Featherlight

An Obsidian plugin that enforces character limits on notes — a live counter in the status bar shows characters used and remaining, and once you hit the limit, the editor simply won't accept more.

Inspired by the succinct nature of tweets: a hard ceiling forces you to think a little harder about what to write.

Features

• Hard limit, not just a counter — a CodeMirror transaction filter blocks additive edits once the note is at its limit. Deletions and selections always work, so you can edit your way back under.
• Live status bar counter — ✦ 231/280 · 49 left, colored green with plenty of room, orange within 10% of the limit, red at the hard stop.
• Twitter-era presets — 140 (Classic Tweet, 2006–2017), 280 (Modern Tweet, 2017–2022), or a custom limit of your choosing.
• Per-note override — add char-limit: 500 (any positive number) to a note's YAML frontmatter to give that note its own limit. The per-note value always beats the global setting.
• Watched folders — optionally scope the limit and counter to specific folders (e.g. Tweets). Outside them, notes behave normally and the counter hides. Leave the list empty to apply the limit everywhere.

Settings

• Watched folders — add folder names exactly as they appear in your vault with the list's + control. The limit and status bar only activate inside them; an empty list applies the limit to every note.
• Limit preset — 140, 280, or Custom; choosing Custom reveals a field for any positive number.

Settings are built on Obsidian's declarative settings API, so every option shows up in the global settings search.

Notes

• Characters include spaces and punctuation — the count is the raw length of the note, frontmatter included.
• The limit only blocks typing and pasting past it. Notes that already exceed the limit (created before the plugin, or moved into a watched folder) aren't truncated — you just can't add more until you trim them below the limit.

Installation

Requires Obsidian 1.13.0 or later.

Until the plugin is available in the community directory, install it manually:

1. Create the folder <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/featherlight/
2. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release and copy them into it
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Featherlight under Settings → Community plugins

Development

This is a TypeScript project — src/main.ts (plugin) and src/settings.ts (settings tab). To build:

npm install
npm run build

This typechecks with tsc and bundles the sources into main.js via esbuild.

License

MIT