Since joining GitHub in Sept. 2021, I’ve kept all my personal notes in Obsidian. This includes things like meeting notes and explanatory articles I write for myself like “WTF is SAML?” I also keep what I call code journals where I write a few bullets on progress I make when I work on side projects, which is helpful for catching me up after taking breaks.

For each company and organization I work with, I also keep a single, long-running markdown file. My longest one is 75,000 words! Sometimes it’s helpful to know things like “hey didn’t we discuss this already?”

Searching through the file for keywords using CMD+F sort of works sometimes, but unleashing GitHub Copilot on these kinds of use cases is far more effective. Setting this up is simple if you have a GitHub Copilot license:

• Upload your Obsidian vault to a GitHub repo. Most likely, you’ll want to double check that it’s a private repo.
• From the created repo on github.com, click the Copilot icon at the top right.
• This should open up a new chat on github.com/copilot, with your Obsidian vault loaded in as context.
• In my example above, I explicitly included the file with ~75k words, as I wanted to quickly get some context on whether a particular topic had been discussed before.
  • In a github.com/copilot chat window, you can explicitly reference individual files by clicking the “Add files, repositories, and spaces” at the bottom left of the text entry box.
• I typed in my prompt, and voilà. Using Sonnet 4.5, it easily handled the 75k word context window and quickly caught me up on the past discussion areas I looked for. So much faster than trying to manually skim my notes.

Handling and processing huge chunks of text is a key domain where LLMs excel. I know there are other ways to do this with Obsidian plugins, but if you’re already backing up your Obsidian vault to a GitHub repo, this is a straightforward way to quickly ask questions about your notes.