I Built a Plugin for Managing Annotations in Obsidian

I'm a big fan of the Obsidian Clipper for bringing all sorts of content into my Vault. I'm also a serial highlighter, as I personally find it's one of the best methods to really focus (and remember) passages of interest, but until now I couldn't find a plugin that allowed me to easily find, manage, and store them—so I made a plugin that does all of the above.

Features

"Sidebar Highlights is an annotation powerhouse"– Me

But in reality it does have a good number of features in a simple tab based structure.

• Automatically picks up highlights in the current file as they're created.
• Displays all of your highlights across all your files.
• Add highlights to collections, and easily view their contents. There's no limit to how many collections you can make.
• Works with markdown syntax– I've set up a hotkey, CMD+D, for this, but you can also right click selected text and click Create Highlight, or just do it from the Command Palette.
• Add comments to your highlights. This one was tricky, as I wanted something that played well with native Obsidian and didn't lock you into the plugin should it be abandoned or Obsidian changes drastically. It actually works with Obsidian's footnote markdown, so clicking on the comment button on any highlight within the sidebar will automatically create a new footnote for that comment.
• Automatically picks up comments using Obsidian's comment syntax. These are displayed in the sidebar as well, just with muted coloring. Oh, and these can optionally be hidden.
• Grouping: There are a ton of grouping options, such as by parent, collection, filename, or number of comments—the list goes on.
• Tag Filtering: Sidebar Highlights will pick up any tags appended in the footnotes, and they'll be displayed in-line with the sidebar, so you can filter which ones are displayed.

• Command Palette: Yes, having Collections is nice, but what if you want to quickly jump to them? Well, anytime a Collection is created, a corresponding command will also be created, so you can jump to these at any time without doing any clicking at all.
• Highlight Jumping: Clicking a highlight will bring you to its location in the corresponding file. You can also do this with comments!
• Search: Especially useful once you've begun to aggregate a large number of highlights.

• Make it Minimal: You can tweak what elements appear, though I really tried to make it as minimal yet functional.

In conclusion, it's pretty exhaustive and maybe ever so slightly over-engineered.

Sidebar Highlights has gone through a few rounds of revision based on feedback I received on reddit. As a form of advertisement, I made a few posts over on r/ObsidianMD that got quite a bit of traction. If you're interested, there are a few video walkthroughs that can be found there as well!

Installing the Plugin

It's still up for revision with the Obsidian plugin team, and I've heard this could take a month or two. However, if you want to try it out now, you can use the BRAT plugin and point it to this repository. That should get you up and running quickly.

Feedback

Currently, there's no immediate roadmap– but if you find it useful for your own work and how you use Obsidian, I would suggest creating an issue on Github and leaving your suggestions and/or feedback there. It would be greatly appreciated.

Looking Ahead and Supporting Active Development

Simultaneously, I'm also working on a Sidebar RSS app so that clipping content is even easier. Here's a sneak peek of what that looks like 😉

If you'd like to support development, consider becoming a paid subscriber to productnook, or buying me a coffee!