Device Tracker

Know which device created a note — and which one touched it last.

When you edit the same vault on a laptop, a desktop, and a phone, sync keeps the files in step but throws away who did what. Device Tracker writes that information straight into each note's frontmatter:

---
created_device: ThinkPad-JK
modified_device: Pixel7-a3f9c2
---

中文说明见 README.zh-CN.md

The problem it solves

With any file-sync tool (Syncthing, Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, git), a note edited on your phone arrives on your desktop looking exactly like a note you edited on your desktop. Two things go wrong:

1. You can't tell where a change came from. Was this paragraph written at the office or on the train?
2. Naive tracking breaks itself. The obvious implementation — "on file modify, write the current device name" — is wrong. A file arriving through sync is a modify event, so every device overwrites the field with its own name the moment it receives the file. You end up recording the last device that synced, not the last device that edited.

Device Tracker fixes both.

How the sync problem is avoided

modified_device is driven by the editor-change event, not vault modify.

A file synced in from another device never triggers editor-change, so the field is only ever written by a device where a human actually typed.

Programmatic changes (editor refresh, sync reload) are filtered out too, via the event's source flag.

Device names stay local

The device name is stored in each device's localStorage, not in data.json. This matters because .obsidian/ is usually synced along with your notes — if the name lived there, every device would overwrite every other device's name and they'd all end up identical.

You can override the name any time in Settings → Community plugins → Device Tracker → ⚙️.

Fields

Querying notes by device

Once the fields are in your notes, Dataview can filter on them — "show me everything I edited on this laptop", "which notes moved between machines?", and so on.

const me = app.plugins.plugins['device-tracker'].getDeviceName();

dv.table(
  ['Note', 'Created on', 'Last edited on'],
  dv.pages('"Projects"')
    .where(p => p.modified_device === me)
    .map(p => [p.file.link, p.created_device ?? '—', p.modified_device ?? '—'])
);

Five worked examples — including a crash-safe device-name helper and a plain DQL version — are in docs/queries.md (中文：docs/queries.zh-CN.md).

Coexisting with other frontmatter plugins

Several popular plugins write to frontmatter automatically (update-time-on-edit, front-matter-timestamps, and others). Device Tracker is built to sit next to them without loops or fights:

1. Re-entrancy guard — events caused by our own write are ignored.
2. Write only on change — if the device name is already correct, nothing is written. No timestamp comparisons, no spurious diffs.
3. processFrontMatter with restored timestamps — atomic read-modify-write that puts mtime back, so plugins that key off file mtime are unaffected.
4. source filtering — ignores programmatic editor changes.
5. File filtering — skips non-Markdown files, Canvas.md, and empty files.

Install

From the community list

Once accepted into the official directory: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search "Device Tracker" → Install → Enable.

Manually

1. Download main.js, manifest.json from the latest release.
2. Put them in <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/device-tracker/.
3. Reload the app, then enable Device Tracker in Community plugins.

First run on a new device

The app asks whether you trust the vault author. Choose "Trust author and enable plugins" — otherwise Community plugins stay in Restricted Mode and nothing loads.

How it differs from other provenance plugins

This is a device tracker, not a human/AI tracker.

They answer different questions and can run side by side. If you want "was this my laptop or my phone?", use this one. If you want "did a human or an AI write this?", use Authorship Tracker.

Platform support

Limitations

• iOS is not supported — no plugin API there at all.
• Device names aren't retroactive. Notes created before you installed the plugin have no created_device, and it isn't backfilled (there's no reliable way to know where an old file came from).
• A note edited on two devices with the same custom name is indistinguishable. Not a bug — just set distinct names.
• Rename/move doesn't count as an edit. modified_device reflects content edits only.

Documentation

Everything is available in both English and Chinese, as separate pages (never mixed):

License

MIT