MH Note Creator and Navigator

Summary

MH Note Creator and Navigator is an Obsidian plugin for opening configured notes, files, and commands from a modal, and for creating new notes from reusable creation templates.

The plugin is designed for vaults that use menu notes, dashboard files, database/base files, or repeated note types and need fast access from a single command.

Purpose And Features

• Open a combined Navigator and Creator modal, or split them into separate commands.
• Configure root cards as groups or direct items.
• Configure group cards with nested items.
• Open any vault file type supported by Obsidian, not only Markdown notes.
• Run Obsidian commands from cards.
• Create new Markdown notes in a configured folder.
• Optionally seed created notes with a template file.
• Customize modal width, card grid density, card height, icon size, card badges, item counts, language, icons, and icon colors.
• Use English or Brazilian Portuguese interface text.

How It Works / How To Use

Enable the plugin and make sure the MH-API-TEMPORARY dependency is also installed and enabled, because this plugin uses it for shared UI components such as cards, lists, icon picking, color picking, and modals.

Run Open Navigator & Creator from the command palette when Separate Modals is disabled. This opens one modal with a toggle button for switching between navigation cards and creation templates.

Enable Separate Modals in settings to expose two commands instead: Open Navigator and Open Creator.

Navigation cards can be:

• Group: opens a nested view containing that group's items.
• Item: opens a configured file or runs a configured command.

Creation templates define:

• Name: label shown on the creation card.
• Icon and icon color: visual identity for the card.
• Target Folder: folder where the new .md file is created. Leave empty to create at the vault root.
• Template File: optional file whose full content is copied into the new note.

Frontmatter is handled through the template file. The plugin does not generate YAML fields by itself; if you want frontmatter, put it in the configured template file.

Example template file:

---
type: project
status: active
created: 
---

# Project Notes

Example navigation setup:

• Add a Database group.
• Add items inside it for Books.base, Movies.base, and People.base.
• Add a root item for a command such as graph:open.

Example creation setup:

• Add a Meeting Note creation template.
• Set Target Folder to Meetings.
• Set Template File to Templates/Meeting.md.
• Open Creator, choose Meeting Note, enter a note name, and the plugin creates Meetings/<note name>.md.

Installation

For manual installation, copy these files into .obsidian/plugins/mh-note-creator-and-navigator/ inside your vault:

• main.js
• manifest.json
• versions.json
• locales/

Then reload Obsidian and enable MH Note Creator and Navigator in Community plugins.

main.js is a generated bundle. The TypeScript source lives in src/, and manual edits should be made there instead of editing main.js directly.

Development

Install dependencies:

npm install

Run a development build watcher:

npm run dev

Run TypeScript validation:

npm run typecheck

Build the production bundle:

npm run build

Validate the generated bundle syntax:

node --check main.js

The build entrypoint is src/main.ts, and the production output is main.js. The bundle keeps obsidian external so Obsidian provides the runtime API.