Lean Launcher: Capture Notes to Obsidian Without Switching Apps

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In a Nutshell

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Switching to Obsidian every time an idea strikes breaks your focus, even when the interruption only takes a few seconds. Lean Launcher is a free, open-source Windows launcher that captures tasks, notes, and logs straight into your vault without opening Obsidian at all, and jumps you straight to any note when you actually need to open one. This post walks through capture, note search, the rest of its launcher features, and how to set it up.

Capture Tasks, Notes, and Logs Without Opening Obsidian

Press Alt+Space from anywhere on Windows to open Lean Launcher. It works whether Obsidian is open, minimized, or not running at all, because capturing text only needs Obsidian’s configuration file, which Lean Launcher checks automatically - not the app itself.

Type a prefix followed by your text and hit Enter, and it lands in today’s daily note.

  • t <text> adds a to-do to your daily note as a task.
  • a <text> appends a free-form line - an idea, a note, anything you’d otherwise open Obsidian to jot down.

Both work identically whether you’re inside Obsidian, in another app, with Obsidian minimized, or with Obsidian closed entirely. Lean Launcher creates the day’s note if it doesn’t exist yet and formats the entry correctly either way.

Log capture works the same way but lands differently. Type l <text> and Lean Launcher finds a specific heading you’ve configured (“Log”, by default) and adds a timestamped line under it, instead of just appending to the bottom of the note. If you’ve never tried logging instead of traditional journaling, Obsidian for logging helps with journaling covers why it’s worth trying.

Jump to Any Note by Title

Type o followed by part of a note’s title, and Lean Launcher fuzzy-searches your vault and opens the matching note directly in Obsidian.

This is the one deliberate exception to “Obsidian doesn’t need to run.” Jumping to a note requires Obsidian to actually be running, with its command-line interface enabled in Obsidian’s own settings - unlike capture, which needs neither. It’s still fast: search, hit Enter, and you’re in the note.

Still a Full App Launcher

Lean Launcher is forked from Takeoff, and it keeps that general-purpose launcher functionality underneath the Obsidian integration.

  • Launch apps - type an app’s name and hit Enter.
  • Find files - search by filename; Ctrl+K opens an action menu with options like opening the containing folder.
  • Web search - the w prefix sends your query to your configured search engine. You’re not stuck with Google: pick from Bing, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, Ecosia, Brave, or Kagi in Settings, or point it at any custom search engine using a URL template.
  • Calculator - type an expression like 2+2*3 for an instant inline result (8, correctly respecting order of operations).

Search is scoped by context: search unscoped and you get matching apps and files together; add the file prefix and you get files only; add the web prefix and it skips straight to a search-engine query.

Plenty of other launchers do all of this, and often more. PowerToys and Raycast are both genuinely more feature-rich than Lean Launcher - see Top 3 PowerToys Features for my Productivity for what PowerToys alone can do. But that feature depth comes with weight: both are heavier on system resources than Lean Launcher, which stays intentionally small and fast at exactly what it needs to do, nothing more.

Settings and Customization

Open Settings from the launcher’s settings icon to configure every part of it.

  • Shortcuts - the hotkey to open the launcher (Alt+Space by default), the actions menu (Ctrl+K), running as administrator (Ctrl+Enter), and quick-launch shortcuts (Alt+1 through Alt+8) - all rebindable.
  • System - autostart, the system tray icon, and automatic update checks (toggle off for manual control).
  • Search - enable or disable file search and web search independently, choose your web search engine from a preset list or define a custom one with a URL template, and set custom prefixes for file, web, and app search.
  • Obsidian - turn the whole Obsidian integration on or off; if you don’t use Obsidian, disable it and Lean Launcher still works as a general launcher. When enabled, pick your vault from a list Lean Launcher pulls automatically from Obsidian.
  • Per-action settings - note search, task capture, note capture, and log capture each get their own enable/disable toggle, custom prefix, and custom label. Log capture also lets you set which heading it targets.
  • Capture destination - by default, captures go to today’s daily note. You can instead point Lean Launcher at a specific folder rather than the daily note.

Lean Launcher also auto-detects your daily-note setup, whether you use the core Daily Notes plugin, Periodic Notes, or the Journals plugin - nothing to configure there.

Download and Install

There’s nothing to install - Lean Launcher ships as a single executable.

Grab leanlauncher.exe from the latest release on GitHub. Windows SmartScreen will warn that the file isn’t commonly downloaded, since it’s new and doesn’t carry a paid code-signing certificate. Click “More info,” then “Run anyway,” and start the executable from wherever you saved it.

No installer, no sign-up, no account. It doesn’t use AI or an LLM, and everything stays on your machine. The executable is about 500 KB and uses under 10 MB of RAM once running, sitting quietly in the background until you summon it.

If you also want a real terminal inside Obsidian - for the CLI integration Note Jump depends on, running scripts, or working with an LLM - check out Lean Terminal, the companion plugin that brings a terminal straight into Obsidian.