New Plugin: Sync to Etherpad Lite for easy web-based collaboration!

I’m really excited to announce the release of my new plugin. It lets you create a shareable web version of a note that’s editable by others. The note still lives in your vault, and it will automatically stay in sync with changes made on the web.

This plugin relies on Etherpad for collaboration. I’ve always thought of Etherpad as the “pastebin” of collaborative editors. It doesn’t have fine-grained access control, nor the fancy styling of Google Docs. It’s great for quick collaborations on plaintext or markdown documents. It has a few simple additional features that I love, like an editing timeline and text chat. And bold and italic. Fancy!

My first drafts of everything happen in Obsidian. First drafts becomes a final drafts in collaboration with others. I would often cut and paste my work into a Google Doc, share the URL with coworkers, and replace the original with a link to the Google Doc. This made my work unsearchable, untaggable, and unlinkable. Bummer.

With this plugin, I can temporarily put my note in “collaboration mode.” And when I’m happy with the final result, I can unlink my note from Etherpad. The final version lives in my vault, right where it should.

The plugin is called obsidian-etherpad-plugin

and you can see more, including setup instructions at

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