Rebuild the index after large vault changes, or enable auto-reindex in settings.

Commands

• 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.

Settings

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.

How It Works

Similar Notes builds a TF-IDF index across markdown files in your vault:

1. Tokenize each note into meaningful terms.
2. Weight terms by how distinctive they are across the vault.
3. Hash the term weights into fixed-size vectors.
4. 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.

Privacy And Disclosures

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

Development

git clone https://github.com/watthem/quarrel-similar-notes.git
cd quarrel-similar-notes
npm install
npm run dev

Useful commands:

• npm run build builds the release bundle.
• npm test runs the test suite.
• npm run release copies release assets to dist/release/.

Feedback

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.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.