Patina

Find the notes that are quietly rotting.

Every vault accumulates notes that were true when you wrote them and are not true now. Nothing tells you which ones. Patina scores every note's staleness from four signals, ranks them, and gives you a worklist.

Patina never edits your notes. The only thing it ever writes is a decay: line in a note's frontmatter — and only when you explicitly run "Set decay profile for this note".

How the score works

A note decays on a half-life. One half-life of neglect halves how fresh a signal is; two half-lives quarter it. Three signals feed the score:

The score is 0–100, higher is more decayed, and it lands in a band: fresh (< 30), aging (30–59), stale (60–84), decayed (≥ 85).

A note with no inbound links is never punished for it. The weights renormalize over the signals that actually exist. An orphan note is not a stale note, and treating a missing signal as a zero would mark half the vault as decayed on day one.

Per-note half-lives

Set a note's decay profile in its frontmatter:

---
decay: fast        # 14-day half-life — meeting notes, inbox captures
---

Half-lives, weights, band thresholds, the frontmatter key, and the excluded folders are all configurable. A typo in the profile (decay: evergreeen) falls back to the default — it never silently exempts the note.

What you get

Free — all of it

• Staleness score for every note, from edits, opens, and inbound links.
• A sortable review queue in the sidebar — by score, last edited, last opened, or editing time.
• Dimmed stale notes in the file explorer.
• The score for the active note in the status bar.
• Per-note half-lives from frontmatter, and per-profile tuning.
• Snooze a note you are not ready to deal with.
• CSV export of every score.
• No caps, no note limit, no nag screen. Works on mobile.

Pro — $29 one-time, unlocks all five Second Read add-ons

Second Read Pro — $29 one-time. One key unlocks Pro in all five Second Read add-ons (Note Decay, Standing Questions, Effort Index, Prior Art, Unwritten). Buy here: https://buymeacoffee.com/vaultspotlight/e/560213 — the key is emailed to you automatically, within seconds (delivery is fully automated); paste it into Settings → Patina → License. It is verified offline.

Pro adds the two features that need to compare notes by meaning rather than by metadata:

• Group the queue by topic — cluster the review queue so one session covers one subject. Notes the engine finds no topic for are still listed, under their own heading; grouping never hides a note.
• Superseded-note detection — flag a stale note whose content is now largely covered by newer notes. The ones you rewrote without noticing. A note is only flagged when two or more newer notes cover it closely (cosine ≥ 0.78 against the note's own text) — one close match is a follow-up, not a replacement.

Both need the local semantic engine (see below), which runs on your computer and sends nothing anywhere. The engine has no published build as of this release, so both features are switched off and say so when you reach for them. They do not show you an empty list — an empty list would look like a clean vault, and that would be a lie.

One key unlocks Pro in all five Second Read add-ons: Patina, Standing Questions, Effort Index, Prior Art, and Unwritten. Licenses are verified offline with an Ed25519 signature built into the add-on. No account, no server, no network request.

Disclosures

Please read these before installing. They are the things this add-on does that you cannot see.

It records which notes you open, on your device

Obsidian does not track when a note was last opened, so Patina logs it itself. Without that, "last opened" is not a signal anyone could compute.

This add-on records, on your device only, which notes you open. The log lives in <vault>/.obsidian/second-read/signals/ and never leaves your machine. Delete the folder to erase it; there is a Clear activity log button in settings.

The log is a plain append-only text file. It records the note path and a timestamp — nothing about the note's contents. It is shared with the other Second Read add-ons (Effort Index writes editing time into the same log), which is why installing a second one is instantly useful instead of starting from zero history.

Pro features download and run a program (and only if you ask)

The two Pro features need a local semantic engine: a self-contained program that runs on your computer, embeds your notes locally, and opens no network connections.

• Nothing is downloaded unless you click "Download engine" in settings and confirm a dialog that names the exact URL, version, SHA-256 checksum, and install path.
• The download is verified against a checksum built into this add-on before anything is extracted or run. If it does not match, the file is deleted and nothing executes.
• The engine is installed outside your vault, in your system's application-data folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%\second-read-engine on Windows). It is never written into your notes folder.
• It runs only while Obsidian is open, and it is killed when the last Second Read add-on unloads.
• Source: github.com/israerusan/second-read-engine.
• Desktop only. On mobile, the Pro semantic features are unavailable and everything else works.
• If your system refuses to run a downloaded program (antivirus, a noexec mount, Flatpak), you can point the add-on at an engine binary you installed yourself. The download is a convenience, not the mechanism.

This means the add-on accesses files outside your vault, and that is exactly what the two bullets above describe.

It decorates Obsidian's file explorer

The stale-note dimming decorates Obsidian's own file list, which has no public API for it. If a future Obsidian release changes the file explorer, the dimming stops working and nothing else does. It is a toggle in settings.

Commands

No default hotkeys — bind your own in Settings → Hotkeys.

Install

Community plugins (recommended): open Settings → Community plugins, search Patina, and install it — one click, auto-updates.

Manual install: copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/patina/ and enable it in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

npm install
npm run sync:shared     # vendor the shared Second Read core
npm run lint            # typecheck + the review bot's own eslint ruleset
npm test                # lint + drift check + the whole suite
npm run build           # production bundle
npm run install:vault -- <path to a vault>

src/shared/ is vendored from obsidian-plugin-core and must never be edited here — npm test fails on drift.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.