Cognitive Glow

An Obsidian plugin that surfaces the notes you actually use. Notes you actively visit glow brighter in a ranked sidebar; ones you haven't touched fade out. No tags, no manual curation — just open notes and let the glow tell you where your attention lives.

Why

Most note-taking setups bury active work under search results and folder hierarchies. Cognitive Glow gives you a persistent, at-a-glance view of what matters right now, ranked by a blend of recency and visit frequency.

Features

• Visual glow — each note gets a luminous bar proportional to its score. High-activity notes shine; old ones dim.
• Normal and Focus modes — Normal shows your full ranked list; Focus narrows it to your top N.
• Dwell-time gating — visits only count after a configurable minimum open time (default 30 s), so quick flick-throughs don't inflate scores.
• Folder scope — restrict tracking to specific folders, or exclude folders like Templates/ or Archive/.
• Sidebar placement — left or right, whichever fits your layout.
• Ribbon shortcut — sparkles icon in the ribbon opens the panel.

Installation

From community plugins (pending review)

Search for Cognitive Glow in Settings > Community plugins.

Manual

npm install
npm run build

Copy manifest.json, main.js, and styles.css into .obsidian/plugins/cognitive-glow/, then enable in Settings > Community plugins.

Usage

1. Open notes normally — Cognitive Glow tracks visits automatically.
2. Open the panel from the ribbon (sparkles icon) or command palette (Open sidebar).
3. Toggle between Normal and Focus with the header buttons.
4. Click any row to jump to that note.

Settings

Display

Setting	Default	Description
Glow fades after	3 days	How quickly a note loses glow. Presets: 1 day / 3 days / 1 week / 1 month.
Max notes in focus mode	5	Top N notes shown in focus mode.
Hide faded notes	Off	Only show notes above a minimum score.
Sidebar placement	Right	Which sidebar hosts the panel.

Tracking

Setting	Default	Description
Minimum open time	30 s	A note must stay open this long to count as a visit. Set to 0 for instant tracking.
Tracked folders	(all)	Only track notes in these folders. One path per line.
Excluded folders	(none)	Never track notes in these folders. Takes priority over inclusions.

Advanced

Setting	Default	Description
Recency weight	0.6	Contribution of recent activity to the score (0-1).
Frequency weight	0.4	Contribution of visit count to the score (0-1).
Manual pin weight	0	Boost for manually pinned notes (0-1).
Frequency scale	20	Opens treated as "max frequency".
Max tracked notes	3000	Memory cap. 0 = unlimited.
Recency decay (ms)	259200000	Raw exponential decay constant. Overrides dropdown.

Commands

Command	Description
Open sidebar	Opens or reveals the Cognitive Glow panel.
Dump glow scores to console	Logs the top 20 notes by score (dev console).
Show persisted data (JSON)	Opens a modal with the full saved payload.

How scoring works

recency   = exp(-(now - lastOpened) / tauRecencyMs)
frequency = log(1 + hitCount) / log(1 + hitCountMaxScale)
gravity   = manualGravity  (0 if unset)

glowScore = wRecency * recency + wFrequency * frequency + wGravity * gravity

Weights are normalized if their sum exceeds 1. See SPEC.md for full implementation details.

Development

npm install          # install dependencies
npm run build        # compile plugin
npm run dev          # watch mode
npm run lint         # eslint (Obsidian rules)
npm run test         # unit tests

Data

Stored in .obsidian/plugins/cognitive-glow/data.json. No network requests, no telemetry.

License

MIT