MD Journal

Write in your Obsidian notes as if they were a journal.

MD Journal shows a note as book pages, one page or a two-page spread, and lets you write directly on them. When a page fills up, your words carry on at the top of the next page, mid-sentence if needed. When the spread is full, the book turns to a fresh one. Nothing scrolls.

By default the pages use your normal Obsidian theme. Turn on Fixed page to keep the same amount of text on every page whatever the window size: the page scales to fit instead of re-flowing, so page breaks stay put. For a paper notebook, switch the layout to Journal pages: ruled or dotted paper at a real size (A5 by default).

The note stays ordinary Markdown. Whatever you type is saved to the file as you wrote it, and the regular editor, sync, search and links all keep working.

Features

• Pages that fill and continue. Text flows from the bottom of one page to the top of the next as you type, delete or paste. The book follows the caret onto the next page or spread with a page turn.
• Theme view (default). Columns fill the pane in your theme's colours and font, with page buttons at the sides. The page is cut to fit the pane, so page breaks move when you resize, and the view keeps the caret's place.
• Fixed page. In the theme view, this keeps the text area of a page constant (A6 to A4, or a custom size) in your theme font. Resizing the window only scales the page, so every page always holds the same text.
• Journal pages. A paper notebook: A6 pocket, B6, A5, half letter, B5, A4 or a custom size in millimetres, in a two-page spread with a spine shadow. Ruled, dot grid, squared or plain paper in white, cream, sepia, gray, night or your theme's colours. Every line takes a whole number of rulings, so the writing stays on the lines. Big headings sit in a blank band, like the title space of a journal page.
• Live preview. **bold**, *italic*, headings, links, highlights and tags show as formatting. Their Markdown marks appear only on the line you are writing. Bullets and checkboxes are drawn in place, and you can click a checkbox to tick it.
• Highlighted code blocks. Fenced code with a language is coloured by Obsidian's own Prism, as in the reading view.
• Writing aids. Enter continues lists, quotes and task lists, and Enter on an empty item ends the list. Tab and Shift+Tab indent. Insert date heading starts today's entry. Insert page break (<!-- pagebreak -->) starts a new page, and the setting New page for each top-level heading gives every # heading a page of its own.
• Pictures. Paste or drop an image: it is saved as an attachment, following your attachment settings, and shown on the page.
• Undo and formatting keys. Ctrl/Cmd+Z, and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z or Ctrl+Y, undo and redo, with typing grouped as in an editor. Ctrl/Cmd+B and Ctrl/Cmd+I toggle bold and italic.
• Turning pages. Use the ‹ › buttons, PageUp and PageDown, the mouse wheel, or a swipe on touch screens. If the page has focus, the caret moves to the top of the new page. Clicking blank paper puts the caret at the end of the writing on that page.
• Autosave. The note is saved shortly after you stop typing. Changes made elsewhere in Obsidian show up in the journal; if both sides change at once, what you are typing in the journal is kept. Frontmatter (properties) is never shown on the page and is never lost.

How to use

• Click the book icon in the left ribbon to open your journal note (Journal.md by default, created if needed). The caret starts at the end, ready for a new entry.
• To open any note as a journal, right-click it and choose Open as journal, or run Open current note as journal.
• Buttons in the view header:
  • Pencil: switches the tab to Obsidian's normal editor.
  • Aa: page settings.
  • Monitor: switches between the theme view and journal pages.

Commands

Settings

Privacy

MD Journal works entirely offline. It makes no network requests, collects no data, and only reads and writes notes and attachments inside your vault.

Limitations

• Tables, callouts, embeds of other notes and HTML are shown as their Markdown source, not rendered.
• An image taller than a page is shrunk to fit one page.
• On phones the on-screen keyboard shrinks the space for the page, so the page is scaled down while you type.

How it works

The page is a contenteditable surface laid out with CSS columns at a fixed height, one column per page. The browser's own text layout therefore decides where a page ends, and text that no longer fits moves to the next column by itself.

The Markdown source, an array of lines, is the only document model. Edits are intercepted (beforeinput, clipboard and keyboard events), applied to the model, and only the changed lines are rebuilt with DOM calls. No HTML is parsed, and nothing is converted back from HTML. IME composition (CJK input, many mobile keyboards) can't be intercepted, so the browser types it and the changed lines are read back into the model.

Large notes stay responsive. A 536-page note (600k characters) took about 8 ms per keystroke in Chromium.

Installation

Until MD Journal is listed in Community plugins:

• With BRAT: add Timspace-bot/md-journal in the BRAT plugin.
• By hand: download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release into <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/md-journal/, then enable MD Journal under Settings → Community plugins.

Development

MD Journal is written in TypeScript and bundled with esbuild.

npm install
npm run build     # type-check, then src/ -> main.js
npm run dev       # rebuild on change
npm run lint      # Obsidian's official ESLint rules, type-aware, as the community directory runs them
npm test          # Markdown, page geometry and code highlighting logic
npm run harness   # http://localhost:5178/tests/harness.html — the editor in a browser

The harness bundles the real source with a small stand-in for the obsidian module. It has switches for layout, fixed page, dark theme, page mode, paper colour and paper style.

Releases are built by GitHub Actions. Pushing a tag such as 0.2.0 type-checks, lints, tests and builds main.js. It then signs build-provenance attestations for the release files and attaches them to a GitHub release. See CONTRIBUTING.md to help out.

Credits

Inspired by MD Reader by mrrepac, which shows notes as e-book pages for reading. MD Journal is a separate project with its own code, built for writing.

License

MIT © Timspace-bot