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notmehul/auto-linker

AutoLink

AutoLink is a privacy-first, macOS-only Obsidian plugin that automatically suggests meaningful connections between your notes. It uses a fully local machine learning model to understand the meaning of your writing, helping you discover links you might have missed.


💡 What it does (for non-tech users)

As you write in Obsidian, AutoLink works in the background to find other notes in your vault that are related to your current topic.

  • Smart Suggestions: When you type [[, it doesn't just look for note titles; it looks for notes with similar ideas.
  • Relationship Types: It tells you how notes are related—whether one note supports, contradicts, or extends another.
  • 100% Private: Your notes never leave your computer. All the "thinking" happens locally on your Mac.
  • High Precision: It only shows suggestions when it's very confident (>90%), so you aren't overwhelmed by weak matches.

🧩 Jargon Explained

  • Embeddings: A way for the computer to turn text into a list of numbers that represent its meaning.
  • Vector Search: A super-fast way to compare those lists of numbers to find notes with the most similar meanings.
  • Local ML: "Machine Learning" that runs entirely on your device, without needing the internet or a cloud provider like OpenAI.

🔒 Security & Privacy

Your data is yours. AutoLink is built on the principle of absolute local privacy:

  • No Cloud: Your notes are never sent to any server.
  • No Telemetry: We do not track what you write or how you use the plugin.
  • Local Processing: The machine learning model (bge-micro-v2) runs entirely on your Mac's CPU/GPU.
  • Local Storage: All data is stored in a simple database file within your vault at .obsidian/plugins/autolink/data/autolink.db.

🚀 Installation

AutoLink is currently optimized for macOS (Apple Silicon arm64 or Intel x64).

Option 1: Community Plugins (Recommended)

  1. Open Obsidian Settings > Community Plugins.
  2. Click Browse and search for AutoLink.
  3. Click Install, then Enable.

Option 2: BRAT (For Beta Testers)

  1. Install the BRAT plugin.
  2. Add the repository: fivelabs/autolink.

Option 3: Manual Installation

  1. Download the latest release from the Releases page.
  2. Create a folder named autolink in your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory.
  3. Unzip the release assets into that folder.
  4. Restart Obsidian and enable the plugin in settings.

🛠 For Developers

Prerequisites

  • macOS 12.0+: Required for native sqlite-vec extensions.
  • Bun: Our preferred runtime and package manager.

Setup & Build

# Install dependencies
bun install

# Build the plugin
bun run build

# Development mode (watch)
bun run dev

Repository Structure

  • src/: Main plugin source code.
  • models/: Contains the quantized ONNX embedding model (bge-micro-v2.onnx).
  • native/: Pre-compiled sqlite-vec binaries for macOS.

❓ Troubleshooting

macOS Gatekeeper Issues

If you see an error saying "Apple cannot check it for malicious software" when the plugin tries to load the native components:

  1. Open System Settings on your Mac.
  2. Go to Privacy & Security.
  3. Scroll down to the "Security" section.
  4. You should see a message about vec0.dylib being blocked. Click Open Anyway.
  5. Restart Obsidian.

⚖️ License & Attribution

Copyright © 2026 Five Labs. Released under the MIT License.

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a simple tool that gives automatic suggestions to link notes inside obsidian to create a knowledge graph

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