Triggers

Runs your Obsidian commands when you open something.

A rule says where — a note, a folder, a Base, a view, a frontmatter property — and what to run when you get there. Any command from the palette, or a QuickAdd choice with the context handed to it.

Contents

• 1 Installation
• 2 What a rule looks like
• 3 Working with QuickAdd
• 4 With Sidebar Layouts
• 5 Quality
• 6 Privacy
• 7 Languages
• 8 Documentation
• 9 Development
• 10 License

1 Installation

Not in Obsidian's community plugin browser yet: a plugin is submitted there after its first release, and appears once that submission has been reviewed. Until then, either route below installs it.

• BRAT — install BRAT, then add mrkhachaturov/obsidian-triggers to it. It installs the latest release and follows the ones after it.
• By hand — download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release, put them in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/triggers/, then enable the plugin under Settings → Community plugins.

Requires Obsidian 1.13.0 or later.

2 What a rule looks like

A rule fires when every condition you switched on matches:

Condition	Matches
View type	Markdown, Bases, Canvas, and Excalidraw when that plugin is installed
Path	a full path, a file name, or a folder — optionally as a regular expression
Base view	the view shown in the Bases toolbar, such as Kanban Board
Properties	type: task, or just due for "has that property". Tags count as a property

It then runs its actions in order. When several rules match, all of them run, top to bottom — you can group them and change the order.

3 Working with QuickAdd

A QuickAdd action receives the context as variables — where you are, which rule fired, the note's tags and every frontmatter property. QuickAdd's own conditions branch on them with its ten operators, so "run this when the note is a task created before Friday" needs no script.

QuickAdd is optional. Without it, rules still run commands.

The full list of what is passed is in docs/reference.md.

4 With Sidebar Layouts

Sidebar Layouts keeps several arrangements of a sidebar — three panels stacked for one task, one full-height panel for another — and registers each arrangement as a command.

Triggers runs commands. Together they do something neither does alone: open a Base in its Kanban view and the right sidebar becomes the one you built for tasks; open a note whose type is meeting and the left sidebar turns into outline and backlinks. You set the rule once; the sidebars follow what you open.

Neither plugin needs the other. A rule runs whatever commands you name, and a layout is switched just as well by a hotkey.

5 Quality

Every change passes the same gates before it lands: biome, ESLint with the official Obsidian plugin, TypeScript with strict and then some, Vitest, knip for dead code, and two checks of our own — one that no translated string is unused or missing, one that the generated reference still matches the code.

mise run check is the whole set, and it runs again before every push.

6 Privacy

No network requests of any kind. No telemetry, no update checks, no downloads.

The plugin never opens your files. To decide whether a rule matches it reads the index Obsidian has already built — the same one the Properties panel shows — and nothing else.

Debug logging is off by default. When you turn it on, it stays in memory on that device and its switch is stored outside your vault, so it never syncs to a machine where nobody is debugging.

7 Languages

The interface follows the language selected in Obsidian — the settings, the rule editor, command names and the plugin's own messages are all translated, and English stands in wherever a translation has not caught up. More languages are added over time: one is a file of strings and needs no other change to the plugin.

Names you type, and labels that come from Obsidian or another plugin, are left as they are.

8 Documentation

Document	What it holds
docs/reference.md	Conditions and variables. Generated from the code

9 Development

mise install && mise deps       # tools, then dependencies
mise run check                  # every gate
mise run docs                   # regenerate docs/reference.md
VAULT=/path/to/vault mise run plugin:install

10 License

MIT. See LICENSE.