Thunderegg

Thunderegg — Obsidian Plugin

Convert any attachment in your vault — PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, email, image, even meeting recordings (transcribed on-device) — to clean Markdown with YAML frontmatter, 100% on your Mac. Plus the Refinery: track note maturity, discover connections, and surface hub notes automatically.

The plugin is free and MIT-licensed. The app it drives is not. Thunderegg for macOS is $19.95, once — no subscription, no account — after a free trial of 5 conversions. This plugin is the Obsidian half; the Thunderegg app does the converting, and it is what you buy. thunderegg.ai

Three ways in

1. Right-click a file in the file explorer → Convert to Markdown (Thunderegg).
2. Right-click a folder → Thunderegg: convert all attachments (recursive).
3. ⌘P → Thunderegg: Convert clipboard — copy anything (a web page selection, an email, a table), run the command, and Thunderegg converts it into a new note called Clipboard <date>.md and opens it. Nothing to save to disk first.

The clipboard command is command-palette only — there is no ribbon icon and no menu item for it, so it is easy to miss. It is the fastest way to get something you are reading in a browser into your vault as clean Markdown.

Features

Conversion

• File menu: right-click a file → Convert to Markdown (Thunderegg)
• Folder menu: right-click a folder → Thunderegg: convert all attachments (recursive)
• Command palette:
  • Thunderegg: Convert file — convert the active attachment
  • Thunderegg: Convert clipboard — paste clipboard content (HTML or text), run it through Thunderegg, and create a new note
• Status bar: live indicator showing whether the Thunderegg engine is available (🟢 Ready / 🔴 Unavailable)
• Output is written as <file>.md next to the source, with title/source/type/created/tags frontmatter.
• Recordings become meeting summaries: drop an audio or video file (mp3, m4a, wav, aiff, aac, flac, opus, mp4, mov, m4v, mkv, webm — Zoom, OBS, Discord and browser recordings included) and the engine transcribes it on-device and writes a structured summary — action items, decisions, notable quotes. Transcription takes a few minutes per recording; nothing is uploaded.

Refinery

Enable the Refinery in settings for Thunderegg's knowledge-management layer. It adds three concepts:

When Refinery is enabled:

• A Refinery info bar appears at the top of each note showing the note's Grade badge, Bond count, Condenser flag, and links to any Condensers that reference it.
• The status bar displays Grade / Bond / Condenser metadata for the active note.
• The bond graph is built from Obsidian's own metadata cache — zero parsing overhead.

How Grades work

Add a grade field to any note's YAML frontmatter:

---
grade: rough
---

Valid values: blank, rough, polished, crystal, gem (plus synthesis on generated map pages). Notes from before the 2026-07 rename (vapor, crude, distillate, refined, essence) are read forever and shown under their new names. The plugin reads Obsidian's metadata cache for instant display.

Requirements

• macOS (desktop-only — uses the on-device Thunderegg engine).
• The Thunderegg app — $19.95 once, 5 conversions free to try — installed, which provides ~/Library/Application Support/MarkItDownDroplet/convert.sh. The engine path is configurable in plugin settings.
• Image OCR uses the Apple Vision ocr helper that ships with the Thunderegg app. If image conversion fails with an OCR message, reinstall the Thunderegg app — that restores the helper.

Settings

How it works

The plugin shells out to the local Thunderegg engine via Node's child_process (allowed for desktop-only plugins). Conversion and transcription are entirely on-device — nothing is uploaded to convert. Frontmatter can be toggled off in settings (passes DISTILL_FRONTMATTER=0); the plugin also passes your vault's path (DISTILL_VAULT_PATH) so the engine's bond discovery links against this vault.

The Refinery reads from Obsidian's metadataCache.resolvedLinks to build the bond graph — no custom file parsing, no background workers.

Publish & Community (optional, off by default — and the one feature that CAN upload)

The plugin can publish an Obsidian Canvas as a signed concept map to a server you configure (Settings → Publish & Community), and import maps others share via obsidian://distill-fork links. This is the only network call the plugin itself makes: nothing is sent by the plugin unless you explicitly run a Publish command, publishing sends only the selected Canvas (after a redaction scan for blocked tags), and the device token is stored outside your vault.

That is a claim about the plugin, not about the whole pipeline, and the difference matters. Conversion, OCR and transcription run entirely on your Mac. But if you have connected a cloud model in the Thunderegg app, the engine's AI enrichment step sends part of each converted note to that provider — the plugin never sees that request and cannot prevent it. Mark the vault Local in Thunderegg (or connect no cloud model) to keep everything on-device. The hosted community server is not currently online; the feature works against any server implementing the protocol.

Build from source

npm install
npm run build      # produces main.js

Install into a vault (manual / dev)

Copy manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css into:

<your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/thunderegg/

Then enable Thunderegg in Settings → Community plugins.

Releasing an update (the plugin is already in the community catalog)

The plugin is listed in the official Obsidian directory as thunderegg. To ship an update:

1. Bump version in manifest.json and add the same version to versions.json — always, even when minAppVersion did not change. Obsidian picks the newest version whose versions.json entry its app version satisfies, so a MISSING key does not mean "unchanged", it means "skip this release". 0.2.1-0.2.3 were absent for exactly this reason and every Obsidian 1.4.0-1.6.5 user silently resolved back to 0.2.0.
2. npm test && npm run build.
3. Tag a release named exactly the version, with manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css as assets — Obsidian serves updates from the GitHub release, no new catalog PR needed. ⚠️ This step has been forgotten twice: a fix committed to the repo reaches nobody until a release is cut under a bumped version.

Note: Obsidian's review guidelines require desktop-only plugins that run shell commands to clearly disclose it. The description and this README state that the plugin executes a local helper script; keep that disclosure if you edit copy.

Status

v0.2.7 — listed in the official Obsidian community directory. On top of the v0.1.0 conversion features: the Refinery (rock-ladder grades with permanent legacy-name reads), audio/video → on-device meeting summaries, .doc/.rtf support, vault-aware bond discovery (DISTILL_VAULT_PATH), clipboard conversion, status-bar indicators, and the Canvas publish/verify/fork surface (disclosed above).