Collate

Two drafts, side by side.

简体中文

An Obsidian plugin that opens two notes in a native split and marks what differs between them — in both notes, down to the word.

Chinese text is segmented through Intl.Segmenter, so differences are highlighted word by word instead of line by line. Both sides read the unsaved editor buffer first and refresh after a short debounce, identical text is never colored, and the highlighting itself never writes to the notes. Both sides of a split currently use the same word-difference color, meaning "unique to this side" — not a unified add/delete direction.

Collate grew out of Till Friebe's obsidian-file-diff (MIT) and is now maintained by SigiL as part of the ouatis Obsidian family, alongside Desk Lamp, Skill Switchboard and Scriptorium. Quiet panels and thin rules share a visual rhythm with the rest of the family; colors and fonts follow your Obsidian theme. English and Simplified Chinese are available.

[!NOTE] Collate runs on desktop Obsidian (verified on Windows); mobile is not supported.

Install

Requires Obsidian 0.15.0 or newer. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the releases page, place them in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/bigao/, then enable the plugin.

Use

Run a command from the command palette:

In a Simplified Chinese Obsidian the same commands read 比稿：…. The side panel follows the source cursor while you write; the follow toggle sits in its header. Collate: Close side-by-side comparison only closes panes that still show the note Collate opened there; panes you have repurposed are left alone. Blocks that moved between the drafts are paired into one decision — accept the move, reject it, or split the pair back into two independent hunks; near-moves (edited en route) say so and keep the revised wording. Merge actions modify notes — review the differences and keep backups before confirming.

Notes on scale

The full-diff view is bounded to 4,000 lines and 1,000,000 characters per note, and the diff computation itself to 2,000 edits or 500 ms — oversized inputs show an explicit message instead of a wrong "no differences". The inline split highlighting caps at 4,000 lines per note; past the cap the highlight stays empty, which must not be read as "no differences".

Editor highlighting requires the note to be in editing mode; reading mode is not guaranteed to look the same. Comparison pairs are restored automatically after a reload while both panes stay open. Collate is a desktop plugin; it is not tested on mobile.

Development

With Node.js 22.6 or newer:

npm ci
npm run verify

runs the dependency audit, the installed-bundle regression, the strict TypeScript check, the source unit tests, a clean production build and the installed-vs-source parity checks. AGENTS.md records the maintenance conventions; README.local.md and src/RESTORE-PLAN.md document the restoration history.

npm run package:candidate writes a full candidate package with checksums to dist/candidate/ (three files; the inline diff runtime is bundled into main.js). For a real desktop smoke test, provide the local Obsidian paths and run npm run test:obsidian — it only ever touches isolated temporary vaults.

License

MIT, following upstream. Collate is based on obsidian-file-diff by Till Friebe; the restoration baseline is the upstream 1.1.2 tag (d566ded402f72e1508f33b640d6f96d7c32c9a00). The original copyright and license text are preserved in LICENSE.