Hex citations, day one

Why Care?

If you write long-form notes that need to hold up under scrutiny, citations are not an afterthought — they are most of the work. Cite-Wide started life as the answer to one specific question: how do you keep references aligned with the passages they back as a draft evolves?

This entry is the retrospective that should have been written on June 7th, 2025 but wasn't — we hadn't formalized the changelog convention yet. We're filing it now (May 2026) because the splash page for content-farm needs an honest history of when each plugin's identity emerged, and June 7th is when Cite-Wide's did.

What's New?

(All historical, captured retrospectively.)

• feat(hexCitations) — first working transform converting Perplexity-style footnotes into a custom hex-encoded citation format that survives copy-paste and round-trips through markdown without breaking.

• Followed within hours by milestone(perplexica): now hitting perplexica and milestone(perplexica): write to file now works correctly — the citation work and the search-augmented retrieval work were initially intertwined before they were split into separate plugins.

The arc

Mid-2025 we were drafting research-heavy content in Obsidian and constantly hand-managing footnotes and references. Perplexica (then still going by Perplexity-the-API) gave us streaming search results with footnote markers; the hard part was getting those footnotes to round-trip into a markdown note without falling apart.

The hex-encoding approach was the breakthrough. By transforming citation references into a compact hex token that the modal could parse back into structured data, we could:

• Move citations around in the text without losing their target

• Re-render them in different formats (footnote, inline, sidebar) from the same source token

• Diff drafts cleanly without citation noise muddying the changes

The June 7 commit was the first time the modal actually did the conversion end-to-end. Not pretty. Not done. But the loop was alive.

What this enabled

Everything that came after Cite-Wide's extraction into its own repo in July 2025 — the modal-based citation editor, the references panel, the Lossless Citation Spec, the integration with Perplexed's research output — built on the hex-encoding pattern that landed this day.

Retrospective notes

• Written 2026-05-04, eleven months after the fact.

• The early commits read like a single-day sprint: starter setup at 15:37, feat(hexCitations) at 20:09, perplexica milestone at 21:22, write-to-file at 21:53. That's a real day.

• This entry exists to seed Cite-Wide's changelog/ directory so the content-farm splash's rolled-up changelog feed has something from this repo on day one.

• The very early commits in this repo's log come from forking Obsidian's official sample plugin starter — the same starter every Obsidian plugin developer forks from on day zero. Not interesting; mentioned only because it explains the first couple of commit hashes if anyone goes archaeology-spelunking.