Disclaimer
Is this plugin open source? Yes
Is this plugin completely free? Yes
Is this plugin vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory: Pentimento - Obsidian Plugin
Pentimento - Version history for your notes
Hello, everyone! First of all, I want to say that you are an amazing community, and that the value that your plugins have brought to my life is pretty much immeasurable.
Now I have the honor to (hopefully) finally give back.
Penti-what??
Pentimento (Italian for “repentance”): a trace of an earlier version that shows through the paint of a finished painting, because the artist changed their mind. X-rays of old masterpieces are full of them: an arm that used to point somewhere else, a hat that got painted over.
Which is pretty much what this plugin does for your notes!
Okay, but what exactly does it do?
I’ll tell you the problem I tried to solve first. I’m a writer, a software engineer, and a musician. While working in Obsidian, I noticed that it was very hard for me to keep track of different versions of, say, a song.
The way I went about it was to create a new note per version, but then I would have to find the last one, and if I wanted to go back, to either pick something from an old version or restore a previous version, it was kinda hard. And, most importantly, there was a lot of copy-pasting and renaming involved.
So what did I do? I made Pentimento: a plugin that lets you save drafts of your notes, see the differences between them, and restore any of them, with a few clicks (or a hotkey, if you assign one!). The first time you save a draft, it adds three properties to the note, and then, boom, version history. It only ever touches those three lines, so your own properties stay exactly as you wrote them.
You can describe your drafts if you want to, but it’s not necessary. Pentimento writes the summary for you from what changed, using your headings. “Rewrote Chorus” “Removed Bridge”.
The history lives in a hidden .history folder right next to the note. The drafts are plain markdown copies, plus a small file with the summaries, so it’s all local and readable without the plugin.
It also has something that I added because it helped me a lot: Cuttings. A cutting is, basically, this: say you are writing a song. You add the verse, the chorus, and a bridge. Then you save the draft. Then, next day, you realize the bridge was not as cool as you thought last night when you were drunk. So you delete it, and keep writing the song and save. But a week and 50 drafts later, you are like, “Goddammit, I really liked that bridge… where is it now?”. Welp, you switch to the Cuttings tab, and you’ll find a list of all the passages you deleted or rewrote beyond recognition, with a nice little copy button.
A few more things it does:
- Save a draft every day (off by default): notes that already have drafts get a new one once a day, if they changed.
- Remove drafts from a note: one click (and a confirmation) puts the note back exactly as it was, so trying it out is safe.
- It’s built to work on mobile too! (Because I use it on my phone a lot)
I don’t know, it has helped me a bunch. When/if you guys start using it, please give me some feedback so I can improve it!
Heads up if you use Obsidian Sync
Obsidian Sync skips folders whose names start with a dot, so your drafts stay on the device where you saved them. Syncthing, iCloud, Dropbox, and git sync them just fine. We can figure out something to accommodate this, but I just don’t use Obsidian Sync, so I didn’t even think about it.
Why not git though?
My grandma doesn’t use git, but she does write poetry! She wants to see a big button that says “Save draft” and wants it to work. Ain’t nobody got time for git if you’re not a software engineer.
Also, not every note demands version history. Why use git for a couple of notes?
That being said, you can commit your Pentimento history folder to git if you want! It’s two different things for two different use cases.
Wrap it up, please…
Right, right.
So TL;DR: Pentimento is a plugin that lets you save drafts of your notes, see the differences between them, and restore them, with a few clicks.
I’ve been versioning my writing with Pentimento for about three months now, and this week I finally turned it into a plugin. Literally the only reason I’m sharing it is because I think some of you might find it useful, and I want to give back to the community.
(And Mr. Claudio helped me get it plugin-ready, ahem…)
That’s all from me. I hope you enjoy it!