Privacy Screen

An Obsidian plugin that blurs your workspace while keeping a spotlight around your cursor, providing privacy when working in public spaces.

Features

• Blur overlay - Blurs the entire Obsidian workspace except for a configurable spotlight area around the cursor
• Spotlight shapes - Choose between circle or square (with adjustable corner roundness)
• Independent size control - Adjust spotlight width and height separately
• Horizontal offset - Shift the spotlight left or right relative to the cursor position
• Tracking modes - Follow the text cursor or mouse pointer
• State persistence - Remembers whether privacy screen was active when you close Obsidian

Installation

From Obsidian Community Plugins

1. Open Obsidian Settings
2. Go to Community Plugins and disable Safe Mode
3. Click Browse and search for "Privacy Screen"
4. Install and enable the plugin

Manual Installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release
2. Create a folder privacy-screen in your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory
3. Copy the downloaded files into that folder
4. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin in Settings > Community Plugins

Usage

• Click the eye-off icon in the ribbon to toggle the privacy screen
• Use the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd + P) and search for "Toggle privacy screen"

Settings

Commands

All commands can be bound to hotkeys in Settings > Hotkeys:

• Toggle privacy screen
• Increase/Decrease spotlight width
• Increase/Decrease spotlight height
• Increase/Decrease blur intensity
• Increase/Decrease horizontal offset
• Increase/Decrease feather edge
• Increase/Decrease corner roundness
• Toggle tracking mode (cursor/mouse)
• Reset to default settings

Known limitations

• Text-cursor tracking reads the editor's cursor position through an undocumented CodeMirror 6 internal (editor.cm), since Obsidian doesn't expose a public API for this. If a future Obsidian update changes that internal, cursor tracking could stop working until the plugin is updated — mouse tracking mode doesn't depend on it and is unaffected.

Acknowledgements

• Inspired by Pwritevacy

License

MIT