Disclaimer
Is this project open source? Yes
Is this project completely free? Yes
Is this project vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Hello. Yes.
Here’s the blurb:
textFlow lets you create flows - dynamic, editable documents built from the contents of multiple notes. All edits to flows and their sources are registered automatically and synced both ways. Flows can be defined from Dataview queries, or paths/tags/properties, or bookmark groups.
textFlow is intended mainly for long form writers, but can be used by anyone who wants to see or work on multiple notes in context, or to make excerpts of their vault to hand out.
Here’s the repo: https://github.com/tine-schreibt/textflow
Please read the readme to get the most out of textFlow.
My favourite features outside of the obvious:
- Navigate via file explorer: You can navigate within flows via the file explorer. There’s also an internal nav dropdown that can be filtered, and saving also saves your cursor position.
- Friendly UI: The UI has options for keyboard navigation (including a dedicated flow nav modal and commands for nearly everything) as well as a feature rich mouse UI that lets you stay on top of all your active flows.
- Convenient flow creation: You can create new flows from folders with as few as two clicks in the file explorer.
- Everything still works: Everything that works in a source note also works in your flows (like code blocks, tabs, embeds and Dataview stuff, callouts, themes, Outline (well, mostly)…) because a flow is just a normal note as far as Obsidian is concerned.
- Flows with embeds: As of version 0.4.0 you can build flows with the source notes embedded, which gets rid of data duplication. You can then use Sync Embeds by uthvah to directly edit in your embeds. Embed flows have some downsides, though, which are detailed in the readme. You can switch types anytime.
- Multilingual: There’s a German version, meaning there are language files, meaning translating this to more languages will be easy (if anyone would like to volunteer…?)
The biggest limitations:
- Multi-select: Multi-select via alt still works as expected, but navigation via file explorer interferes with shift multi-select. It can be switched off via command, though, so if you don’t like it, you can get rid of it.
- Limits to automation: Automatic rebuilds after the adding/deleting/moving a file works best for flows defined from folders, with dvQueries and Bookmarks it’s hit or miss and you may have to rebuild manually.
Some of the features that may come in the future:
- Favourites for the switcher modal: In case you have a gazillion flows, need help staying on top of them, and frontmatter/Dataview seem scary to you.
- Tags and properties for bookmark flows: So you can narrow them down if you only have them to sort your stuff in file explorer.
- Bespoke artisanal flows: The option to input a random file list as flow source. dfdfd
I have submitted the plugin to Obsidian’s market place, but there’s a huge backlog, so while we wait, you’ll have to install it manually or using BRAT. Instructions on how to do this are also in the readme.
Here’s the repo again: https://github.com/tine-schreibt/textflow I hope you like it.