Obsidian Easy Typing

Easy Typing is an enhancement plugin for Obsidian that improves the writing experience through automatic text formatting, smart editing enhancements, and a powerful rule engine for custom text transformations.

⚡ Quick Start

After installing and enabling the plugin, these features work out of the box — no configuration needed:

• Auto-spacing between Chinese and English, Chinese and digits — cleaner typography
• Auto full-width punctuation after CJK characters — no need to switch punctuation mode
• Auto-pairing CJK brackets and quotes — type （ and ） is inserted automatically
• Type ·· (two middle dots) to quickly create inline code — no need to switch to English for backticks
• Tab to jump out of paired symbols — press Tab to escape brackets/quotes
• Smart Backspace — clear empty list items and quote lines with one keystroke

💡 All auto-formatting actions can be undone immediately with Ctrl/Cmd+Z.

Want to customize further? Adjust each feature's behavior in the plugin settings.

Core Features

1. Text Auto-formatting

Automatically formats text as you type:

• Auto-spacing between different script pairs (e.g. Chinese and English, Chinese and digits, etc.)
• Auto-capitalize the first letter of sentences
• Inline element spacing for code, formulas, and links — configurable as none, soft, or strict
• User-defined regex blocks to protect special text patterns from formatting
• Prefix dictionary to suppress premature space insertion while typing

Supports Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, Russian, digits, and user-defined script categories.

Detailed documentation →

2. Edit Enhancements

Smart editing features that work as you type:

• Better Code Edit: Enhanced editing inside code blocks (Cmd/Ctrl+A selection, Tab indent, delete, paste)
• Better Backspace: Enhanced deletion of empty list items and empty quote lines
• Tabout: Press Tab to jump out of paired symbols (【】, （）, 《》, quotes, inline code, etc.)
• Enhanced Mod+A: Progressive selection expansion (current line → current block → entire document)
• Smart Paste: Auto-add indentation and list/quote prefixes when pasting inside lists or quotes
• Strict Line Break: Enter creates double line break (Markdown paragraph break)
• Collapsed Heading Enter: Enter on a collapsed heading adds a sibling heading without expanding

Detailed documentation →

3. Rule Engine

A powerful, unified rule engine handles all text transformations with three rule types:

Type	Trigger	Example
Input	Triggered when you type a matching pattern	·· → `$0` (inline code)
Delete	Triggered on Backspace	Delete $ → delete entire $...$ pair
SelectKey	Triggered when you type after selecting text	Select text + ￥ → $text$

The plugin ships with rich built-in rules (auto-pairing, full-width/half-width conversion, symbol shortcuts, etc.) and supports fully custom rules:

• Regex matching with capture group references ([[1]], [[R1]])
• Regex flags i / m / u for case-insensitive, multiline, and Unicode matching
• Tabstop placeholders ($0, $1, ${1:default}) with Tab navigation
• Scope-aware execution — restrict rules to one or more text, formula, or code contexts
• Code-language filtering — optionally limit code-scope matches to a language like python
• Function replacements — write JavaScript logic in the replacement field
• Priority-based ordering and drag-and-drop reordering
• Tab-triggered or auto-triggered
• Import/Export user rules as JSON

Detailed documentation →

4. Built-in Commands

Command	Default Hotkey	Description
Format Article	Mod+Shift+S	Apply auto-formatting to the entire document
Format Selection/Line	Mod+Shift+L	Format selected text or current line
Delete Blank Lines	Mod+Shift+K	Remove extra blank lines
New Line After Current	Mod+Enter	Create new line below and jump to it
Insert Code Block	Mod+Shift+N	Convert selection to code block
Toggle Auto-format	Ctrl+Tab	Enable/disable auto-formatting
Toggle Comment	Mod+/	Toggle comments (supports code block languages)
Select Block	—	Expand selection to current block

5. Other Settings

• IME fixes: Compatibility options for Chinese IME, macOS context menu, and MS IME
• File exclusion: Exclude specific files from auto-formatting by path pattern

Changelog

For a full changelog, see changelog.md

Acknowledgements

• https://github.com/artisticat1/obsidian-latex-suite
• https://github.com/aptend/typing-transformer-obsidian
• https://marcus.se.net/obsidian-plugin-docs/

Support

If you like this plugin and want to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee here!