Obsidian Rolodex ("obrol") is a small CLI written in Go to manage a contact database stored as Markdown files, designed to be browsed in Obsidian. Each contact is a Markdown file with a YAML frontmatter block containing fields like email, last contact date, and location.

• Reads configuration from a TOML file, pointing to your contacts directory.
• Lists contacts in a tabular view (Name, Last Contact, Email, Location).
• Adds new contacts with frontmatter keys present even when values are omitted.
• Updates existing contacts by case-insensitive, partial name match.
• Quickly marks a contact as contacted today via touch.

• Go 1.24+

• With Make: make build (binary at bin/obrol)
• With Go: go build -o bin/obrol ./cmd/obrol.go

brew tap dce/taps
brew install obrol

• Upgrade: brew upgrade obrol

• Tags drive releases: create a tag like v1.2.3 and push.
• GitHub Actions runs GoReleaser on tags to build macOS (arm64) tarballs, publish checksums, and push a Formula update to vigetlabs/homebrew-taps/Formula/obrol.rb.
• Version info is baked into the binary via ldflags and defaults to dev for non-release builds.

Obrol expects a TOML config file specifying the directory that contains your contact Markdown files.

• Default path: ~/.config/obrol/config.toml
• Override with: -c /path/to/config.toml

Config file format:

# ~/.config/obrol/config.toml
basedir = "/absolute/or/relative/path/to/contacts"

Notes:

• basedir must exist and be a directory.
• Relative paths are resolved relative to the current working directory.
• ~ is expanded to your home directory.

Each contact is a Markdown file named by the contact's name, for example: Firstname Lastname.md.

Frontmatter (always present keys):

---
email: someone@example.com
phone: 555-1234
last contact: 2025-09-30
location: City/Region
---

Optional freeform notes below the frontmatter.

• The tool treats email, phone, last contact (YYYY-MM-DD), and location as optional when reading; missing values display as blank in the list.
• When adding contacts, these keys are written even if values are blank.

General form:

obrol [-c /path/to/config.toml] <subcommand> [args]

Scan basedir for *.md (and *.markdown) files and print a table.

obrol list

Example output:

Name              Last Contact  Email                Phone      Location
Ada Lovelace      2025-09-28    ada@example.com                  London

Create a new contact file named Name.md in basedir. The YAML frontmatter always includes email, last contact, and location keys (blank when not provided).

obrol add [--email EMAIL] [--phone PHONE] [--location LOCATION] [--last-contact YYYY-MM-DD] Firstname Lastname

Examples:

obrol add "Grace Hopper"
obrol add --email grace@example.com --phone 555-1234 --location "Arlington, VA" --last-contact 2025-09-01 "Grace Hopper"

If the file already exists, the command errors without overwriting.

Update frontmatter fields of an existing contact. Matching uses case-insensitive substring against the contact name (from the filename). If multiple matches are found, the command errors and lists them.

obrol update [--email EMAIL] [--phone PHONE] [--location LOCATION] [--last-contact YYYY-MM-DD] NameQuery

Examples:

obrol update --email new@example.com "ada"
obrol update --location "UK" Ada

After a successful update, a confirmation message is printed indicating which fields were changed.

Append or prepend a dated note section to a contact’s Markdown file. The date heading is inserted as ## YYYY-MM-DD followed by your note text.

obrol note [--prepend] [--touch] [--date YYYY-MM-DD] \
  [-m TEXT ... | --file PATH | --stdin | --edit] NameQuery

Input modes (choose one; if none are given and stdin isn’t piped, $EDITOR opens):

• -m, --message TEXT: Repeatable; each becomes a new line.
• -f, --file PATH: Read note content from a file.
• --stdin: Read note content from standard input (useful with pipes or here-docs).
• -e, --edit: Open $EDITOR to compose the note.
• --touch: After inserting the note, also set "last contact" to today (same as running obrol touch).

Examples:

obrol note -m "Met at lunch." -m "Follow up next week." Ada
obrol note --stdin Ada <<'EOF'
Met at the conference.
Discussed a pilot next quarter.
EOF
obrol note --file notes/today.txt "Scofield"
obrol note --edit --prepend --date 2025-09-30 "Dana"
obrol note --touch -m "Quick check-in call." "Grace Hopper"

Update a contact’s "last contact" date to today (YYYY-MM-DD). Matching uses the same case-insensitive substring behavior as update and note.

obrol touch NameQuery

Examples:

obrol touch Ada
obrol touch "Grace Hopper"

Fish completion script is included at completions/obrol.fish.

• Install: make install-fish (copies to ~/.config/fish/completions/obrol.fish).
• Activate: start a new Fish session, or run source ~/.config/fish/completions/obrol.fish.
• Name suggestions: the completer queries obrol list and extracts the Name column.
  • If your config is not at the default path, add -c /path/to/config.toml to the current command line so completions can find it.

This project was developed with the assistance of ChatGPT for code generation.

MIT License -- see LICENSE for details.