Disclaimer
Is this project open source? Yes
Is this project completely free? Yes
Is this project made with AI beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Obsidian Git on my phone kept stopping without telling me. I’d notice days later, when a note from
the laptop just wasn’t there. So I built a widget that watches for it.
How it works with Obsidian
It reads a folder you point it at through Android’s file picker — your vault root or any subfolder.
It finds the vault on its own by looking for .obsidian, so usually you only pick the notes folder
and it works out the rest.
The notes show up on the home screen as cards with a rendered preview, or as a compact list of
names. Tapping a note fires an obsidian://open deep link, so it opens in Obsidian at that exact
file. The + button uses obsidian://new to create a note in the same vault. The widget itself
never writes to your notes — everything that changes a file goes through Obsidian.
It doesn’t copy or convert anything. Your notes stay plain .md files in your own folder, and the
widget just renders what’s there.
The sync chip
If the folder is a git repo, the chip says synced 17:51, sync stuck after a half-finished merge,
or not pushed when the branch drifted from origin. It reads the plain files a git client leaves
behind, so it behaves the same with Obsidian Git, Git Sync or CLI git. It never runs git and never
goes online.
For Obsidian Sync or Syncthing there’s no real status — those keep their state in private app
storage nothing else can read, so it falls back to when a note last changed.
Links
Free, GPL-3.0, no account, no server: GitHub - marfolog/notes-widget-for-markdown: Android home screen widget for local Markdown notes, with git sync status · GitHub
It’s also in closed testing on Play, which needs 12 people for two weeks. Order matters: join
https://groups.google.com/g/notes-widget-testeri first, then
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.marfolog.noteswidgetformarkdown and tap “become a tester”.
The Play link alone says the app isn’t available until you’re in the group.
Curious how it holds up on launchers other than Pixel — that’s the one thing I can’t test myself.