Obsidian Slugify

Rename files — and everything that links to them — to slug-case (lowercase, no accents, hyphens) right from Obsidian. No script, no terminal: pick a file, a folder, or a multi-selection, review the list, edit it if needed, confirm.

Why

Renaming files by hand to keep a consistent naming convention is tedious, and doing it outside Obsidian breaks wikilinks. This plugin uses Obsidian's own fileManager.renameFile API, so every link pointing to a renamed file is updated automatically — nothing breaks.

Features

• Rename a single file, an entire folder (recursively), or a multi-selection from the file explorer context menu.
• Vault-wide command from the command palette.
• Preview modal listing every old path → new path before anything changes — nothing is renamed without explicit confirmation.
• Each proposed name is editable in the preview; collisions are recomputed live as you edit.
• Collisions (against an existing file, or two renames targeting the same path) are flagged in the preview instead of silently skipped.
• "Undo last slugify" command reverts the most recent batch (in-memory, single level).
• Settings: excluded folders (skipped everywhere), configurable separator (-/_), and an opt-in toggle to also rename non-markdown attachments.
• English and Spanish UI, following Obsidian's language setting (falls back to English).

Install

Not yet on the Community Plugins list — manual install:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/slugify/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Slugify under Settings → Community plugins.

Usage

• Ribbon icon (sidebar) or command palette → "Rename files to slug-case (whole vault)".
• Command palette → "Undo last slugify".
• Right-click a folder → "Slugify: rename files in this folder".
• Right-click a file → "Slugify: rename this file".
• Select multiple files/folders, right-click → "Slugify: rename selection (N items)".

In every case a modal shows the full list of renames — editable — before anything is applied.

Settings

• Excluded folders — one path per line; files inside them (and their subfolders) are always skipped, everywhere.
• Separator — - or _, used in place of spaces and other non-alphanumeric characters.
• Include attachments — off by default. When enabled, non-markdown files (images, PDFs, etc.) become eligible for renaming too, and the file/folder/selection context menu items apply to them as well.

Permissions

The plugin calls vault.getFiles() / vault.getMarkdownFiles() to enumerate files in the vault. This is required for its core function (finding which files to rename) — it never reads file contents or sends anything over the network.

Verifying a release

main.js and styles.css in each release are signed with GitHub artifact attestations, proving they were built by this repo's release.yml workflow from the tagged source. Verify a downloaded asset with the GitHub CLI:

gh attestation verify main.js --repo ansango/obsidian-slugify

Development

Uses Bun for both package management and running scripts. Bundling still goes through esbuild (the approach recommended by Obsidian's plugin docs).

bun install
bun run dev     # watch mode, rebuilds main.js on change
bun run build   # type-check + production build (minified, no sourcemap)
bun test        # run the test suite

The plugin is plain TypeScript + the Obsidian API — no UI framework, structured under src/:

• src/core/ — the Plugin entry point, the confirmation modal, the settings tab, and vault file-tree helpers.
• src/utils/ — pure logic (slugify, collision detection) decoupled from Obsidian's types so it's unit-testable with bun:test (colocated as logic.test.ts), plus the English/Spanish translations.
• src/styles/ — the plugin's CSS, copied to the plugin root on every build.

License

MIT