How to Search Your Obsidian Vault by Meaning (With or Without a Plugin)

An Obsidian vault rewards you for remembering. Remember the note’s title and the quick switcher gets you there. Remember a word in it and search finds it. Remember that it links to your project note and the backlinks pane shows it.

The trouble starts with the note you wrote eighteen months ago and only half remember. You know what it was about. You do not know what you called it or which words you used.

What Obsidian’s search does

Obsidian’s core search is a strong keyword search. Beyond plain words, it supports:

• file: and path: to search names and folders
• tag: for tags
• line:, block: and section: to require words to appear together
• task: for checklist items
• regular expressions between slashes, and a match-case toggle

If you know roughly what words are in the note, this is fast and precise. What it cannot do is connect "ways to reduce churn" to a note titled "Why customers leave – call notes" that never says "churn". For that you need search by meaning.

Option 1: a plugin inside Obsidian

The best-known route is Smart Connections, a community plugin. It is free, and the important detail is that search does not need a cloud account: it starts creating embeddings with a local model as soon as you install it, with no API key and no extra apps. It then shows related notes as you write and lets you search by meaning inside Obsidian.

Chatting with an AI model about your notes has moved to a separate Smart Chat Pro plugin, and some Pro plugins are offered to people who support the project. The core plugins stay free.

There are others too. VaultSearch was a well-liked local hybrid search plugin, but it has been archived and is no longer available, which is the usual risk with community plugins.

If you spend your day inside Obsidian, a plugin is a natural fit. It lives where you write, and the related-notes sidebar is something a separate app cannot offer.

Option 2: search the vault along with the rest of your Mac

A plugin searches your vault. But the thing you are looking for is not always in your vault. Sometimes it is in a PDF in Downloads, a screenshot on the Desktop, an Apple note from your phone, or a recording of the call where it came up.

Dhito is a search app for your whole Mac that runs AI models locally. For Obsidian users, here is what it does:

• Finds your vaults automatically. It reads Obsidian’s own list of vaults, so it finds them wherever they live, iCloud included, without scanning your disk. No plugin to install.
• No permission prompt. A vault is a folder of Markdown files. Dhito reads it like any other folder.
• Searches by meaning. Notes are indexed by the same local model as your documents. "Ways to reduce churn" finds "Why customers leave".
• Reads your attachments too. The PDFs, images and audio in your vault folder are ordinary files, so Dhito indexes them like everything else: images are captioned and their text read, recordings are transcribed. A search can land on a slide pasted into a note, or the minute of a voice memo where something was said.
• One search across everything. Your vault, Apple Notes if you switch it on, documents, screenshots and recordings, ranked together. The 🗒️ Notes pill narrows to notes when you want.
• Works without Obsidian open. It is a separate app on a hotkey.

Because a Markdown note is an ordinary file, everything else in Dhito works on it too. You can chat with a long note and get answers that point to the passage, or convert a note to PDF or Word with one of the file tools. The result is always a new file next to the original, so your note is never overwritten.

One caution: Dhito’s smart rename suggests better file names and applies them when you accept. In a vault, renaming a note outside Obsidian can break wiki links that point to it. Leave rename for your Downloads folder, not your vault.

Everything stays on your Mac

This matters more for notes than for most files. Notes are where the half-formed, private stuff goes: health worries, money, drafts, people. Smart Connections keeps its embeddings local. Dhito does all of its indexing and search on your Mac too, with no account and nothing uploaded, and search works offline.

If you are looking at any other semantic search tool for your vault, the question to ask is what happens to your notes when you are not looking at the settings. Some tools work best with a cloud API key, and that means your notes are being sent somewhere to be embedded.

Which should you pick?

You can use more than one. Obsidian’s search for exact matches, a plugin for related notes while writing, and Dhito for "where did I put that" across the whole Mac. There is more about how Dhito handles notes, including Apple Notes, on the notes search page.

Obsidian’s links are a great way to find things you connected on purpose. Search by meaning is for the connections you did not make at the time, and that is most of them.