Mass Editor

An Obsidian plugin for mass search and editing of notes across your vault. Build a visual query (nested AND/OR groups with NOT), get a list of notes, and run bulk edit operations on them — safely, with backups and undo.

The UI inherits your active Obsidian theme.

Features

• Visual query builder with nested AND/OR groups and NOT.
• Two-phase search engine (metadata → content) with three-valued (Kleene) logic — note bodies are read only where metadata alone can't decide. Fast even on thousands of notes.
• Fields: tag, frontmatter (per key), body, name, path, location (folder + recursion), created/modified dates.
• Edit operations: frontmatter set / add / delete / append-to-list, move a frontmatter key into the body, tag add / remove, body append / prepend, regex find & replace (capture groups $1), and remove duplicate blank lines.
• Value variables: frontmatter set / add (only if missing) values can embed per-note placeholders — {{title}}, {{path}}, {{folder}}, {{today}}, {{now}}, {{time}}, {{created}}, {{modified}}. Date placeholders accept an optional format, e.g. {{modified:YYYY/MM/DD}} (tokens YYYY YY MM DD HH mm ss). Pick one from the Insert variable… menu or type it.
• Frontmatter → body: convert a frontmatter entry into body text and append or prepend it, using a format preset (heading, bold label, Dataview inline field, bullet, blockquote, value only) or a custom rule with {{key}} / {{value}} placeholders — optionally removing the key afterwards.
• Blank-line cleanup: collapse runs of duplicated empty lines (between paragraphs, after / before headings, between bullet list items, between tasks, and at the note's start / end). Pick a preset (collapse to single, tighten lists & tasks, hug headings, compact) or set custom rules (max consecutive blanks + per-spot toggles).
• Result selection via checkboxes (all selected by default), with a live count.
• Configurable result columns: show any metadata as table columns — frontmatter (per key), tags, file created / modified dates, folder path, and the note name itself. The header shows plain column titles; click a title to edit that column (type / frontmatter key), drag it to reorder, drag its right edge to resize (double-click to reset), and add columns with +. Each column can also list OR fallbacks — e.g. show frontmatter author, or owner when it's missing. The layout is remembered.
• Resizable results pane: drag the bottom edge of the results list to make it taller or shorter.
• Regex match preview: peek at the lines a regex operation will hit in any result (with the matches highlighted) before you run it.
• Impact summary + change preview before applying: a per-operation breakdown, plus an optional dry-run diff of the body transformation on a sample of the selected notes — nothing is written.
• Backup + undo: each run is a single transaction; restore from backup with drift detection. Only files that actually changed are backed up.
• Git-style diff: inspect exactly what an edit changed in any note — a line-by-line comparison (backup before vs current after), unified or side-by-side, with word-level highlighting.
• Export report: save a run as a Markdown note with a unified diff per file.
• Presets: save and reload a query + operations combination.
• Layout: single pane on desktop, two tabs on mobile.

Install via BRAT

1. Install the BRAT community plugin.
2. In BRAT choose Add Beta Plugin and enter the repository: ondreu/mass-editor.
3. BRAT downloads the latest release; enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Open it via the ribbon icon (⟳) or the command Mass Editor: Open.

Usage

1. Query — compose rules and groups. The AND/OR toggle is on each group, the NOT toggle on both rules and groups. The live count shows an estimate (up to N notes, until content rules are evaluated).
2. Search — computes the full result (including reading bodies where needed).
3. Results — uncheck any notes you don't want to change (all selected by default). Columns show as a table with titled headers: click a header to edit it, drag to reorder, drag the right edge to resize, + to add. Drag the pane's bottom edge to make it taller.
4. Operations — add one or more edit operations.
5. Apply — an impact summary is shown; after confirmation a backup is created and the operations run.

Operation order is fixed and deterministic: frontmatter → tags → move-to-body → regex → append/prepend → blank-line cleanup (the cleanup runs last so it also tidies text that earlier operations introduced).

Backups and undo

• Each edit run backs up the affected files (only those that actually changed) and writes a manifest.json.
• History and Undo are behind the history icon in the toolbar.
• Undo restores files from the backup. If a file was manually changed in the meantime (drift), the plugin warns and offers skip / overwrite.
• View changes: expand a run and click the compare icon next to a file for a git-style diff of the backup against the note's current content. Toggle unified / side-by-side; changed words within a line are highlighted; unchanged runs collapse into hunks with surrounding context.
• Export report: the download icon on a run writes a Markdown note (in the report folder) containing the run metadata and a fenced unified diff per file.

Backup location tradeoff: the default backup folder is inside the plugin folder (.obsidian/plugins/mass-editor/backups/). That folder may not sync and reinstalling the plugin can delete it. For durable backups, set a path inside your vault (backupFolder) in Settings.

Settings

Development

npm install
npm run dev      # watch build → main.js
npm run build    # typecheck + production bundle
npm test         # unit tests (engine, diff, blank-line & frontmatter helpers)

Key modules: src/query (types, operators, evaluator, engine), src/edit (operations, applier, summary, diff, report), src/backup (backups + undo), src/ui (DOM components incl. shared diff renderer), src/view (main view).

Implementation safety: frontmatter/tags are edited exclusively through app.fileManager.processFrontMatter, and bodies through app.vault.process (atomic). No manual YAML parsing.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.