Lightweight, free, and working within the vault you already have. No project wizard, no special "book folder", no AI near your text. Your book lives wherever you put it, your chapters are whatever files you like, and Word-Smith takes it from there.

Everything has its own toggle, so take what you like and leave the rest off.

Works with Obsidian 1.13.7 and newer, desktop and mobile.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b89e078d-add8-49f5-8ded-e802816a2b9c

What do you get?

The Organizer

The big boy. The end-all-be-all outliner-database-metadata manager. The Outliner-zilla.

Drag and drop to sort, and the order sticks: in your file tree, in the table, and in the finished manuscript. One order, three places. No renaming, no 01 - Opening haunting your filenames forever. Filterable, sortable, searchable. Set a target on a note, a chapter or the whole book. Flag what still needs a pass, with a shape and a colour of your own. Watch a folder add itself up, and a Total row at the foot add up the lot.

Every property in your frontmatter can be a column, edited right in the cell with Obsidian's own editors: tags are pills, a checkbox is a toggle, a date gets a picker. Readings the frontmatter can't give you sit beside them: word count, target, flag, reading grade, paragraphs, tasks, backlinks, outgoing links, footnotes, created, modified. Turn on the ones you want.

Ctrl-click a few rows and edit them all at once. Every change is one step back with Ctrl+Z, and Redo puts it right again. Row numbers if you like them, a search box above the tabs, and your sort and filter come back after a restart.

It isn't only for notes. Tag a PDF. Put a checkbox on a spreadsheet. Give a book cover a description. You can even build an e-book database with it, real epub files and all. Simple to use, vastly useful for any domain of work.

Did I just build Bases? Kinda, but no. Bases is for notes. The Organizer takes every file in your vault, and adds order, targets, flags, task counts and a compiler on top. Read more about the Organizer.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/d16a2b67-6984-402b-950f-85bf59a62219

Writing modes

Zen, Letter box, Typewriter, and Hemingway mode, which locks your backspace so a first draft can only go forward. Horrible, but it works.

Zen. The interface goes away, a piece at a time.

The letter box. Only the part you're working on.

Themes repaint the whole workspace, dark and light.

_{The same vault, two schemes. Editor, sidebars and panels all follow.}

Read more about writing modes and themes.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/43a91d87-0775-4e93-8f44-67bcca09f08f

Export

PDF, docx, md, html, plus a fast print preview. Tick what goes in, pick your paper, and see the pages before a single file is written, laid out to the submission standard.

The tick boxes live in Obsidian's own file tree. Tick a note or a whole folder from anywhere in the vault and it joins the manuscript; a folder with only some of its notes in shows a half tick. Title page, running header, table of contents, footnotes, comments and highlights are each a checkbox.

Read more about Export.

Writing history

Words you added rise from the centre line. Words you cut fall below it. A day spent cutting is still a day's work, and it won't break your streak.

The whole year, at a glance.

Day by day, added above, cut below.

The Writing Report gives a note, a folder or a selection its numbers: words against target, characters, syllables, sentences, paragraphs, pages, reading time and grade. Under them, every word you used, how often, and its share drawn as a bar. Common words stay out until you tick them in.

Read more about history and the report.

And the rest

Prose checks and parts-of-speech colouring. Nouns, verbs and adjectives in colour, the way a code editor shows you structure. Too many adverbs reads as a rash. Filler, passive voice and doubled words get a squiggle. No model, no network, no verdicts.

A status bar you build yourself. You write it as text, and the punctuation you type between tokens becomes the shape you get. Words, characters, reading time, tasks, properties, backlinks, the note's flag, the time, the battery, and a button for every menu. Each button can be an icon, a word, or both. Three shipped bars to start from, and a share code to trade yours with a friend.

_{As plain as you like. Or not.}

The menu. Everything you change while writing, in one keyboard-driven pop-up. Any Obsidian command can go in it, other plugins included.

Plus typography, text options, Vim niceties and word counts, flags and targets in Obsidian's own file tree.

Local, and only local

No account. No cloud. No subscription. No network calls, no telemetry, no dependencies. Your history, targets and order are plain notes in your vault, readable in any editor, yours to delete. Read more about privacy and your files.

Install

Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search Word-Smith, install, enable.

Needs Obsidian 1.13.7 or newer. Built and tested on the 1.13.7 installer; installers before 1.9 are refused at start, because Obsidian froze on enable in every one reported. Settings → General shows both numbers, and troubleshooting says what to do about an old installer.

Desktop, tablet and phone. The Organizer wants a bigger screen, though it pinches to zoom on a phone.

Five minutes in

1. Run Open the Organizer from the command palette, then click a folder in Obsidian's file tree. That's your work, as a table.
2. Press Properties, add a column, click a cell to edit it. Ctrl-click two rows and set a flag on both.
3. Settings → Word-Smith → Powerline. Try a shipped bar before writing your own.
4. Turn on Zen and Letter box. Write something.
5. Switch on History last. It counts from the day you turn it on.

And a fancier cursor

Word-Smith pairs nicely with my other plugin, Cursor-Smith, if you want a fancier text caret. The most advanced cursor engine out there (maybe): cursor types, thickness, effects, smooth movement, motion smears, sharing codes, and presets so you can try them fast.

Docs

Organizer · Export · Writing modes · Powerline · Themes · History and report · Syntax and prose · Commands and menu · Privacy · Troubleshooting

Questions, ideas, bugs

If you have a question, a cool idea or you found a bug, write it here. Tell me your OS, your Obsidian version and your installer version (Settings → General), and send a screenshot if you can.

Free and MIT. Thanks to everyone on r/ObsidianMD who reported bugs and sent ideas. Cheers!