Text Case and Cleanup

Change the case of the text you have selected, and clean up prose that came out of a PDF, a scan or a web page.

Everything runs on the text in front of you. There is no network access, no telemetry, and nothing runs on its own: a command only ever touches the selection you give it, and each one is a single undo step. The one optional exception is Tidy on paste, which is off until you turn it on.

Installing

In Obsidian, open Settings -> Community plugins -> Browse, search for Text Case and Cleanup, then install and enable it.

To install it by hand instead:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Put the three files in <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/text-format/.
3. Reload Obsidian and turn the plugin on under Settings -> Community plugins.

It needs Obsidian 1.0.0 or newer, and works on desktop and mobile alike.

Commands

Each command works on every selection you have. With no selection it works on the current line, and on a blank line it does nothing.

Case

Names: variables, file names, tags, anchors

They read each other as well as prose: userAccountId, user_account_id and USER-ACCOUNT-ID all give the same words, XMLHttpRequest splits as xml_http_request, and don't stays one word. Each line converts on its own and keeps its bullet, task box or heading hashes, so a list of titles becomes a list of slugs, not one long identifier. Links, URLs, inline code and maths are left in place.

One hotkey for all of them

Change case… lists every case with a preview of what your selection would become. Type a few letters to filter (snake, kebab), then Enter.

Sentence case lowers everything first and then raises the opening word of each sentence. Capitalize sentences only raises the opening word, so proper nouns you already typed survive.

Cleanup

Tidy note

One command, Tidy note, runs the cleanups you pick in the settings over the selection, or the whole note when nothing is selected. A small window first says how many lines each step would change (and a notice says "Nothing to tidy" when it would change none); confirming applies everything as one undo step.

Steps: remove invisible characters, replace ligatures, join wrapped lines, collapse multiple spaces, remove trailing whitespace, remove extra blank lines. All but joining wrapped lines are on by default.

It leaves fenced code, inline code, display maths, front matter and tables alone, never touches indentation, list markers or blockquote depth, and keeps Markdown hard line breaks (two trailing spaces before another line of text).

Each of three steps is also a command of its own: Remove trailing whitespace, Collapse multiple spaces (indentation stays) and Remove extra blank lines (keep one).

Tidy on paste (off by default) runs the same steps on plain text you paste. It does nothing inside code or front matter, leaves pastes that carry formatting (HTML, files) to Obsidian, never changes the clipboard, steps aside if another plugin already handled the paste, and is one undo step.

Your own find-and-replace

For the fix you make again and again, keep it as a command. In the settings, under Saved replacements, add a replacement with a name, the text to find, the text to put in its place, and two options: Regular expression and Match case. Each one becomes its own command, Replace: , which you can give a hotkey, and is also listed in Run a saved replacement…. Adding, renaming or deleting one takes effect at once, without a reload.

A replacement works on the selection, or on the whole note when nothing is selected. It is one undo step, and a notice says how many replacements it made. Nothing is saved by default.

Example: a replacement named Dates to ISO, with Regular expression on, that finds (\d{2})/(\d{2})/(\d{4}) and replaces it with $3-$2-$1, turns 31/12/2026 into 2026-12-31.

• Without Regular expression, the find and replace text are taken exactly as typed, so . and $ mean themselves.
• With it, $1, $2... are the groups of the match, $& is the whole match, and \n in the replace text is a line break. An empty replace text deletes the matches.
• Match case is off by default, so cat also finds Cat.
• A regular expression that is not valid shows an error line under it in the settings, and its command only shows a notice; it never changes the note.
• Matches never span two lines. A selection that starts or ends inside code is left alone.

Lines

These work on every line the selection touches, or on the whole note when nothing is selected. The front matter is never included, lines inside code blocks are never removed, and one undo puts everything back.

What these commands will not touch

• Fenced code blocks and inline code are copied through untouched, as is inline maths. Saved replacements skip code and front matter too.
• URLs, wikilinks, autolinks and e-mail addresses keep their case, because lowering a URL can break it.
• A line's markdown prefix — quote markers, bullets, ordered numbers, task checkboxes, heading hashes — is never rewritten. - [x] buy milk becomes - [x] Buy milk, never - [X] Buy Milk.
• Abbreviations and decimals (e.g., U.S.A., 3.14) do not end a sentence and keep their own capitals.

Settings

Scope

This is a rebuild of the uncontested half of Text Format, whose last release was in July 2024. It deliberately leaves out:

• Automatic format-on-save. Whitespace cleanup is a command, and pasting can be tidied only if you opt in; nothing rewrites your notes unasked.
• The original's grab bag — callouts, Anki, LaTeX conversion, table to list, heading level shifting, API requests. Those are separate tools wearing one name.

Bugs it does not reproduce

These are open issues on the original. They are fixed here by design, and each one has a test naming it.

Building and testing

npm install
npm test     # the logic, under plain Node
npm run build

The logic lives in src/case.ts and src/cleanup.ts and imports nothing from Obsidian, so it runs and is tested under plain Node. main.ts is the only file that talks to the editor, and it edits by range inside one editor.transaction, so a command is one undo step and never replaces the document.

More plugins by Siulved54

All of them are in the community directory: Settings -> Community plugins -> Browse, then search for the name.

Licence

MIT, see LICENSE.