Running Head

Running Head is an incredible Obsidian plugin that adds a highly customizable metadata header. Track dates, custom frontmatter properties, folder paths, and tabs navigation seamlessly without hassle.

🌟 Features in Action

1. 📅 Creation & Last Update Dates

Track your note's timeline dynamically. Format dates using 18 default locales or your own Moment.js patterns. A dedicated, smart update label automatically highlights when a note was modified after creation.

2. 📐 Layout Styles

Choose between Blog Style (folder path above the title, metadata below) or Wiki Style (metadata above the title, path below) layouts to suit your note-taking aesthetics.

3. 🍞 Note Path (Breadcrumbs)

Navigate easily with a clickable folder path showing exactly where your note is located, with optional highlighting of the current active folder.

4. 🏷️ Custom YAML Fields & Folder Scopes

Render any frontmatter property (text, lists, checkboxes) as custom fields or beautiful pill structures in your header. Hide specific fields in certain directories using flexible folder scopes to keep your workspace clean.

[!NOTE] Adding a text field serves as an illustration; these options apply to any custom metadata property.

5. 🗂️ Interactive Tabs Navigation

Build sleek navigation headers to jump between related notes using frontmatter properties. Customize tab visual styles (Underline, Pill, or Minimal) and easily add Lucide icons or custom display names.

6. 📊 Scroll Progress & Typify Integration

Add a modern, color-customizable scroll progress bar fixed at the top of your note. Running Head also seamlessly integrates with the Typify plugin to automatically inherit premium colored pill styles.

⚙️ Additional Features

• 🎨 Custom Colors: Define the colors of the update label, the note path, or the progress bar simply and individually.
• 🙈 Hide First H1: Prevent duplicate titles on screen if you use plugins that sync the filename to the first H1.
• 📅 Format Title as Date: Turn your note title into a nicely formatted date.

  [!NOTE] For this to work, the note's filename must contain only the date (and optionally the time), without any other text. Supported Formats:

  • YYYY-MM-DD, YYYYMMDD, DD-MM-YYYY, YYYY.MM.DD, DD/MM/YYYY, etc.
  • With time: YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm, YYYYMMDDHHmmss, DD-MM-YYYY HH:mm, etc.

• 💾 Data Management: Export complete settings as JSON and import them into another vault or device easily.
• 🌍 Internationalization: Interface fully translated into English, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, French, and Simplified Chinese. If there are translation errors or improvements, please let me know.

🚀 Usage & Quick Start

1. Activate the Plugin: Open Obsidian settings $\rightarrow$ Community Plugins, search for Running Head, and enable it.
2. Set Dates in Frontmatter: Configure your YAML keys for creation (default date) and update (default updated) dates:

   date: 2026-05-29
   updated: 2026-05-29
   

3. Configure Custom Fields: Go to plugin settings $\rightarrow$ Custom Fields and click Add to map any YAML key (e.g. Author, tags) to the header.
4. Create Tabs: Go to Tabs Navigation, define a global property name (e.g. menu), create a new tab group (e.g. project) and add your tabs. Then, in your note's frontmatter, use menu: project.

📦 Installation

Manual Installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Create a folder named running-head inside your-vault-folder/.obsidian/plugins/.
3. Move the downloaded files into that folder.
4. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin under Settings → Community plugins.

🛠️ Development

To build the plugin locally:

1. Download the source code to your machine.
2. Install the necessary NodeJS packages.
3. Start the project compilation in watch mode.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This plugin was designed to bring a more elegant, "published" feel to your Obsidian vault notes. And like other times, it was born from my desire to customize my vault (sometimes desires make us create incredible things, as well as spend hours and hours until it looks the way we want... lol).

Special thanks to Antigravity for the invaluable assistance in building, refactoring, and optimizing this codebase. But nothing is done magically, this plugin was tested, retested, turned inside out to be as optimized, light, good, beautiful and functional as possible for everyone looking for something like this.

If you find any bugs, please open an issue and I'll do my best to fix it. Contributions via pull requests are always welcome! 😉