🧠 Smarter Markdown Hotkeys

A plugin for Obsidian providing hotkeys that select words and lines in a smart way¹ before applying markup. Multiple cursors are supported as well.

Table of Contents

• Markup Commands with Smart Expansion
  • Command-Specific Details
• Non-Markup Commands with Smart Expansion Logic
  • Smarter Punctuation Commands
  • Smarter Case Switching
  • Smarter Delete Text
• Commands without Smart Expansion
  • Smarter Toggle Heading
  • Smarter Insert New Line
  • Smarter Delete Current Note
  • Smarter Copy Path
  • Smarter Copy File Name
  • Toggle Readable Line Length & Toggle Line Numbers
• How the Smart Expansion works in detail
• Setting the Hotkeys
• Installation
• Contribute
• About the Developer
  • Profiles
  • Donate
• Credits

Markup Commands with Smart Expansion

• Smarter Bold
• Smarter Italics
• Smarter Underscore Bold (__foobar__)
• Smarter Underscore Italics (_foobar_)
• Smarter Comment*
• Smarter HTML Comment*
• Smarter Inline/Fenced Code*
• Smarter Highlight
• Smarter Bold & Highlight²
• Smarter Italics & Highlight²
• Smarter Strikethrough
• Smarter Markdown/Image Link
• Smarter Wikilink (Internal Link)
• Smarter Wikilink with Heading
• Smarter Mathjax*
• Smarter Callout Label

All commands also support multiple cursors, smart inclusion/exclusion of special characters, and undoing markup by triggering the same hotkey.

* These commands wrap whole blocks instead of wrapping each line when the hotkey is triggered on a multi-line selection. They also switch to the appropriate syntax, for example from inline code syntax to fenced code syntax. (See below for details.)

Command-Specific Details

The following commands have some special features:

Smarter Markdown/Image Link

• Auto-Insert URLs: When you use Smarter Markdown Link and have an URL in your clipboard, the URL will automatically get inserted as well.
• Automatic Switch to Image Syntax When the URL in the clipboard ends with an image extension like .png,³ the command will also prepend the ! for image links.

Smarter Inline/Fenced Code

• Terms instead of Words: Smarter Code will not consider punctuation or brackets as delimiters. This means that a cursor anywhere in "object.method" will select the whole term and result correctly in "object.method" instead of "object.method". (Similar to WORD in Vim.)
• Automatic Switch to Fenced Code Syntax: When more than one line is selected, Smarter Code will wrap the selected lines in fenced code syntax instead. Furthermore, the cursor is moved to the beginning of the fenced code block so you can conveniently enter the code language.
• 💡 Smarter Fenced Code synergizes well with the Codeblock Completer Plugin.

Smarter Comment

• Automatic Switch to Block Comments: When more than one line is selected, the Smarter Comment commands will expand the selection to whole blocks and then wrap all of them together into the comment syntax.

Smarter Wikilink

• Auto-Suggest: When turning text into a wikilink, Smarter Wikilinks will trigger the suggester afterwards.
• Wikilink a Heading: Alternative command that inserts the syntax for a markdown link to a heading, and also triggers the Suggester after doing so. (i.e., instead of [[ ]], it uses [[## ]]).

Smarter Mathjax

• Automatic Switch to Blocks: When more than one line is selected, the Smarter MathJax command will also expand the selection to whole blocks and switch from $ to $$. (I do not use Mathjax myself, so feel free to open an issue when the Mathjax command can be improved somehow.)

Smarter Callout Label

Turns the text under the cursor into a callout label.

Demo

Non-Markup Commands with Smart Expansion Logic

Smarter Punctuation Commands

While strictly speaking quotation marks and brackets are not a form of markup, I found it quite useful to be able to set them in the same way. Therefore, the following commands have been added as well.

• Smarter Quotation Marks
• Smarter Round Brackets
• Smarter Square Brackets
• Smarter Curly Brackets

When there is no selection, the the Smarter Punctuation Commands essentially emulate ysiw", ysiw), ysiw], and ysiw} from vim-surround.

Smarter Case Switching

The same logic can also be applied to case switching commands. First, the selection is expanded to whole words. Then, the casing of the whole selection is changed. Instead of having multiple hotkeys for each type of casing, this command smartly switches the case depending on the current state.

• lower case → Sentence case*
• Sentence case* → UPPER CASE
• UPPER CASE → lower case
• OTheR → Sentence case

This allows you to repeatedly press the hotkey to achieve a certain result, e.g. two times on a lowercase word to make it UPPERCASE.

* Sentence case means that the first letter of the string will be capitalized, like in an English sentence. If the string only contains one word, Sentence case produces the same result as Capital Case.

Smarter Delete Text

Deletes text with the same text-expanding logic from the smarter markdown commands. (This command is similar to daw in Vim.)

Commands without Smart Expansion

These commands have simply been added for convenience. They do not use any kind of selection expansion, but are still attempts to improve the normal commands they correspond to.

Smarter Toggle Heading

Increases the Heading Level of the line under the cursor by 1. If already at 6, removes the heading instead. Intended for pressing it quickly multiple times, e.g. pressing the hotkey 3 times to turn a normal line into a h3.

Smarter Insert New Line

Inserts line break, even when the cursor is in a nested list. Pressing return in a nested list normally inserts a line break followed by a indented list marker. (This command is essentially the same as o in Vim.)

Smarter Delete Current Note

Deletes the current note, but also goes back to the last file instead of leaving an empty pane. (This requires Confirm File Deletion in the Obsidian settings to be disabled.)

Smarter Copy Path

Press once to copy the vault-relative path of the current file, press a second time to copy the absolute path. Press a third time to copy the (vault-relative) path to the parent folder.

Smarter Copy File Name

Press once to copy the name of the current file without extension, press a second time to copy it with extension.

Toggle Readable Line Length & Toggle Line Numbers

These do pretty much what the name says.

How the Smart Expansion works in detail

Inline code signifies the part of the text being selected. | is a cursor without selection. This table serves as a reference for the precise mechanics of this plugin.

You can take a look which characters exactly are included or excluded by taking a look at the const.ts.

Setting the Hotkeys

If you want to replace the default commands from Obsidian, remember to remove their hotkey binding before changing the hotkeys from this plugin. Example for Smarter Bold:

1. Remove the hotkey cmd/ctrl + B⁴ for the default command Toggle Bold.
2. Assign cmd/ctrl + B as the hotkey for the command Smarter Bold.

💡 For the Smarter Punctuation Commands, you can also use a hotkey with shift, e.g. shift + 2 for Smarter Quotation Marks. Curiously, Obsidian accepts such hotkeys, so you can basically "overwrite" normal punctuation typing if you want to.

However, note that this comes at the cost of losing the ability to type punctuation normally. Also, this does seem to result in minor bugs, e.g. interference with Obsidian's in-document search.

Installation

The plugin is available in Obsidian's Community Plugin Browser via: Settings → Community Plugins → Browse → Search for "Smarter Markdown Hotkeys"

Contribute

The easiest way to make contributions is to make changes to const.st, since the constants there determine commands and what to include/exclude.

Please use the .eslintrc configuration located in the repository and run eslint before doing a pull request, and do not use prettier. 🙂

# Run eslint fixing most common mistakes
eslint --fix *.ts

About the Developer

In my day job, I am a sociologist studying the social mechanisms underlying the digital economy. For my PhD project, I investigate the governance of the app economy and how software ecosystems manage the tension between innovation and compatibility. If you are interested in this subject, feel free to get in touch!

Profiles

• Academic Website
• ResearchGate
• Discord
• GitHub
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Donate

If you feel very generous, you may also buy me something from my Amazon wish list. But please donate something to developers who still go to college, before you consider buying me an item from my wish list! 😊

Amazon wish list

Credits

Thanks to @SkepticMystic for his support during development.

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