Smart Link Formatter

Smart Link Formatter

A plugin for Obsidian that automatically formats pasted links with metadata.

It has explicit support for:

• YouTube
• Twitter/X
• Reddit
• YouTube Music
• GitHub
• Image links

Features

• Automatically formats pasted links
• Supports custom formatting for all clients, as well as regular links
• Blacklist domains to prevent automatic formatting
• Toggle auto-linking on/off

Formatting

Variables are replaced dynamically by the plugin. The first instance of square brackets [] will be a hyperlink for the clipboard content.

For default links, the following variables are available:

• {title} - Page title
• {url} - The URL of the page

Example format: [{title}]

If you need to format a date (e.g. upload_date), you can use moment.js date formats: {upload_date|MMMM Do, YYYY}

Capturing

Clients in the plugin have unique variables you can capture. For instance, when pasting a YouTube link, the following variables are available for formatting:

• {title} - Video title
• {channel} - Channel name
• {uploader} - Uploader name (which can sometimes differ from channel)
• {duration} - Length of the video
• {views} - Number of views
• {upload_date} - When the video was uploaded
• {description} - Video description
• {url} - The URL of the video
• {timestamp} - For timestamped links (formats as @HH:MM:SS or @MM:SS)

Example format: [{title}] by {channel}

Other clients follow similar patterns, and their variables can be found in the plugin settings.

Replacements

Regex replacements are also available to do rules-based replacements on the formatted text. Useful examples:

• Normalize spaces: \s{2,} -> ' '
• Remove parenthetical text: \s*\([^)]+\) -> (empty)
• Truncate after n chars (link only): (?<=(?<!\\)\[)(.{0,n}\S*?)\s.*?(?=(?<!\\)\]) -> $1...
• Trim whitespaces: ^\s+|\s+$ -> (empty)