Plan — Migrate the Lossless Plugin Family to Obsidian 1.13

Why Care?

Image Gin found the problems first. On Obsidian 1.14, half its settings tab silently disappeared, none of its settings showed up in Obsidian's new settings search, and pnpm 12 refused to build plugins whose settings still lived in package.json. Then Cite Wide's commands stopped loading. Every plugin in this family was built the same way, so every one is exposed the same way.

This plan applies the fix Image Gin shipped as 0.3.0 to the rest of the family, one plugin at a time.

The non-negotiable: every plugin stands alone

content-farm is a pseudomonorepo. Each plugin is its own repo and its own marketplace release, installed by people who have none of this tree. So:

• Each plugin has its own pnpm-workspace.yaml listing only itself (packages: ['.']). Without one, pnpm walks up to content-farm/pnpm-workspace.yaml and treats the parent as the workspace root. Five plugins were missing theirs.

• Tooling is copied, never shared. The test harness, ESLint config, and scripts are copied into each repo. Nothing imports from, scripts against, or symlinks to a sibling or the parent.

• Vault-side libraries only override. Anything read from a vault folder such as zz-cf-lib/ falls back to defaults bundled in the plugin.

The playbook (per plugin)

Reference implementation: plugin-modules/image-gin, commits f828afd … 48fd035. Its plan is image-gin/context-v/plans/2026-10-06_Migrate-Settings-Tab-to-Obsidian-1-13-Declarative-API.md.

1. pnpm settings file. Create or extend pnpm-workspace.yaml with packages: ['.']. Move any "pnpm" block out of package.json, since pnpm 11+ ignores it. Keep onlyBuiltDependencies for CI's pnpm 10 and add allowBuilds for pnpm 11+.

2. Toolchain. obsidian 1.13.1 (pinned), ESLint ^10.12, typescript-eslint 8.71.1, eslint-plugin-obsidianmd ^0.4.2 (the review-bot rules, added where missing), esbuild 0.28.2. Two packages are held on purpose:

   • TypeScript stays at 6.0.3. typescript-eslint supports only <6.1.0.

   • @types/node stays on 22. In-app Obsidian updates don't replace Electron, so a 1.13 user can still be on Node 22.

3. Tests. Copy the zero-dependency harness (esbuild + Node's built-in node:test). Then write, red first:

   • a settings-definitions spec

   • an onload() test asserting every command registers

4. Settings tab. Move to getSettingDefinitions() with no display() override and every row carried over. Raise minAppVersion to 1.13.0 and bump the version a minor, kept identical across manifest.json, package.json, and versions.json. The lint rejects 1.13 APIs until the manifest says 1.13.

5. Docs. README minimum version and anything stale, a changelog entry, and changelog/releases/<version>.md.

6. Gates, which must all pass before each code commit:

   • pnpm test

   • tsc

   • ESLint at 0 errors and 0 warnings

   • the production bundle

   • CI=true pnpm@10 install --frozen-lockfile

The family

Current status and the per-plugin checklist live in [[2026-10-07_Upgrading-Plugins-to-Obsidian-1-13-and-the-Current-Stack]] (handoffs/).

Out of scope:

• grab-reference and obsidian-task-manager have no plugin manifest. grab-reference is a multi-package app repo.

• Third-party submodules are only synced:

  • obsidian-textgenerator-plugin is already at upstream 0.8.11-beta.

  • The obsidian-git fork merged 47 upstream commits to 2.41.1 (c68e277). Upstream made the same minAppVersion 1.13.0 move.

Releases

Pushing development is part of each plugin's work. Tagging a release is gated on the operator. Directory-listed plugins (cite-wide, perplexed) follow image-gin's release procedure:

1. Fast-forward development → main → master.

2. Tag with no v prefix.

3. The attested release workflow runs.

4. Verify the release.

The parent's submodule pointers are bumped once, at wrap-up.

Related

• [[Dependency-Upgrades-Across-Plugin-Family]]: the July toolchain campaign this continues

• context-v/reminders/Obsidian-Marketplace-Compliance.md: portal rules beyond lint