Clipboard to Note - Obsidian Plugin

An Obsidian plugin that processes clipboard text and URLs with AI-powered tag suggestions, web clipping capabilities, and intelligent image downloading.

Features

Core Functionality

• One-click note creation from clipboard content (text or URLs)
• AI-powered tag suggestions based on your vault's folder structure
• Automatic title generation from clipboard text
• Smart markdown formatting (converts H1 to H2, maintains header hierarchy)
• YAML frontmatter with tags, created, and modified timestamps
• Configurable inbox folder for new notes
• Multilingual support (German/English)

Web Clipping

• URL detection - Automatically detects when clipboard contains a URL
• HTML to Markdown conversion - Downloads and converts web pages using Turndown with GFM support
• Image downloading - Optionally downloads all images from web pages
• Relative URL resolution - Converts all relative image URLs to absolute URLs (e.g., images/photo.png → https://site.com/page/images/photo.png)
• Smart image naming - Downloaded images get a random 3-character prefix to identify images from the same page (e.g., x7k_photo1.png, x7k_photo2.png)
• Obsidian attachment folder integration - Respects your Obsidian settings for attachment locations:
  • Supports absolute paths (e.g., /Attachments)
  • Supports relative paths (e.g., ./attachments)
  • Automatically creates folders if needed
• Duplicate handling - Automatically renames files if they already exist
• Source tracking - Adds source URL to frontmatter for web clippings

Installation

Manual Installation

• Clone this repository or download the files
• Run ./build.sh to build the plugin
• Copy the built files to your Obsidian plugins directory:

# Define target directory
TARGET_DIR="[path to your vault]/.obsidian/plugins/clipboard-to-note"

# Create target directory if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p "$TARGET_DIR"

# Copy files to target directory
cp main.js "$TARGET_DIR/"
cp manifest.json "$TARGET_DIR/"
cp styles.css "$TARGET_DIR/"

• Restart Obsidian or reload the plugin
• Enable "Clipboard to Note" in Settings → Community Plugins

Development

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Build once
npm run build

# Build and watch for changes
npm run dev

Usage

Create a note from clipboard text

1. Copy any text to your clipboard
2. Click the clipboard icon in the ribbon, or use the command palette: "Create note from clipboard"

The plugin will:

• Analyze the text and generate an appropriate title
• Format the content with proper markdown headers
• Suggest relevant tags based on your vault structure
• Add YAML frontmatter with timestamps and tags
• Save the note to your configured inbox folder
• Open the newly created note

Create a note from a URL

1. Copy a URL to your clipboard (e.g., https://arxiv.org/html/2408.13296v1)
2. Click the clipboard icon in the ribbon, or use the command palette: "Create note from clipboard"

The plugin will:

• Fetch the webpage content
• Extract the page title
• Convert HTML to clean markdown
• Convert all relative image URLs to absolute URLs
• Download images if enabled (with a unique 3-character prefix)
• Suggest relevant tags based on the page content
• Add YAML frontmatter with timestamps, tags, and source URL
• Save the note to your configured inbox folder
• Open the newly created note

Settings

General

• Inbox folder: Configure where new notes should be saved (default: "Inbox")

AI Settings

• Use OpenAI for tag suggestions: Enable AI-powered semantic tag matching using OpenAI API
• OpenAI API Key: Your OpenAI API key (required for AI tag suggestions)

Web Clipping Settings

• Download images: Download images from web pages to local storage (uses Obsidian's native attachment folder setting)

Tag Suggestion Methods

The plugin offers two methods for suggesting tags:

Keyword Matching (Default)

• Fast, local matching based on keyword similarity
• Compares clipboard/web page content with your vault's folder names
• Scores matches based on exact folder name matches and word-by-word matching
• Returns the top 3 most relevant tags
• Works offline with no API required

OpenAI-Powered (Optional)

• Semantic tag matching using OpenAI's GPT-3.5-turbo
• More intelligent understanding of content relevance
• Requires OpenAI API key
• Falls back to keyword matching if API call fails
• Supports multilingual content (German/English)

Example Output

YAML Frontmatter

---
modified: 2025-10-05 14:30
created: 2025-10-05 14:30
tags: [AI, Research, Technology]
sources: "[Website](https://arxiv.org/html/2408.13296v1)"
---

Downloaded Images

When downloading from a URL like https://arxiv.org/html/2408.13296v1:

• x7k_Overview_of_LLMs.png
• x7k_diagram.jpg
• x7k_figure1.png

All images from the same page share the same 3-character prefix (x7k in this example) for easy identification.

Requirements

• Obsidian v0.15.0 or higher
• Internet connection for URL downloading and OpenAI features

Recommended Plugins

• Frontmatter Markdown Links - This plugin uses the Frontmatter Markdown Links syntax for adding sources to the YAML header (e.g., sources: "[Website](https://example.com)"). Installing this plugin will make source links clickable in the frontmatter.

License

MIT