I’ve been using the Claude.ai on the Max tier for the better part of six months now, and I’ve really come to like it, primarily because of MCP, but also because it’s encouraged me to use Obsidian more as my knowledgebase, instead of Drafts files and relying on Notion to be online to get things to work. As much as I enjoy Notion as a team and org tool, I don’t think it works for me on a personal level.
But another issue that I have with the Claude and Obsidian mix is that I have to have my MacBook Air with me, and connected to a network to get it to work. When I’m out and about I much prefer to have my cellular iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard as there are often times I just need to sit down for 30 mins in a coffee shop after dropping the kids off from school and get something done quickly.
Alas, the sandboxed nature of iOS/iPadOS doesn’t allow for that — but I discovered this video at the weekend with Noah Brier, who’s using Claude Code on top of his Obsidian vault:
He’s also using the PARA method for his Vault, something that I’ve always wanted to do but have never found the time for. Since I’m paying for Claude Max though, I thought that I would give this setup a try.
So for the last couple of days, I’ve done that. I installed Claude Code on top of my vault, and then I talked through with to reorganise my vault into something easier to work with — all via the command line.
And the nice thing about this that I can now access this from wherever I am. Phone, iPad, Windows PC etc. I’m no longer using iCloud to sync this information between devices, but I’m using SyncThing instead, and an app for iOS call Möbius Sync (I did pay the €6.99 to unlock the full app as it’s going to be constantly in use).
This morning I needed some more information on how to get the sync running on the Apple devices, and found this video pretty useful. My only issue was that I screwed up the sync and nearly lost everything, and had to manually move the files back off of my iPad and onto my Mac Mini server again.
I’m already running Tailscale on my home network so I can access various other services outside of the house, so this part of the setup was easy.
I really, really want to use Panic’s Prompt 3 app as my iOS/iPadOS terminal app of choice as I think they’re a great company, but I’ve paid for Prompt and Prompt 2 in the past and don’t have the spare app spend at the moment, so I’m using Termius instead.
So now I have:
- Access to my Obsidian Vault no matter where I am
- Access to Claude on top of my Obsidian Vault no matter where I am
- As long as I have a connection back to my home server.
Interestingly enough, as I was setting this up yesterday, CloudFlare had an outage that affected just about everyone, but Claude Code was able to work independently, ticking away in the background as I worked with it.
So this reduces the overhead of having to run an MCP server for Obsidian on top of Claude, for the time being. Although I’ve got more digging to do on how I can make the most of this setup.