markseek

Semantic search over your markdown vault. Built on Obsidian. Lightweight, local, zero-config.

Query by meaning, not keywords. Works offline. No API keys.

Why

You want semantic search over your Obsidian vault, your notes, or any folder of markdown files. Everything else that does this is either a heavy web app (PrivateGPT, AnythingLLM — full Docker containers, web UIs, hundreds of MB of RAM) or only works while the desktop app is open.

markseek is one package, no web server, no Docker, no cloud:

$ markseek "what did Frankl say about the bird"

Search results for: "what did Frankl say about the bird"

─── Result 1 (relevance: 0.91) ───
File: letters/Pen Pal.md
Snippet:
And then a bird lands on the dirt he just dug up and looks at him.
That's it. That's the whole philosophy. A man who has lost literally
everything and a bird lands and looks at him and the world is still,
for one second, looking back.

Install

pip install markseek

Quick Start

1. Configure your vault:

markseek --configure

Or point it directly via environment variable:

export MARKSEEK_VAULT_PATH="~/Documents/Obsidian Vault"

2. Search:

markseek "what does Frankl say about meaning and suffering" -n 5

3. Watch for changes (background index):

markseek --watch

Run this in a terminal, or as a systemd/launchd service. Whenever you modify a .md file in the vault, it gets re-indexed automatically within 2 seconds.

Commands

How It Works

1. Markdown files in your vault are chunked by paragraphs (~500 chars).
2. Local embeddings -- all-MiniLM-L6-v2 (~80MB, CPU, no GPU needed) converts each chunk to a vector.
3. ChromaDB stores the vectors locally for fast similarity search.
4. Auto-indexing -- a file watcher detects changes and re-indexes only the changed file.
5. Semantic queries -- your question gets embedded and matched against all chunks, ranked by cosine similarity.

No files are uploaded anywhere. Everything runs on your machine.

Configuration

Config file: ~/.config/markseek/config.yaml

vault_path: ~/Documents/Obsidian Vault
index_path: ~/.cache/markseek/index
model_name: all-MiniLM-L6-v2
max_chunk_size: 500
debounce_seconds: 2.0
log_level: INFO
extensions: [".md"]

Environment variables take priority:

• MARKSEEK_VAULT_PATH -- override vault path
• MARKSEEK_INDEX_PATH -- override index location

As a Library

from markseek.config import Config
from markseek.core import Index

cfg = Config.load()
index = Index(cfg)
results = index.search("meaning through encountering someone")

License

MIT. See LICENSE.