Chisel is an artisan companion plugin for Obsidian designed for thoughtful knowledge crafters. It unifies intelligent media handling, font and snippet styling, Zen distraction-free editing, and e-ink display optimizations into a cohesive, modular experience.
Chisel's settings are grouped in four places: General, Reading, Writing and Vault. Each feature below is a section in one of them.
Settings → Chisel → General
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Zen hides the vault name, the file explorer header, the status bar and the tab header when only one tab is open, for a distraction-free canvas.
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Truncate long filenames cuts long file and folder names in the explorer with an ellipsis instead of clipping them.
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Auto-hide sidebars hides the sidebars and the ribbon until you hover near the edge of the screen.
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Default reading mode opens notes in reading view when they say nothing else. Any note can choose its own view with a
modeproperty in its frontmatter:mode: readopens it in reading view,mode: editopens it in editing view,mode: source(orraw) opens it in source mode.
The note's own
modealways wins over the default. It is applied once, when the note opens, so switching view by hand is never undone. -
Focus last line on mobile puts the cursor at the end of a note when it opens on a phone.
Settings → Chisel → General (desktop only)
Keeps Obsidian running in the background when you close the main window: it hides to the system tray instead of quitting, so your notes and sync keep running. Hide on launch starts Obsidian hidden.
Settings → Chisel → Reading
An interactive outline next to the editor scrollbar for moving around a long note. Choose its position, width and opacity, and whether it shows a map of the document or a progress gauge.
Settings → Chisel → Reading
Collapses long base64 strings (embedded images, fonts, binary data) into a compact, expandable badge in the editor and in reading view, so notes stay readable without losing the data.
Settings → Chisel → Reading
High-contrast rendering for e-ink displays, with animations and blur disabled. Set it to auto (on a detected e-reader), always, or disabled. On Boox devices it can map the volume, page and arrow keys to scrolling, and adjust typography and layout for grayscale screens.
Settings → Chisel → Writing
Write CSS inside a note and have it applied live, without the hidden snippets folder. Chisel reads CSS code blocks from notes, registers them as global or note-scoped stylesheets (with a configurable frontmatter key, and the option to always use cssclasses), skips excluded folders, and caches the compiled result for fast startup on desktop and mobile. Rebuild global cache recompiles everything.
Settings → Chisel → Writing
Tidies attachments as they arrive:
- Smart rename turns names like
CleanShot 2026-09-20 at 11.23.45.pnginto clean slugs, with a configurable timestamp format. Live editor links update immediately without losing cursor position, even when editing without moving the caret. - Storage folder routes media to a folder, relative to the note (for example
./assetsorattachments/{note}) or at the vault root. - Only on paste or drop limits it to media you actively paste or drop into a note, which avoids conflicts with Obsidian Sync.
- Enable on mobile devices is off by default, to prevent sync collisions.
- Aggressive link repair rewrites unresolved links after a rename. Obsidian already updates links on rename, so leave it off unless you need it.
- Excluded folders are ignored.
Settings → Chisel → Writing
Writes frontmatter for you. Define a folder and the properties it should have; when a note is created in, or moved to, that folder, Chisel adds those properties without overwriting any key the note already has. The command Apply seedbed rules to current file applies them on demand.
Settings → Chisel → Writing
Two floating buttons at the bottom of a daily note to jump to the previous or next one. Chronological follows the daily notes that exist; Calendar steps through days one by one.
Settings → Chisel → Vault
Opens the public version of the current note in your browser. Set the base URL of your site and an optional suffix for notes without a permalink. Use the command Open public note or the ribbon icon.
Settings → Chisel → Vault
Builds dynamic feeds from your log entries. Add the folders to scan (leave one empty to scan the whole vault) and use an echo code block in a note to list entries by tag.
Settings → Chisel → Vault
Finds hollow notes: notes with nothing under their frontmatter. The command Find hollow notes (or the ribbon icon) lists them, and Delete all sends them to the system trash. Folders you add to Excluded folders are skipped.
- Open Settings > Community plugins in Obsidian.
- Ensure Restricted mode is turned off.
- Click Browse and search for Chisel.
- Click Install, then Enable.
(Note: Currently submitted to the community directory. In the meantime, use Option 2 or 3.)
- Install and enable the BRAT plugin from Community Plugins.
- In Obsidian, run the command
BRAT: Add a beta plugin for testing. - Enter
ZeFish/obsidian-standard-chiseland confirm.
- Download
main.js,manifest.json, andstyles.cssfrom the latest release on the Releases page. - Create a folder named
standard-chiselin your vault's plugins folder:<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/standard-chisel/. - Copy the downloaded files into that folder.
- Reload Obsidian and enable Chisel in Settings > Community plugins.
Open Settings → Chisel. The page opens on General; Reading, Writing and Vault are the tabs next to it. Every feature above names the tab it lives in.
# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/ZeFish/obsidian-standard-chisel.git
cd Chisel
# Install dependencies
pnpm install
# Build the bundle (produces main.js and styles.css)
pnpm run build
# Watch mode during development
pnpm run devTo automatically copy build artifacts to your Obsidian vault during development, define VAULT_PLUGINS:
export VAULT_PLUGINS="/path/to/your/vault/.obsidian/plugins"
pnpm run buildChisel is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. Built with craftsmanship by Utopie.