WordSmith: Elevate Your Writing Craft in Obsidian

Amid a landscape saturated with automated text and generic AI output, I craved a different kind of writing companion—one that amplifies a writer’s unique voice, rather than replaces it. That’s why I built WordSmith: a sophisticated, context-aware writing assistant designed specifically for Obsidian users who value nuance, authorship, and control over their creative process.

WordSmith is not about automation; it’s about careful, purposeful augmentation. It’s an AI-powered writing assistant designed to seamlessly elevate your craft without ever wresting away creative direction, instead offering intelligent support that removes friction, sharpens your prose, and lets you focus on the artful work of writing.

The Vision: Empowerment Over Automation

Where most AI tools gravitate toward churning out impersonal, “AI slop,” WordSmith is rooted in a simple philosophy—augmentation, not replacement. It exists for people who care deeply about their craft: writers and content creators who sweat the details, who care about every sentence, and who want their work to remain authentically theirs.

With WordSmith, you direct the narrative, set the tone, and make the decisions. The plugin acts as a co-pilot: clarifying muddled ideas, polishing rough edges, or helping you brainstorm—always with a light touch and always under your supervision. You remain the author, the architect, and the storyteller, with WordSmith quietly offering suggestions, insights, and refinements to enhance your process at every step. Its purpose is to empower you—to remove friction, unlock new ideas, and support you as you carefully craft each sentence, paragraph, and article.

Context at the Core: Smarter Suggestions for Serious Writers

The real power of WordSmith lies in its contextual understanding. Your writing isn’t just a string of disconnected lines—it’s a living, interconnected whole. My vision was to create something deeply context-aware, capable of understanding intent and nuance by considering broader passages, entire notes, or even custom materials. WordSmith honors this by letting you define exactly what context the AI considers with every suggestion.

Obsidian’s power lied in its interconnectedness and layered contexts. WordSmith harnesses this inherent richness to deliver nuanced, highly relevant suggestions. You control precisely what the AI “sees”:

• Dynamic Context: WordSmith can automatically include the lines surrounding your focus, providing more accurate and relevant edits.
• Entire Note Context: The plugin can take the whole document into account, ensuring suggestions always align with your broader intent and style, while avoiding out-of-place or disconnected recommendations.
• Custom Context: Go deep—link to other notes, style guides, project glossaries, research documents, or any specific reference you want the AI to observe, by using Obsidian’s own [[wikilink]] syntax to embed your notes.

All suggestions appear as highlights, inline “ghost text” directly within your editor, empowering you to review, accept, reject, or modify them—each individual suggestion, or in bulk—while keeping your workflow uninterrupted.

Custom Prompts: Make Your Workflow Uniquely Yours

Every writer’s process is personal. Perhaps WordSmith’s most versatile feature is its Custom Prompt system—an infinitely adaptable mechanism that lets you tailor the AI precisely to your workflow and goals. Declaring custom prompts means transforming WordSmith from a general tool into your personalized writing partner:

• Need to summarize dense research content quickly and accurately? Build a prompt.
• Struggling to phrase complex ideas clearly or achieve a specific conversational tone? Define exactly that.
• Crafting proprietary or project-specific terminology? Connect relevant style notes or glossaries to ensure AI consistency.

Custom Prompts form a dynamic toolkit that continuously evolves alongside your writing, giving you pinpoint control over the nature, intent, and precision of the AI-assisted suggestions. You’re not locked into someone else’s definitions of “good writing.” Instead, you build an evolving toolkit of mini-helpers that reflect your projects, voice, and creative goals.

Frictionless, Keyboard-First Workflow

Great writing happens in a state of flow. Interruptions, distractions, unnecessary clicks, and clunky UIs break concentration and stall creativity. That’s why WordSmith was designed with a keyboard-first philosophy. Assign hotkeys to trigger custom prompts, step through suggestions, and navigate your writing—all without breaking your rhythm with distracting clicks or menus.

Everything happens inline, keeping your attention where it belongs: on your words. The experience is minimalistic, subtle, and distraction-free—simplicity engineered to ensure your hands stay on the keys, and your mind deeply engaged in your writing.

Technology and Flexibility

WordSmith supports leading AI models from OpenAI (GPT series) and Google Gemini, giving you the flexibility to select the engine that balances quality, speed, and cost for your needs. Whatever your setup, the plugin slots unobtrusively into your daily routine—ready to support you, but never to dictate.

Its advanced inline suggestion system provides granular control, letting you selectively accept or reject individual suggestions, paragraphs, or even whole sections rapidly and precisely:

• Inline Visual Suggestions: See exactly how proposals integrate into your existing text before committing changes.
• Granular Acceptance Controls: Accept or reject suggestions per phrase, sentence, paragraph, or entire selection.
• Ad-hoc Text Generation: Need a quick brainstorm or alternative phrasing? Type the intent, and WordSmith instantly generates suggestions to refine effortlessly directly at your cursor.

Effortless Transformation: From Raw Text to Polished Prose

One of WordSmith’s most powerful abilities is transforming unedited or messy text into clean, publication-ready content—no matter the source. Drop in a raw, unformatted chat transcript, a brainstorm dump, or notes hastily captured on the fly, and WordSmith will help you shape it into coherent, well-structured prose.

Whether your goal is to:

• Edit chaotic chat logs: Automatically format back-and-forth dialogue, whether chat transcripts or YouTube captions, remove filler, and clarify meaning for easy reading or summarization.
• Make text text-to-speech ready: Adjust pacing, clarity, and flow so your content sounds natural and engaging when read aloud.
• Flesh out: a sketch of an article, a note, a scene, or the next chapter in your book based on a structural scaffolding.
• Polish rough drafts: Refine grammar, punctuation, and style to make the text smooth and consistent.
• Conform to specific standards: Apply custom formatting rules, style guides, or industry-specific templates, so your output always matches the requirements.

Just paste your raw text, select the desired transformation prompt, and let WordSmith do the heavy lifting—delivering clear, organized, and professional results in seconds, all while preserving your unique voice.

Getting Started

WordSmith is open source, free to use, and currently pending review in the Obsidian community plugin store. In the mean time, you can install it today directly from GitHub. Simply download the latest release, unzip its contents into a folder called ‘wordsmith’ (you’ll have to create this) in your Obsidian plugins folder and enable it in Settings.

A Partner in Your Creative Journey

In designing WordSmith, I built the tool I’ve always wished existed—an unobtrusive yet discerning companion that helps me write with greater fluency, clarity, and ease. It makes the process more pleasurable and productive, lightening the burden of revision without ever undermining your distinct voice or artistic touch.

At its heart, WordSmith is for writers who want to stay hands-on with their work while leveraging the best that modern AI can offer. It’s for anyone who wants a quiet assistant, not an overbearing manager—a partner that empowers, not erases, your authorship. I built WordSmith to make writing in Obsidian faster and smoother, without ever losing sight of the magic that comes from shaping words by hand.

I invite you to try WordSmith, explore its depth at your own pace, and adapt it to suit your workflows. My hope is that it becomes, as it has for me, an indispensable companion in your writing—a tool that empowers and enriches rather than replaces, quietly drawing out the best in your words.