Is the Obsidian Local REST API plugin needed for Seekstone?

No, Seekstone reads the vault directly from disk and does not require the REST API plugin.

How does Seekstone's search performance compare to REST proxy servers?

Seekstone returns warm search results in approximately 6.2 milliseconds for 10,000 notes, significantly faster than REST proxy servers which can take up to 1,550 milliseconds.

What platforms does Seekstone support?

Seekstone supports macOS, Linux, and Windows.

How are frontmatter queries handled?

Seekstone includes built-in support for structured frontmatter queries with property, date, and size predicates.

Seekstone

Filesystem-direct Obsidian MCP server providing fast, low-overhead vault search and frontmatter queries without needing Obsidian or plugins.

Quick Install

Automated & IDE Setup

Copy the AI prompt to install this server into Claude Code, Cursor, or another agent — or use 1-click editor setup below.

Add to Cursor Add to VS Code

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Manual Client & Custom JSON ConfigExpand JSON ▾

Client Config & Setup

Choose your client or environment

Target File:~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "shaqmughal-seekstone": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "seekstone"
      ]
    }
  }
}

💡 Paste the JSON block into your client's configuration file under mcpServers, then restart the application.

Overview

Seekstone is an MCP server that enables direct read and write access to an Obsidian vault by reading files directly from disk. It does not require the Obsidian app to be running or any plugins installed, reducing context payload sizes significantly. Seekstone maintains a warm full-text index in-process, enabling single-digit millisecond search latency and structured frontmatter queries. It is suitable for developers needing efficient, local access to Obsidian vault data with minimal overhead.

Use cases

Search large Obsidian vaults with low latency

Query structured frontmatter properties efficiently

Access and modify vault files without running Obsidian

Integrate Obsidian data into AI agents or tools via MCP

Perform local vault operations with minimal context payload

Key features

Direct filesystem access to Obsidian vault

No Obsidian app or plugins required

Single-digit millisecond warm search latency

Extremely small search payloads (~2 KB at 10k notes)

Built-in structured frontmatter queries (query_notes)

Cross-platform support: macOS, Linux, Windows

Capabilities & Tool Schemas (21)Self-reported

Inspect callable tools, capabilities, and parameters exposed to AI agents by Seekstone.

search

Full-text search. Returns ranked excerpts (default ~120 chars, tunable via `excerptLength`), not full notes. Fuzzy and prefix matching; with `SEEKSTONE_SEMANTIC=1`, `mode: "semantic"`/`"hybrid"` searches by meaning via a local embedding model (nothing leaves your machine).

query_notes

Structured metadata query. Filter by frontmatter key/value predicates (`eq`, `ne`, `contains`, `exists`, `missing`, `gt`/`gte`/`lt`/`lte`), tag, folder, modified time, and size; sort and select the fields you need. Returns compact rows (path + title by default), not note content.

context_pack

Answer-ready context for a natural-language question in one call, hard-capped at a byte budget (default 2 KB): ranked excerpts, linked neighbor notes with one-line summaries, and follow-up source paths — replaces a search → read → get_backlinks round-trip loop.

read_note

Read the full content of a note by vault-relative path. Supports returning a single section, block, or line range.

list_notes

List notes, optionally filtered by folder prefix or tag.

list_tags

List all tags in the vault sorted by usage count (or alphabetically).

Documentation Overview

The Obsidian MCP server that needs no plugin, no running Obsidian app — and doesn't blow your context window.

Filesystem-direct · single-digit-ms keyword search · ~26 ms semantic · ~2 KB payloads · 21 tools · macOS · Linux · Windows

seekstone.dev →

	Seekstone	obsidian-mcp-server (#1 by downloads)	REST-proxy servers
Local REST API plugin	Not needed	Required	Required
Obsidian app running	Not needed — works with Obsidian closed	Required	Required
Search payload @ 10k notes	2.0 KB	47 KB	up to 95 MB
Warm search latency @ 10k notes	5.2 ms	732 ms (~141× slower)	up to 1,550 ms
Structured frontmatter queries	Built-in (`query_notes`) — property/date/size predicates, answers in a few hundred bytes	JSONLogic via REST	Varies

^{Same queries, same committed vaults, 20 runs each, one machine. In-process adapters were re-run on the fixture-v2 vault in September 2026; the REST-proxy rows (rest, obsidian-mcp-server, mcp-obsidian) plus obsidian-mcp and obsidian-mcp-pro are June 2026 captures on fixture v1 — per-row provenance in benchmarks.json, the generated source of truth every number here is checked against in CI — full results across eight servers and three vault sizes below, fully reproducible from the harness.}

Seekstone demo — Claude searching an Obsidian vault and querying frontmatter, with tool-call waits time-lapsed

What is Seekstone?

Seekstone is an Obsidian MCP server — it gives Claude (and any Model Context Protocol client) direct read and write access to your Obsidian vault. No Obsidian app needs to be open, no plugins are required, and nothing leaves your machine.

It reads your vault directly from disk rather than routing through the Obsidian Local REST API plugin, and holds a warm full-text index in-process. The practical difference is twofold:

Speed. Keyword searches return in single-digit milliseconds warm and semantic searches in ~26 ms — up to ~514× faster than every other Obsidian MCP server we benchmarked, because there's no subprocess to spawn and no HTTP round-trip per query.
Context. A broad search that returns tens of megabytes and millions of tokens via a REST-proxy server returns ~2 KB via Seekstone — up to a ~47,000× reduction that only widens as your vault grows.

Search comes in three modes: ranked full-text search (fuzzy and prefix matching), optional local semantic search (meaning-based, via a small on-device embedding model — opt-in, offline at runtime after a one-time ~30 MB model download), and structured metadata queries — query_notes filters by frontmatter properties (status, due, type, …), tags, folder, modified time, and size, answering questions like "which draft notes changed this week?" in a few hundred bytes instead of a search-and-read loop.

Claude can search and read your entire note library, in milliseconds, without burning most of its context window on a single tool call.

Published on npm as seekstone — install with npx -y seekstone. (Previously also published as obsidian-mcp-seekstone; that alias is deprecated but existing installs keep working.)

Why Seekstone? The numbers.

Most Obsidian MCP servers return full note content for every search hit. On a broad query that's megabytes of text your LLM has to process — most of it irrelevant, all of it burning context window.

Seekstone returns short ranked excerpts instead (~120 characters by default, tunable per query). We benchmarked Seekstone against 7 other Obsidian MCP servers — 8 servers total — across three vault sizes — 1,000 / 5,000 / 10,000 notes (20 runs each). Every number below is fully reproducible: the vaults are committed to this repo (generated from the public-domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), so you can clone it and run the exact same benchmark yourself.

The point of testing three sizes is that this is where the architectures diverge — a real vault only grows.

Search payload — bytes returned per query (context tax; lower is better)

Server	Architecture	1k notes	5k notes	10k notes
🥇 Seekstone	in-process index	1.6 KB	1.8 KB	2.0 KB
mcpvault	fs-direct subprocess	1.7 KB	1.9 KB	2.2 KB
obsidian-mcp-rs	fs-direct, per-query scan	5.4 KB	5.8 KB	6.2 KB
obsidian-tc	SQLite platform	4.6 KB	6.8 KB	7.2 KB
obsidian-mcp-server	REST API	55 KB	47 KB	47 KB
obsidian-mcp-pro	fs-direct subprocess	25 KB	84 KB	114 KB
obsidian-mcp	fs-direct subprocess	18 KB	105 KB	201 KB
mcp-obsidian	REST API	9.8 MB	45 MB	95 MB

Read the full README →View source on GitHub →

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Frequently Asked Questions about Seekstone

No, Seekstone works independently and does not require the Obsidian app to be open.

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