Relay Comments
Add Relay-aware comments and suggestions to Markdown notes.
- Overview
- Scorecard
- Updates2
Comments and suggested edits for Obsidian notes — stored in the note itself.
Select text, add a comment, and discuss it in a review sidebar, Google Docs-style. Propose additions, deletions, and replacements that the author can accept or reject with one action. Everything is written into the Markdown file as plain CriticMarkup, so review state survives without a server, syncs with anything that syncs text, and stays readable in any editor.
Discuss a passage
Select text and comment — Ctrl+Alt+M (Cmd+Opt+M on macOS), the margin
button, or the right-click menu. Replies stack into a thread anchored to
the passage, and collaborators' comments land in your note as they write
them. Hover any commented passage to read the thread in place; the
preview's links reply or open the full thread.
Suggest edits
Mark additions {++like this++}, deletions {--like this--}, and
replacements {~~old~>new~~}. Review them where they sit: hover a
suggestion and Accept or Reject it from the preview — or sweep
the whole note at once with Finalize for publish.
Review in the sidebar
Every comment, suggestion, and highlight in the note, in document order, with colored spines and diff chips so you can scan what each one is. Click a card to jump to its place in the note; resolve a thread with one click — the markup leaves the note, the text stays.
Comment on canvases
Figma-style pins on any canvas: comment on a card — from its right-click menu or by clicking it in comment mode — and the pin docks at the card's corner; click the empty board to drop a freestanding pin right there. Pins carry the author's initial, hold their size at any zoom, ride their card when it moves, and open a floating thread to read, reply, and resolve.
Authorship and identity
No account or plugin dependency is required. Comments can use a plain
author name such as Bongo Cat; when no identity service is available,
Relay Comments settings ask for your name and an optional profile
picture. Relay and Obsidian Sync can instead supply
your service identity. When both are available, choose one in Relay
Comments settings.
The identities array in the plugin's data.json is a directory for
resolving other people's author IDs. Those entries are never treated as
your own identity.
Privacy and network access
Relay Comments has no account, telemetry, or direct note-upload service. When you select Relay or Obsidian Sync as your identity provider, Relay Comments asks that installed service for identity records; that service's network and privacy behavior still applies. Profile-picture URLs are loaded by Obsidian when their avatars are displayed.
Usage notes
- Live Preview and Reading mode render review marks and hide the raw delimiters; Source mode shows the plain text. Half-typed markup is never hidden, so nothing silently disappears while you type.
- Sidebar cards carry Resolve; suggestions add Accept /
Reject under the
⋯menu. - On a canvas, the add-comment shortcut starts click-to-place.
Commands (search "Relay Comments" in the command palette): open/close the review sidebar, add comment, add comment to canvas (click to place), show comment preview at cursor, highlight selection, mark selection as addition/deletion/substitution, accept/reject current, accept/reject all, and finalize for publish. The ribbon icon toggles the sidebar.
The format
Notes stay portable because review state is plain text in the CriticMarkup syntax:
| Mark | Syntax |
|---|---|
| Addition | {++inserted text++} |
| Deletion | {--removed text--} |
| Replacement | {~~old~>new~~} |
| Highlight | {==marked text==} |
| Comment | {>>comment text<<} |
Authored comments use the established author metadata field:
{==the passage==}{{author="Bongo Cat">>Can we ground this sooner?<<}}
author may be a display name or an ID understood by the selected
identity provider or the local identity directory. When it is an ID,
names, avatars, and colors are resolved when the note is displayed and
are not duplicated into its Markdown.
Any CriticMarkup-aware tool still reads the note; plain-Markdown tools see readable text with visible annotations.
Installation
Install Relay Comments from its Obsidian community plugin catalog page, or from inside Obsidian:
- Open Settings → Community plugins and select Browse.
- Search for Relay Comments and select Install.
- Select Enable.
Development
npm install
npm run check # typecheck src/
npm run build # typecheck + produce main.js
Unit tests live in tests/unit/ — npm test runs them on any checkout.
See CONTRIBUTING.