Corduroy

Corduroy

Search a place, get its coordinates — straight into your note's frontmatter.

Corduroy is an Obsidian plugin for people who keep place-based notes: cities, restaurants, trips, points of interest. Map plugins like Obsidian Leaflet and Map View can render those notes on a map — but only if each note carries coordinates in its frontmatter. Getting those coordinates normally means leaving Obsidian, hunting around Google Maps, and copy-pasting a latitude/longitude pair by hand.

Corduroy removes that detour. Run one command, type the name of a place, pick it from a live search list, and the plugin writes the coordinates (and, optionally, the formatted address) into the current note's frontmatter.

How it works

1. Open the note you want to tag with a location.
2. Run "Search for a place and insert coordinates" from the command palette (Cmd/Ctrl-P).
3. Start typing — results stream in live from Google Maps as you type.
4. Pick a place. Corduroy looks up its coordinates and writes them to the note's frontmatter, leaving every other property untouched.

The result looks like this:

---
categories:
  - "[[Places]]"
type:
  - "[[Cities]]"
created: 2026-05-31
coordinates:
  - "36.1251645"
  - "-115.339808"
address: "Las Vegas, NV, USA"
---

That coordinates list is exactly the shape map plugins expect, so the note shows up on your map immediately.

Setup

Corduroy uses the Google Places API (New), which requires an API key.

1. In the Google Cloud Console, create (or pick) a project and enable the Places API (New).
2. Create an API key under APIs & Services → Credentials.
3. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Corduroy and paste the key into the Google Maps API key field.

Your key is stored in Obsidian's native secret storage, not in the plugin's settings file — so it never lands in plaintext in your vault or in any synced data.json.

Billing note: Google's Places API is a paid service with a monthly free tier. Corduroy minimizes cost by debouncing requests as you type and by using session tokens, so an autocomplete search plus the final coordinate lookup are billed as a single session. Review Google's pricing before heavy use.

Settings

Coordinates are written as a list of two quoted strings (["lat", "lng"]), which matches the convention used by Obsidian Leaflet and Map View.

Installing into a vault

Corduroy isn't in the community plugin directory yet, so install it manually.

Obsidian loads a plugin from <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/corduroy/. Build the plugin (see below), then copy manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css into that folder and enable Corduroy under Settings → Community plugins.

For active development, symlink the repo in place instead of copying:

mkdir -p "<vault>/.obsidian/plugins"
ln -s "$(pwd)" "<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/corduroy"

Then run bun run dev to rebuild main.js on every change. Reload the plugin in Obsidian to pick up changes (toggle it off/on, or use the community Hot Reload plugin).

Development

Built with Bun.

bun install        # install dependencies
bun run build      # build main.js once (production)
bun run dev        # watch + rebuild on change
bun run typecheck  # type-check without emitting

Project layout

main.js and data.json are intentionally gitignored — the former is a build artifact, the latter is per-vault runtime settings.

License

MIT