Musical Text

Musical Text

When we write, we often forget text has rhythm. Poetry and music incorporate rhythm inherently as they are performed aloud. Written prose has this same property, but we writers often overlook it. Musical Text visualizes the variety in your sentence length to reveal the rhythm of your prose. Sentences are color coded based on their word count, making it simple to assess the rhythm of whole pages at once.

Features

• Real-time sentence marking as you type
• Three visual marking styles:
  • Highlighting
  • Text color
  • Color underlining
• Automatic contrasting text colors that maintain hue for optimal readability (highlighting mode)
• Toggle highlighting on/off per editor with status bar button, ribbon, or command
• Customizable sentence length thresholds
• Customizable highlight colors

How to Use

1. Install the plugin from Obsidian's Community Plugins
2. Enable the plugin in Settings → Community Plugins
3. Start writing! Sentences will be automatically highlighted based on their length
4. Toggle highlighting using:
   • The status bar button (sheet music icon)
   • The ribbon button (same icon)
   • The command palette (Cmd/Ctrl + P → "Toggle musical text highlighting")
5. Start writing! Sentences will be automatically highlighted based on their length

Settings

You can customize the plugin in Settings → Musical Text:

• Choose a marking style between highlighting, underlining, and text color

• Hide status bar button

• Hide ribbon button

• Sentence Length Thresholds

  • Short: 1 to (medium-1) words via slider (default: 5)
  • Medium: (short+1) to (long-1) words via slider (default: 7)
  • Long: Minimum of (medium+1) words via text input (default: 9)

• Colors

  • Select a premade palette from several popular code themes
  • Customize colors for each sentence length category

Markdown Support

The plugin intelligently handles markdown syntax:

• Unordered lists: - item, * item, + item
• Ordered lists: 1. item, 2. item, 10. item
• Checkboxes: - [ ] task, - [x] done, - [X] complete
• Nested lists: Properly handles indented list structures
• List markers excluded: Only the actual content text is highlighted, not the markers

About

Read about the development process in my blog post.

Support

• Report issues on GitHub
• Follow development updates on Bluesky or my blog

License

MIT License - do whatever you want with it