Word-Smith

Lightweight, free, and working within the Vault you already have. No project wizard, no special "book folder", no AI or telemetry near your texts.

Your book lives wherever you put it, your chapters are whatever files you like, and Word-Smith takes it from there.

Every feature has its own toggle, so take what you like and leave the rest off.

Works with Obsidian 1.13.7 and newer, desktop and mobile.

Contents

The Organizer · Writing modes · Themes · The powerline bar · Export · Writing history and the report · And the rest · Install · Five minutes in · Docs

What do you get?

The Organizer

The big boy. The end-all-be-all outliner-database-metadata manager. The Outliner-zilla. The Master-Table. The Organizer!

Drag and drop to sort, and the order sticks: in your file tree, in the table, and in the finished manuscript. One order, three places.

No more renaming, no more "001-Preface" haunting your filenames forever.

Filterable, sortable, searchable. Set a target on a note, a chapter or the whole book. Flag what still needs a pass, with an icon and a color of your own choosing. Folders sums the proprieties up, and a Total row at the bottom, because it's a table. And a table needs a Total row!

Every property(frontmatter) can be a column, that you can edit right in the cell: tags are pills, a checkbox is a toggle, a date gets a picker.

And even more proprieties outside the Obsidian's metadata: Word count, Target, Flag, Reading Grade, Paragraphs, Tasks, Backlinks, Outgoing links, Footnotes, Created, Modified time. Turn on the ones you want.

Ctrl-click a few rows and edit them all at once. Bulk edit can even help you clean your metadata, so you don't have tags like "Alice", "alice" and "Aliice" all over your frontmatter.

Every change is one step back with a Ctrl+Z. Add Row numbers if you like, and your sort and filters are saved, even after a restart.

Also, the Organizer follows the note you open, but you can Pin it down and it stays put wherever you go in the file tree.

BEST part is that it isn't only for .md notes. Tag a PDF. Put a checkbox on a spreadsheet. Give a book cover a description. You can even build an e-book database with it, real epub files and all.

Simple to use, vastly useful for any domain of work. Want a task manager? Easy. Just toggle on the tasks column. Sky is the limit!

Did I just remake Obsidian's Bases? Kinda, but no. Bases is for .md notes. The Organizer takes EVERYYYY filetype in your vault. Think of Directory Opus, but in Obsidian.

How does it work? Simple. For the non-markdown files, it just writes the metadata into the ws-structure.md file that lives in your Vault. So don't lose that file!

The Organizer at work:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d16a2b67-6984-402b-950f-85bf59a62219

Read more about the Organizer.

Writing modes

Zen, Letter box, Typewriter, and Hemingway mode, which locks your backspace so a first draft can only go forward. Painful, but it works!

Read more about writing modes.

Themes

Themes repaint the whole workspace, dark and light. Editor, sidebars and panels all follow the color schemes. Even your text cursor! Yes, even THAT swooshy cursor too!

The same vault, two colorschemes.

Modes and themes, switched while writing:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/43a91d87-0775-4e93-8f44-67bcca09f08f

Read more about themes.

The powerline bar

A status bar you "code" yourself. You write it as text, and the punctuation you type between {tokens} becomes the shape you get. You'll love it! I think...

Words, characters, reading time, tasks, properties, backlinks, the note's flag, the time, the battery, and a button for every menu. Each powerline token-button can be tweaked.

Three shipped bars to start from, and share codes to trade your creations with your friends.

As plain as you like. Or not.

Read more about the powerline bar.

Export

PDF, docx, md, html, plus a fast print preview. Tick what goes in, pick your paper, and see the pages before a single file is exported, laid out to the 12pt, double spacing manuscript standard.

The Export's tick boxes live in Obsidian's own file tree. Tick a note or a whole folder from anywhere in the vault and it joins the manuscript.

Title page, running header, table of contents, footnotes, comments and highlights are each a checkbox. Easy! And it exports the file in your Vault with a timestamp, so you don't have to rename things like "TheBook-final-final-v7.docx"

Read more about Export.

Writing history and the report

More like a writing log. A day spent hacking away is still a day's work(wise words!), and it won't break your writing streak.

The Writing Report shows a note, a folder or a selection its numbers: Word count, target, characters, syllables(clearly useless, but it makes the popup pretty), sentences, paragraphs, pages, reading time and reading grade.

Under them, every single word you used, the Word Frequency menu. Common words stay out until you tick them in.

Read more about history and the report.

And the rest

Prose checks and parts-of-speech coloring. Nouns, verbs and adjectives in color, the way a code editor shows you structure. Too many adverbs reads as a rash(Thank you, Mr. Stephen King!).

Filler words, passive voice and doubled words get an underline.

No model, no network, no verdicts. Offline and based on some regex rules and a small dictionary inside Word-Smith.

The menu. More like the PowaaahMenu. Any Obsidian command can go in. Yes, you read it right. ANY Obsidian command!

Plus typography, text options, Vim niceties and word counts, flags and targets in Obsidian's own file tree for a quick glance and back to work!

Local, and only local

No account. No cloud. No subscription. No network calls, no telemetry, no dependencies.

Your history, targets and order are plain notes in your vault, readable in any editor, yours to delete, and also yours to protect(with great power comes great...you know the rest!)

Read more about privacy and your files.

[!NOTE] Your notes, your files, your writings don't depend on Word-Smith at all.

Word-Smith is just a fancy layer on top of Obsidian's robustness and plain, future-proof Markdown files.

If you ever uninstall Word-Smith, everything you wrote stays exactly where it is. Word-Smith keeps its three files (ws-structure.md, ws-history.md and ws-settings.md) in the Word-Smith folder inside your Vault (and you can even move this Word-Smith folder, hide it in another folder like Archive, if you'd like. It does not need to stay in the Vault's root). And the cool part is, these three files are plain Markdown files too. So, if you ever come back to use Word-Smith and those 3 files are still there, Word-Smith will pick everything up from where you left it!

Install

Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search Word-Smith, install, enable. That's it! Even a writer could do it!

Needs Obsidian 1.13.7 or newer. Built and tested on the 1.13.7 installer; installers before 1.9 are refused at start, because Obsidian froze on enable in every one reported. Settings → General shows both numbers, and troubleshooting says what to do about an old installer.

Desktop, tablet and phone. The Organizer wants a bigger screen, though it pinches(like a crab...) to zoom on a phone.

Five minutes in

1. Open the Organizer from the Word-Smith's menu or the pane , then click a folder in Obsidian's file tree.
2. Press Properties, add a column, click a cell to edit it. Ctrl-click two rows and set a flag on both.
3. Settings → Word-Smith → Powerline. Try a shipped bar before writing your own.
4. Turn on Zen and Letter box. Write something.
5. AAAAAND DON'T FORGET TO Switch on History. It counts from the day you turn it on!

And a fancier cursor

Word-Smith pairs nicely with my other plugin, Cursor-Smith, if you want a fancier text caret(I call it a cursor, because I'm old and I can do anything).

BRAGGING TIME: Cursor-Smith is The most advanced cursor engine out there (maybe, who knows?). You get cursor types, thickness, effects, smooth movement, motion smears, fire trails, fireworks, blinking options. The whole lot.

What else? Sharing codes, presets so you can try them fast, typewriter effects and sounds, color by speed and mooore. It's clearly too much, it's over the top, it's Cuuuursor-Smiiiith(cringe)!

Workspace showcase

Made a writing space you love? Share a screenshot and your bar's share code in the Workspace Showcase.

Docs

Organizer · Export · Writing modes · Powerline · Themes · History and report · Syntax and prose · Commands and menu · Privacy · Troubleshooting

Special thanks (must be read in Dumbledore's voice)

To my friend, Max Shippee, actor and author, for narrating the YouTube video! His voice brought Word-Smith to life in a way I never could have imagined.

To Protesilaos Stavrou, for his perfectly balanced Modus themes.

To the r/ObsidianMD community, for every bug report, idea and kind word. Word-Smith is better because of you.

Questions, ideas, bugs

If you have a question, a cool idea/feature or found a bug, write it here or on Reddit at u/No_Ratio_2483.

Regarding bugs, tell me your OS(pleeease), whether it's desktop, tablet or phone, your Obsidian version and your installer version (Settings → General), and send a screenshot if you can. Send some cookies and a coffee too! Cheers!