Alpha Bullet

AlphaBullet

AlphaBullet is a simple yet powerful Obsidian plugin that sorts your unordered markdown lists using natural order sorting — with optional grouping by the initial letter.

Whether you're organizing notes, inventories, glossaries, or worldbuilding content, keeping things neat and readable has never been easier.

✨ Features

• Sort unordered lists alphabetically using natural order (e.g., item2 comes before item10)
• Sort in ascending (A → Z) or descending (Z → A) order
• Optionally group items under a heading based on their first letter (## A, ## B, etc.)
• Supports YAML frontmatter for per-file auto-sorting
• Plugin-wide default settings available
• Multi-language support (English & French)

⚙️ How to Use

1. Open a note containing the list you want to sort.
2. Open the command palette (Ctrl / Cmd + P)
3. Search for “AlphaBullet”
4. Choose a command:
   • Sort ascending
   • Sort descending
   • Create glossary, with options:
     • Full ascending
     • Full descending
     • Ascending (groups descending, items ascending)
     • Descending (groups descending, items ascending)
   • Sort based on frontmatter
5. Your list will be instantly sorted!

[!TIP] You can also use the editor context menu to sort a selected list!

🔍 Understanding "Grouping" and "Items" Sorting

AlphaBullet uses natural order sorting, which means values like item2 are placed before item10 (unlike strict ASCII sorting).

When grouping is enabled (group: true), items are organized under headings based on their initial letter:

## A
- Apple
## B
- Banana

There are two levels of sorting:

1. Group headings (e.g., ## A, ## B) can be sorted in ascending or descending order.
2. Items within each group are also sorted alphabetically.

🧠 Tricky part: The sml_glossary_desc setting lets you sort groups in descending order while keeping items inside each group sorted ascending.

This is useful when creating reverse glossaries or highlighting last-letter groups first while keeping internal coherence.

🛠 Frontmatter Configuration

You can configure sorting behavior directly in your note using YAML frontmatter:

---
sml_sort: true              # Enable sorting
sml_descending: false       # Sort order: false = A→Z, true = Z→A
sml_group: true             # Enable grouping by first letter
sml_level: 2                # Heading level used for group titles (## = level 2)
sml_glossary_desc: false    # Sort groups descending, but items ascending
---

💡 You can also set these options globally via the plugin settings in Obsidian.

📦 Installation

• Coming soon to Obsidian’s Community Plugins
• Available via BRAT: https://github.com/Mara-Li/obsidian-alpha-bullet
• Manual installation:
  1. Download the latest release
  2. Unzip the folder into .obsidian/plugins/
  3. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin

🌐 Languages

• English
• French

Want to help translate?

1. Fork the repository
2. Add your translation to src/i18n/locales/<lang>.json
3. Register your locale in i18n/i18next.ts

Use obsidian-translations or tp.obsidian.moment.locale() to find your language code.

🙋 Support & Contributions

Found a bug? Have a feature request?
Please open an issue or pull request on GitHub.

✏️ English isn’t my native language — feel free to suggest improvements! But please use English for issues so others can follow along.

❤️ Credits

Huge thanks to Jesse Hines for the wdio-obsidian-service, which allowed me to run automated tests in a real Obsidian vault — a dream come true for a QA engineer!