Attention

Attention

Record where your attention went — then run into it again.

Highlight and comment on notes, transcripts and subtitles, and revisit what you marked. Annotations live in a sidecar file next to the original; the original file is never modified.

Most annotation plugins write ==highlights== into your notes. This one doesn't touch them. Most review plugins resurface whole notes, or highlights imported from a third-party service. This one resurfaces the passages you marked, wherever you marked them.

Using it

Select text in a note and a small bar appears: Mark it, or 💬 to write a comment. Click a picture for Mark, 💬 and 🔍 — zooming is still there, just no longer the only thing a click can do. A marked picture gets a ring rather than an underline, and behaves like any other mark from there. Turn that off in settings to capture only deliberately.

Either way, right-click a selection for the full menu:

• Highlight — in the default colour
• Highlight in colour… — pick from the palette
• Comment… — write a note against the passage (⌘/Ctrl+Enter saves)

Click a mark to read its comment and see every time that passage caught you; right-click it to edit or remove.

Marking something already marked doesn't create a second mark — it records another hit. A line that moves you three times over a year is the strongest thing this plugin can know about you, and the panel shows it as 3×. In editing modes these are appended to Obsidian's own context menu; reading mode gets its own, raised only when there is something to offer.

The ribbon's highlighter icon opens the panel, which has two views of the same annotations:

• This note — an outline, in document order, for finding your way around what you marked here
• All — across the vault, grouped by how long ago, with a Resurface button that brings back a handful you haven't revisited

Marks follow the note as you edit it — text inserted around them shifts them, text typed inside them widens them. A passage deleted or replaced outright can't be followed, so its mark is listed as lost rather than quietly discarded: it keeps its words, its comment and every time it caught you, and can be re-attached to a new selection without losing any of that.

Sort either view by document position, when it was last or first marked, or how many times it caught you. Hovering an entry reveals buttons to mark it again, comment on it, or remove it without going to find it first; right-click gives the full menu. The count appears only once a passage has caught you more than once. Clicking an entry jumps to the passage and flashes it. The panel appears on its own when you open a note that has annotations, and stays out of the way when you open one that doesn't.

Opening notes in reading mode

Off by default; turn it on under How notes open.

Marks live beside the note rather than in it, so reading mode costs nothing here — you can highlight and comment without ever leaving it. That makes it the natural way to hold material you collected in order to read it: the note stops inviting stray keystrokes, and nothing you do to it can be a typo.

It is not read-only. Obsidian has no such thing, and this doesn't invent one: Ctrl+E still switches to editing, and the file stays writable.

• Everything else opens as — the vault-wide default.

• Exceptions by folder — somewhere you write rather than read. The deepest matching folder wins, so raw can be reading while raw/drafts is not.

• Frontmatter overrules both, using the same keys as the Force note view mode plugin, so notes already carrying them keep working:

  obsidianUIMode: preview     # or: source
  obsidianEditingMode: live   # or: source
  

The mode is chosen when a note is opened, and only then. Press Ctrl+E to fix a typo, glance at another tab, come back — you are still editing. Plugins that force the mode on every activation need an "ignore open files" switch to escape that; not reconsidering is simpler and never surprises you.

Running a separate view-mode plugin alongside this will make them fight — whichever acts last wins, and the winner can change from open to open. Pick one.

On a phone

Everything works, with the gestures a phone has:

• Select text and lift your finger — the popover appears once the selection stops changing, which is later than the lift, since iOS lets you drag the handles afterwards.
• Press and hold for the full menu, wherever a right-click would give you one: a passage, a picture, an entry in the panel.
• The panel's row actions are always visible there rather than waiting for a hover that will never come.

Versus ==highlight==

Obsidian's own highlight is markdown syntax living in the note. That makes it sturdier than anything here — it cannot lose its anchor, because it is the text — and it travels to any markdown tool. What it can't do is carry a comment, a colour, or a date, or tell you what you marked last week; and it edits the file to exist at all.

Timestamps use a moment format string — the same vocabulary as daily note filenames — defaulting to YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss. Clear it for relative times ("3 days ago"), which follow your Obsidian's language.

Marks share one colour, set in settings. Choosing a swatch every time turns noticing something into a decision, and how often a passage caught you carries more than which shade you picked.

Marks are drawn as an underline by default. They are meant to be many, a page of filled blocks is unreadable, and a background fill looks exactly like ==highlight== — the one thing worth telling apart. Annotations carrying a comment get a little more weight. Switch to a background fill in settings.

Status

Working: markdown notes and — when Media Transcript is installed — its transcript panel. Marking a transcript line records the moment it happens at, so the review panel can put you back there: clicking the entry seeks the player and plays.

Transcript marks belong to the media file rather than to a subtitle track, and are re-found by timestamp and quote, so re-transcribing with a different engine doesn't orphan them.

See docs/architecture.md for the design and what's still open.

How it stores things

lecture.mp4              ← never touched
lecture.mp4.anno.json    ← your highlights and comments
周报.md                   ← never touched
周报.md.anno.json

One sidecar per annotated file, named after the target's full filename. Portable (move the media, take the annotations), sync-friendly (a conflict touches one file, not your whole library), and readable.

A highlight and a comment are the same thing — a comment is just an annotation with a body — so they share one file and one anchor.

Review

Not spaced repetition. The goal isn't to memorise a passage, it's to run into it again, so there's nothing to grade:

• Time buckets — today / this week / this month / earlier
• Resurface — a random handful, preferring what you haven't revisited

Building

npm install
npm run build
cp main.js manifest.json styles.css <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/attention/

License

MIT

Development

npm install
npm run dev      # esbuild watch — rebuilds and copies into the dev vault on every save
npm test         # vitest, watch with: npm run test:watch

npm run dev copies main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into every vault listed in .dev-vault (one per line) after every rebuild (styles.css is watched separately, so CSS-only edits deploy too). Point it elsewhere with VAULT_PLUGIN_DIR=/path/to/vault/.obsidian/plugins/attention, or set it empty to skip deploying.

The development vault is in this repository: fixtures/vault. Open it in Obsidian as a vault of its own and list it first in .dev-vault; see fixtures/README.md for what each note is for and which plugins it needs.

Copy, not symlink — this repo lives in iCloud Drive, and aiming a vault at an iCloud path risks Obsidian stalling on an evicted file.

Install hot-reload in the dev vault and Obsidian will reload the plugin on every rebuild; the build already writes the .hotreload marker it looks for. Without it, reload manually.

What is tested

npm test covers the pure logic — anchoring, sidecar path rules, the review policy — and placing a reading-mode selection against the DOM Obsidian draws (under happy-dom). All of it decides whether a passage you marked can still be found and shown to you again, and all of it fails silently when wrong, which is exactly what clicking around does not catch.

npm run e2e checks the rest in a running Obsidian, with the fixtures vault open: thousands of random selections across every note, each checked to be captured as the source the reader was looking at, and jumping to a mark from the review panel. Point it at a real vault to find the next case:

E2E_VAULT=~/path/to/vault E2E_FOLDER=some/folder E2E_NOTES=12 npm run e2e

Releasing

How a release goes out — versions, tagging, the community directory's automated review and what it rejects — is written down in the maintainer's notes, obsidian-plugin-publishing (a private repository; check it out next to this one). In short: run the review's lint rules locally first, bump manifest.json, package.json and versions.json together, push a tag equal to the version (no v), and check the community directory's review for that version before calling it released.