Plugin for Obsidian to keep inline title synced with file name.
NOTE: currently only works on desktop.
When you rename a file, this plugin will search for an "H1", in the document. If this is found, and the current text matches the old filename, it will be updated to reflect the new filename.
Only the first "H1" is replaced.
I personally prefer to have the page title in the contents of the file, and disable "Show inline title" in Obsidian.
- I prefer to have the contents of the markdown file to be self-contained, so when reading the content in another editor, I don't miss important context.
- The "title" may not necessarily be the file name
- I may want to have several notes with the same "title", so I would need to
add some extra context to the actual file name.
- For example, I might have a note on the concept of "Domain-driven Design", and a note on the book by Eric Evans of the same name. The latter might have the file name "Domain-drivern Design (book)", but the displayed title should not have the "(book)" in it.
- Sometimes, the title is not a valid file name.
- I make notes on some of our customers. And Danish companies end with "A/S" in the name to indicate a publicly tradable company. The "/" is not valid in the file name, but I want to show it in the title.
- I may want to have several notes with the same "title", so I would need to
add some extra context to the actual file name.
This plugin primarily solves some annoyances when creating new notes using templates.
When creating a new note, Obsidian names it "Untitled". My template would fill
# Untitled in the contents. The file name is now highlighted, ready for me to
type in the real name of the note. But after having done that, only the file
name is changed, not the template-generated inline title.
This plugin fixes that.
If the file name and h1 is in sync, and nothing happens, Obsidian's metadata
cache is probably not in sync.
Obsidian has a data structure representing representing a rich model of the data, specifying that "here is a title", "here is body text", "here is a code block", etc. This is what the plugin use to find the location and text of the heading.
When the file is updated, this is an operation on the entire unprocessed text of the file. If the metadata was not in sync with the latest content, the locations from the previous step are no longer valid. The plugin will not modify the file if this happens, as it'd probably corrupt the file (an example could be overwriting frontmatter with the new title).
There is an alternate plugin, you might want to check out: Obsidian Filename Heading Sync. This handles some of the same problems, but seems to have a different philosophy, that the filename and heading should always be in synced.
That makes "Obsidian Filename Heading Sync" much more aggressive than mine. E.g., the default settings will:
- Rename the file when you change the heading in the markdown contents.
- Insert a heading in the markdown contents when opening a file that doesn't have one.
I don't want neither of those two behaviours. If I change the heading in the markdown contents, it's a deliberate action on my part to have a different heading than file names. (otherwise I would have just renamed the file). And creating the heading in the contents is a problem I use templates to solve.
This also makes this plugin significantly simpler, as there are no edge
Currently, I can imagine these two improvements.
Should be simple enough. Currently this depends on node's "path" module to get the expected old title from the old file name. This could easily be replaced with a regex, but in particular core difference between Windows filesystem and Linux/MacOS needs to be tested here.
Handle localised case insensitivity in title comparison. This would require a settings page, so the user can specify the language that they actually write notes in.
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