Clippings Dedupe

An Obsidian plugin that merges duplicate highlights appended by the official Obsidian Web Clipper — while protecting the comments you write under each quote.

The problem

The Web Clipper cannot append "only new highlights" to an existing note (obsidian-clipper#180). When you read an article in multiple sittings — highlight, clip, come back, highlight more, clip again — every clip appends all highlights on the page, duplicating the ones you already saved. The clipper intentionally has no knowledge of your vault, so the merge has to happen vault-side. That is what this plugin does.

What it does

Whenever a note inside your clippings folder changes, the plugin:

• Merges blocks quoting the same highlight. The quoted text itself is the identity — no IDs or hashes needed.
• Never loses your writing. If one copy of a quote has your comment under it, that copy wins. If two copies have different comments, both are kept.
• Folds appended sections back in. Sections like ## Highlights (added …) that the clipper appends at the bottom are merged into the main highlights section, keeping your closing section at the end of the note.
• Backs up before rewriting. A snapshot of the note is saved under the plugin's backups/ folder (pruned to the most recent 30 by default).

It runs 2 seconds after a clip lands, sweeps all clippings on startup, and can be triggered manually via the command palette (Deduplicate all clippings now). Notes without duplicates are never touched.

Expected note shape

The plugin understands notes whose highlight sections look like:

## Highlights

> first highlighted passage

**Note**: your comment here

---

> second highlighted passage

**Note**:

The folder, comment label, and section headings are all configurable in settings, so any clipper template with a quote → comment label → --- structure works. A matching Web Clipper template pair (create + append) is included in templates/, with Japanese variants in templates/ja/.

Settings

Setting	Default	Meaning
Clippings folder	Clippings	Only notes in this folder are watched
Comment label	**Note**:	Label under each quote; written comments are always preserved
Highlights heading keyword	Highlight	## headings containing this word are treated as highlight sections
Merged section heading	## Highlights	Heading for the merged section
Keep backups	on	Snapshot notes before rewriting

Install

Until the plugin is accepted into the community catalog:

1. Copy main.js and manifest.json into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/clippings-dedupe/
2. Settings → Community plugins → turn off Restricted mode → enable Clippings Dedupe

Or install via BRAT with this repository.

Development

npm test          # run the node test suite (no build step — main.js is plain JS)
npm run deploy    # run tests, then copy main.js + manifest.json into your vault
                  # (put your vault path in .vaultpath first)

---

日本語での説明

公式Web Clipperは「新規ハイライトだけを追記」できません（#180）。 記事を分割して読みながらクリップすると、ページ上の全ハイライトが毎回追記され、 保存済みの引用が重複します。クリッパーは意図的にvaultの中身を知らない設計のため、 マージはvault側でやるしかない——それをこのプラグインが担当します。

• 同じ引用文のブロックを1つに統合（引用テキスト自体がID）
• メモが書かれているブロックを優先して残す。書いたメモは絶対に消えない
• 末尾に追記された「（... 追加）」セクションをメインのハイライトセクションに合流
• 書き換え前にプラグインフォルダ内 backups/ へスナップショット保存

フォルダ名・メモラベル・見出しは設定で変更できます。日本語テンプレート （templates/ja/）を使う場合は、設定画面で次の3つを合わせてください:

• Comment label → **✍️ メモ**:
• Highlights heading keyword → ハイライト
• Merged section heading → ## 📌 ハイライト