Contextual Guides

Contextual Guides shows a note in a right sidebar based on tags, folders, and frontmatter properties in your active note. It also lets you apply guide frontmatter back into the current note with one click. Useful for style guides, contextual guidelines, or metadata requirements.

What It Does

• Adds a right-sidebar view called Contextual guide.
• Lets you define one or more guide rules in plugin settings.
• Matches rules when the active note satisfies enabled tag, folder, and/or property conditions.
• Renders the selected guide note in the sidebar.
• Shows guide frontmatter above the rendered guide content.
• Lets you click guide frontmatter property names to add missing properties to the current note.
• Lets you click guide frontmatter values to add them to the current note or replace a single-value property after confirmation.
• Provides an Open guide button to bring the guide note into a foreground tab.

Usage

1. Open plugin settings.
2. Select Add guide.
3. Configure Rule name, Guide panel title, Required tags, Required folders (optional), Required properties (optional), Required property values (optional), and Guide note path.
4. Open a note that matches the rule.
5. Open the sidebar with the ribbon icon or command Open contextual guide sidebar.
6. Use the Open guide button to focus the guide note tab or open it in a new foreground tab.
7. Click frontmatter property names or values in the guide to apply them to the current note.

Rule Matching Notes

• Tag, folder, and property matching can be toggled on and off independently.
• Tags are normalized (case-insensitive, with leading # removed).
• Folder paths are normalized (case-insensitive, slash format).
• Required folders supports one or more folder paths. A note matches if it is in the folder or any subfolder.
• Property names and values are normalized (case-insensitive).
• Required properties checks that each property exists in frontmatter.
• Required property values supports prop=value and prop=value1|value2 patterns.
• A rule only matches when all enabled conditions in that rule are satisfied.
• If no rule matches, the sidebar shows an empty-state message.
• If a rule has no valid guide note path, the sidebar shows a configuration warning.
• Frontmatter properties can be hidden in the sidebar with the plugin setting Hide guide frontmatter properties.
• Frontmatter list values render with commas between items.

Privacy And Security

• The plugin operates on local vault metadata and files.
• No external network requests are required for core functionality.

Release Notes

• 1.0.6: Added clickable guide frontmatter values, clickable frontmatter property names, hidden-frontmatter filtering, and improved guide tab interactions.