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Tidy Naming — Repo Mentions of 'Obsidian' and 'Plugin'

Obsidian's community-plugin guidelines forbid using 'Obsidian' or 'Plugin' in the brand name (repo, manifest, README, description). Several of our repos still do. A punch list of what to rename, where, and why we held off until now.

Path
chores/Tidy-Naming-Repo-Mentions-of-Obsidian-and-Plugin.md
Authors
Michael Staton
Augmented with
Claude Code on Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context)
Tags
Chore · Obsidian-Plugins · Naming · Branding · Refactors

Tidy Naming — Repo Mentions of “Obsidian” and “Plugin”

The constraint

Obsidian’s community plugin guidelines are explicit about brand language:

Don’t include “Obsidian” in the plugin’s name unless it’s part of your brand. … Don’t include “plugin” in the plugin’s name. It’s redundant.

The review bot enforces this on the manifest’s name field at submission time. It also rejects repos whose names suggest they’re official Obsidian artifacts.

We have several repos that violate this in either the repo name, the manifest, or both. The chore is to rename each so the constraint is satisfied without breaking the running plugins or the data folders users have already established.

The punch list

Current repo (GitHub)Current manifest nameProposed namesRename status
lossless-group/obsidian-plugin-starter”Obsidian Starter”repo: filestarter, manifest name: “Filestarter”on-disk renamed to filestarter (May 2026); GitHub remote still obsidian-plugin-starter.git; manifest name and id still old
lossless-group/obsidian-google-docs (now google-docs-api-plugin)“Google Docs Connector”repo: file-transporter, manifest name: “File Transporter”on-disk renamed to file-transporter (May 2026); GitHub remote still google-docs-api-plugin.git; manifest name and id still old
lossless-group/perplexed-plugin”Perplexed”repo: perplexed, drop the -plugin suffixmanifest name already correct; GitHub remote still has -plugin suffix
lossless-group/cite-wide”Cite Wide”no change neededclean
lossless-group/image-gin”Image Gin”no change neededclean
lossless-group/plunk-it”Plunk It”no change neededclean
lossless-group/lmstud-yo”LMStud Yo”no change neededclean
lossless-group/grab-referencen/a (not yet a plugin)no change neededn/a — this is currently a citation-manager microservice
lossless-group/obsidian-git”Git”n/a — vendored upstream, out of scopen/a

Three repos need work: obsidian-plugin-starter, obsidian-google-docs (a.k.a. google-docs-api-plugin), and perplexed-plugin. The other Obsidian plugins are already conformant.

Why we held off

The on-disk rename is cheap. The GitHub remote rename and the manifest id change are not — both have downstream effects:

  • GitHub remote rename — old URLs forward, but every consumer (CI, submodule pointers, content-farm’s .gitmodules, anyone who cloned the old URL) has to re-target eventually. Slack of the forwarding helps, but isn’t free.
  • Manifest id change — the id is the directory name Obsidian creates under <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/<id>/. Changing it means existing installs lose their settings (data.json) and the plugin appears as new. For plugins with active users (cite-wide, image-gin, perplexed) this is a breaking change.

So the chore is best done in two phases:

Phase 1 — On-disk + manifest text (low risk)

For each rename target:

  1. Rename the on-disk directory to the new short form. Done for filestarter and file-transporter.
  2. Update the manifest’s name field (the human-readable display name in Community Plugins). Pending.
  3. Update the README’s title and description to drop “Obsidian” and “Plugin” where they violate the guideline.
  4. Update the package.json name field to match.

Phase 2 — GitHub remote + manifest id (breaking; deferred)

For each rename target:

  1. Rename the GitHub repo (Settings → Repository name).
  2. Update content-farm’s .gitmodules URLs.
  3. Decide on id migration strategy. Options:
    • Keep the old id (back-compat with existing installs, technically still violates the guideline) — leave alone.
    • Change id, ship a loadSettings() migration that reads both old-id and new-id paths, copies forward.
    • Change id, accept that users re-configure on next install.

Phase 2 should happen as part of a deliberate release for each plugin, not as a side effect of this chore.

What’s actually shipping in this chore today

This chore was opened during the May 2026 content-farm pseudomonorepo cleanup. As of writing:

  • Filestarter and File-Transporter on-disk renames are done.
  • GitHub remote renames, manifest name updates, manifest id strategy decisions: all still pending.
  • Perplexed manifest name was already conformant (was “Perplexed”, not “Perplexed Plugin”); the only thing left is renaming the GitHub remote from perplexed-plugin to perplexed.

Cross-references

  • image-gin/manifest.json and cite-wide/manifest.json — examples of clean manifest naming to model from.
  • pseudomonorepos/references/branch-alignment.md — when running the rename pass, do it on development, merge through main → master per the tier model.
  • The Obsidian community plugin guidelines: https://docs.obsidian.md/Plugins/Releasing/Plugin+guidelines