Creating custom plugins in Obsidian

Plugins

• I want some sort of a obsidian plugin where I can add some sort of a special syntax/identifier and add a path/filename to which the snippet below is added until I escape it using some sort of syntax again.
• Finally I want one more plugin which identifies this syntax and removes all of it from my .md files before pushing to github.
• Want a special button which runs a script which pushes to a remote github repo.

Making Plugin-1

We gotta understand how do the obsidian plugins work first.

The Plugin Class defines lifecycle of a plugin and exposes operations available to it. The onload fn configures resources needed by the plugin. The unload fn releases resources used by the plugin.

Cmd+Option+i is shortcut to open Developer Tools.

• We create a new plugin using documentation picked from the Obsidian website.
• We use editorCallback instead of callback as we need access to the editor. But if we use callback instead, we get something like ![[Screenshot 2025-01-01 at 11.09.54 PM.png]] which is accessible in the Command Palette.

I have written this much code now

this.addCommand({
id:"identify-n-add-to-pages",
name:"Identify path and add to Pages",
hotkeys:[{modifiers:['Mod','Shift'],key:'`'}],
editorCallback:(editor:Editor,view:MarkdownView)=>{
editor.setValue("kachow")
}
})

• This works ie. it adds kachow to the current page but removes everything else which is undesirable.
• To solve it, I find the last line and then add the word kachow! to it. It however removes any content on that line as well.
• So, we need to get content on the last line as well, concatenate it and replace.
• With a little messing around with the definitions given in the obsidian.d.ts file for the Editor type, I am able to get it working.

this.addCommand({
id:"identify-n-add-to-pages",
name:"Identify path and add to Pages",
hotkeys:[{modifiers:['Mod','Shift'],key:'`'}],//is Cmd in MacOS.
editorCallback:(editor:Editor,view:MarkdownView)=>{
// editor.setValue("kachow")
// let lastLine = editor.lineCount()
let cursorPosition = editor.getCursor() //get the line the cursor is at.
// let lastLineContent = editor.getLine(lastLine-1)
let currLineContent = editor.getLine(cursorPosition.line) //get content of that line.
console.log(currLineContent,cursorPosition)
// editor.setLine(lastLine-1,currLineContent+"kachow!")
editor.setLine(cursorPosition.line,currLineContent+"kachow!") //set the line to be the same.
}
})

• Now, we will need to see what the user is writing and identify whether it fits our pattern.

• For that, we need to attach event listeners to editor events.

• I tried using the Workspace class by creating an instance of it. After several tries of debugging the syntax, I GPT’ed the thing only to understand that I tried to instantiate something which is already created by default in the environment and that the environment wasn’t gonna be able to integrate another instantiation of the same thing.

Regex

• Next, we create a Regex pattern to identify what path to write the data to and what part should be written.
• Logically it should start with an identifier and so I am gonna start the identifier with <@{path}> and will copy everything from there until an <@end> is encountered.
• So it will be something like <@/Users/hk/Desktop/notes>.
• The initial regex I came up with was /<@(.|^>)>/i . The problem was that it was matching only one character ie. something like <@d> worked but wouldn’t work if length was greater than one.
• GPT came up with /<@([^>\\n\\r]*)>/i so logically, /<@([.|^>|^\r]*)>/i should work as well. `

Material

1. https://github.com/EvilGenius1010/add-shortcut-obs-plugin