Live Anchoring
Arthur Sarazin45 downloadsAnchor your writing to your vault: when you pause typing, words that match existing note titles become wikilinks automatically.
- Overview
- Scorecard
- Updates2
Anchor your writing to your vault. When you pause typing, any word or phrase that matches the title of an existing note becomes a [[wikilink]] — automatically, in place, without moving your cursor.
You write:
The notion of a contract has never been so important.
Two seconds later:
The notion of a [[contract]] has never been so important.
…because your vault has a note called contract.md.
How it works
- Listens for editor changes and waits for a configurable typing pause (default 2 s).
- Collects every note title in your vault and finds matches in the current note — longest titles first, so
[[knowledge graph]]wins over[[graph]]. - Applies all links in a single editor transaction: your cursor and scroll position stay put, and one undo removes them all.
- Never touches YAML frontmatter, code blocks, inline code, existing links, or URLs — and never the word your cursor is in.
Commands
- Anchor current note — run the linker once, on demand (works even with automatic anchoring off).
- Toggle automatic anchoring — flip auto mode without opening settings.
Settings
| Setting | Default | |
|---|---|---|
| Anchor automatically | on | link whenever you pause typing |
| Typing pause | 2000 ms | how long to wait after the last keystroke |
| Minimum title length | 3 | ignore very short note titles |
| Exact case only | off | Contract links, contract doesn't |
| First occurrence only | off | link once per title instead of every occurrence |
| Excluded folders | — | never auto-anchor notes in these folders |
| Show notices | on | "Anchored 3 links" notification |
Vault access & privacy
To know what can become a link, the plugin lists the file names of the markdown notes in your vault (via vault.getMarkdownFiles()). That is the entire extent of its vault access:
- It reads note titles only — never the content of any note other than the one you are editing.
- It writes only to the note you are actively editing, through the editor, as a single undoable transaction.
- It makes no network requests and collects no data. Everything happens locally.
Install
From the community plugin store: search Live Anchoring.
Manually: copy manifest.json and main.js from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/live-anchoring/, then enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.
Development
npm install
npm run dev # esbuild watch mode
npm test # unit tests for the linking engine
npm run build # type-check + production bundle
The linking engine (src/linker.ts) is a pure function with no Obsidian imports — see test/linker.test.ts for its specification.
License
MIT