Ghostmark

English · 简体中文

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When you clip web pages into Obsidian with the Web Clipper, some sites slip invisible watermark characters into the text — zero-width clusters inside words, runs of exotic spaces at paragraph ends, hidden bidi marks. They render as nothing, but they silently break:

• 🔍 Search — a word with a hidden character never matches;
• 🔗 Links & wikilinks — polluted titles fail to link;
• 📝 Diffs & git history — lines look unchanged but are not;
• 💥 Code you paste into terminals — pyt⟪2062⟫hon simply doesn't run.

Ghostmark makes them visible, and cleans them with context-aware, confirmable, undoable actions.

Inspect mode

One toggle (command, status-bar click, or a hotkey you assign) renders every hit as an inline glyph — in Source mode and Live Preview, across all notes.

Gutter badges are segmented — one colored segment per category with its own count — and clicking one clears the enclosing block. Hovering any glyph shows the character's name, codepoint, category and suggested action. The status bar keeps a live Ghost: N count for the active note.

Clear with confidence

Clearing always shows a confirm modal with the category breakdown, applies as one transaction (Obsidian's native single-step undo works out of the box), and reports what it did — including what it deliberately left behind.

• Clear all — the whole note, gated by the modal above.
• Clear selection — grayed out until you select something; reminds you that base64 tracking tokens are visible garbage to delete by hand.
• Clear current block — paragraph / list item / quote run / table row / whole code or math block / frontmatter. Confirm-free by default, therefore only available while inspect mode is on (visibility is the gate); the gutter badge is a second entry point.

Pick unknown watermarks

A new site invents a new watermark character? Park the cursor on it (or select a stretch of text), run Pick codepoint — the modal shows the codepoint facts and a category-based suggested action. Multiple characters open a check-list; you can also add codepoints by hand in settings.

Commands & settings

Settings group the 21 default policy rows (editable per codepoint, with the picked additions section), context rules (math blocks are mark-only by default — MathML transcoding can put a meaningful U+2062 in a formula), interface options and a bilingual UI (English / 简体中文, following Obsidian's language by default).

On mobile

Decorations and all five commands work on mobile; only the status bar is desktop-specific — the command palette is the mobile entry.

Install

Not yet in the community plugin store. Manual install:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json (and styles.css) from the latest release;
2. Put them in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/ghostmark/;
3. Enable Ghostmark in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

npm install
npm run dev     # esbuild watch
npm run build   # tsc -noEmit + production bundle → main.js
npm run lint    # eslint with eslint-plugin-obsidianmd
npm test        # vitest (core engine + fixture acceptance)

The core engine (src/core/) is pure TypeScript with no Obsidian or CodeMirror imports, fully unit-tested against the committed synthetic sample src/core/fixtures/watermark-fixture.md — 801 invisible characters (U+2062 ×108, U+061C ×216, U+2002 ×300, U+2009 ×177) plus 4 ZWJ and 1 skin modifier: 806 hits, 798 clearable, zero residue after clear-all.

Dev vault tip: copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into your test vault's .obsidian/plugins/ghostmark/ after every build, or use pjeby/hot-reload with npm run dev for instant reloads.

License

MIT

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Screenshots are rendered from the plugin's UI design prototypes; the real UI follows them with a segmented gutter badge, sub-page settings and a pick check-list on top.