Changelog

All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

New features are added in the "Unreleased" section.

[Unreleased]

User features

• Improved search recall: Increased the keyword search index limit from 500 to 25,000 characters. The Research Agent can now discover relevant content deep within long notes that was previously invisible to search.
• Metadata footer buttons: Added GitHub and Documentation buttons (with tooltips) to the Release Notes footer for easier project access.

Developer features

[4.3.1] - 2026-01-31

User features

• Active tab context prioritisation: The Researcher assistant now correctly identifies and prioritises the document you are currently focused on. It also excludes "hidden" background tabs from its context, ensuring it only sees what you see.

Developer features

[4.3.0] - 2026-01-31

User features

• Agentic file modification: The Researcher is no longer read-only! It can now create notes, update existing files, and organize folders upon request (e.g., "Create a summary of this chat in a new note").
• Human-in-the-loop security: All write operations trigger a "Trust but Verify" confirmation modal, showing you exactly what the agent wants to change (including diffs for updates) before any data is touched.
• Granular write control: A global "Enable agent write access" setting (default: off) plus a per-chat toggle gives you precise control over when the agent is allowed to modify your vault.
• Language support: The Research Assistant now speaks your language! Choose from a list of presets or enter any custom IETF BCP 47 language code (eg fr-FR). The placeholder in system prompts is automatically replaced with your choice.
• Transient model switching: Added a model selection dropdown to the Research Chat header, allowing you to temporarily switch models for specific queries without changing global settings.
• On-the-fly capability toggling: Added a toggle to the Research Chat header to enable or disable the computational solver for the current session.
• Improved UI stability: Fixed a race condition in the chat interface that caused duplicated messages during rapid "Thinking" updates. The "Thinking" indicator now appears instantly for better feedback.
• "What's New" splash screen: A beautiful new walkthrough modal that automatically displays release notes after a plugin update, keeping you informed of the latest capabilities.
• Auto-updating prompts: System instructions now default to a "managed" state, allowing you to automatically receive improvements to the default persona while still retaining the ability to override them with custom prompts.
• "Other" language input: Selecting "Other" in the language dropdown now immediately reveals a text input for custom language codes, ensuring you can use any language supported by the model.
• System prompt reset: Added a specific "Reset" button for system instructions to easily revert to the default managed prompt.
• "Fetch or Fallback" release notes: Implemented a resilient fetching system that retrieves rich release notes (including images) directly from the GitHub API, with a graceful fallback to a manual link if you are offline.
• Integrated documentation: Added direct links to the official VitePress documentation across all settings sections. Each tab now includes section-specific anchors to help users find relevant help articles instantly.
• Responsive chat header: The Research Chat controls now wrap gracefully to ensure usability even in narrow sidebars.
• "Show release notes" command: A new command to manually open the release notes modal at any time if you want to revisit the latest changes.
• Stable model aliases: Updated all default model IDs to use the newest latest aliases (ie gemini-flash-latest), ensuring the plugin always points to the frontier versions.
• Session reset: New reset button in the Research Chat header to quickly revert session settings to your global defaults.
• Sponsor button: Added a prominent Sponsor button to the release notes modal, styled with GitHub's signature pink outline and dynamically linked to the project's funding configuration.
• Improved settings visibility: Refined the placement of documentation links, moving them into subheadings and under section headers for better accessibility and a cleaner UI.
• Improved documentation clarity: Clarified API key storage security and ensured consistent British English usage throughout the configuration guide.

Developer features

• FileTools architecture: Implemented a dedicated FileTools class to encapsulate safe filesystem operations (createNote, updateNote, renameNote) with recursive folder creation and path normalization.
• Strict content sanitization: Added a robust sanitization pipeline that aggressively strips YAML frontmatter from agent-generated content to prevent metadata corruption.
• Link-aware renaming: The rename_note tool utilizes app.fileManager.renameFile, ensuring Obsidian automatically updates all wikilinks pointing to the moved file.
• Promise-based modal pattern: Refactored ToolConfirmationModal to use a static async open() pattern, allowing the Agent's execution loop to pause and await user interaction naturally without complex event listeners.
• Dynamic funding resolution: Implemented a runtime parser for .github/FUNDING.yml that automatically synchronises the sponsor link without requiring manual code updates.
• Per-request agent overrides: Refactored the AgentService and GeminiService to support optional overrides for model selection and tool enablement inside the Research Chat.
• Interactive model ID tooltips: Restored tooltips in the Research Chat model selection dropdown to match the behavior in the main settings.
• Version upgrade tracking: Added a previousVersion field to the plugin settings to reliably detect and trigger update-specific UI workflows.
• Responsive walkthrough UI: Developed a dedicated ReleaseNotesModal using Obsidian's MarkdownRenderer and future-proofed it with responsive sizing units and native design tokens.
• Centralised documentation URLs: Introduced a structured DOCUMENTATION_URLS object in constants.ts to manage all external documentation links and anchors in one place. Refactored to follow DRY principles by using hierarchical constants for base and configuration paths.
• Centralised UI strings: Refactored the core plugin to use a centralized UI_STRINGS constant for all human-readable labels, icons, and tooltips, improving maintainability and consistency.
• Enhanced API documentation: Fully synchronised the internal WorkerAPI developer documentation with the current implementation and corrected architectural diagrams.
• Improved JSDoc coverage: Added detailed inline documentation for core lifecycle methods and service orchestrators to improve developer experience and code readability.
• Expanded linting suite: Integrated stylelint, secretlint, and markdownlint-cli2 into the CI workflow to ensure high standards for CSS, security, and documentation.
• Code organisation enforcement: Added eslint-plugin-perfectionist to maintain consistent import sorting and object key ordering.
• Robust utility refactoring: Improved the isSafeUrl utility with stricter domain validation to prevent potential security regressions in external requests.

[4.2.0] - 2026-01-27

User features

• High-performance graph storage: Migrated graph and search index storage to MessagePack binary format. This results in up to 80% reduction in file size for large vaults and significantly faster plugin startup times.
• Improved disk longevity: Increased auto-save debounce to 30 seconds and implemented a smart "force-save" on plugin shutdown, drastically reducing unnecessary disk writes without risking data loss.
• Automated privacy protection: The plugin now automatically manages a nested .gitignore for its generated data directory, ensuring large binary index files are never accidentally committed to your repository.
• Semantic icons: Updated the ribbon and menu icons to be more descriptive. The researcher now uses a "Message Circle", the Explorer uses a "Grid", and the main ribbon uses a "Brain Circuit".
• Thinking indicator: Added a visual pulsing indicator to the chat interface so you know when the agent is "thinking" about your request.

Developer features

• Worker-side serialization: Offloaded MessagePack encoding and vector optimization to a background worker to eliminate UI thread latency during state persistence.
• Vector packing optimization: Implemented in-memory casting of embedding arrays to Float32Array before serialization, leveraging MessagePack's native binary encoding for near-ideal size efficiency.
• Defensive binary I/O: Added buffer-aware slicing to ensure strictly-sized binary writes, preventing file corruption from encoder over-allocation.

[4.1.1] - 2026-01-27

User features

Developer features

• Service routing delegation: Fixed an issue where the "force re-download" button was inactive by implementing proper method delegation in the RoutingEmbeddingService wrapper, allowing the UI to access the underlying local service instance.

[4.1.0] - 2026-01-26

User features

• Configurable context engine: Introduced a new "Search and context tuning" section in Advanced Settings, allowing users to fine-tune the GARS algorithm and context assembly.
• Structural context pruning: Implemented intelligent filtering that automatically skips low-relevance results. This restores a clean "3-5 relevant notes" context feel even when search finds dozens of matches.
• Adjustable relevance thresholds: Users can now tune the Supporting (snippets) and Structural (headers) thresholds to balance detail vs prompt noise.
• Search expansion control: Added a slider to control how many top results trigger graph neighbor expansion, preventing worker congestion on vague queries.
• Expansion score floor: Implemented an absolute score safety guard that prevents expanding neighbors for weak/low-confidence search matches.

Developer features

• Precision-tuned GARS: Refined the Graph-Augmented Relevance Score with better spreading activation weights (0.25) and dynamic decay controls.
• Batch metadata optimization: Context assembly now uses a single high-efficiency worker call to fetch headers and titles for all results, reducing latency by 95% in large vaults.
• Context structural cap: Implemented a hard safety cap for structural (header-only) documents to ensure the agent is never overwhelmed by peripheral metadata.
• Zero-latency I/O: Migrated all context file reading to app.vault.cachedRead for near-instant assembly from memory.
• Magic number elimination: Centralised all internal search and context constants into src/constants.ts and exposed them via settings.
• Domination prevention: Reduced the single-document soft limit to 10% of total budget to ensure a more diverse context window.

[4.0.1] - 2026-01-26

User features

Developer features

[4.0.0] - 2026-01-25

User features

• GARS tuning: Users can now precisely adjust the similarity, centrality, and activation weights in settings to fine-tune how the Research Assistant ranks notes.
• Graph & ontology awareness: The Research Assistant now understands vault hierarchy through a new topic sibling traversal algorithm, finding related notes even if they are not directly linked.
• Improved hybrid search: Combined vector and graph analysis into a unified scoring system (GARS) for more relevant search results.
• Adaptive context assembler: Implemented an "Accordion" strategy that packs more context into the AI memory by intelligently switching between full text, snippets, and metadata based on relevance.
• Comprehensive documentation: Added a new user guide for the Researcher and a deep technical specification for developers.
• Improved error feedback: The Research Assistant and settings now provide friendly, actionable messages for authentication issues (eg "Invalid API key") instead of technical status codes or generic apologies.
• Reliable indexing alerts: Background vault indexing now correctly reports critical failures (like expired API keys) to the user interface, preventing silent failures during re-indexing.
• Context transparency: The Research Assistant now displays a collapsible list of all "Context Documents" used to generate the answer (Resolves #59).
• Interactive references: Context documents in the chat reference list are clickable (to open the note) and draggable (to insert a link into other notes).
• Dynamic model fetching: The plugin now dynamically retrieves available Gemini models from the Google API, ensuring support for the latest model versions without plugin updates.
• Smart model caching: Added configurable caching for the Gemini model list to ensure a snappy settings experience while keeping the list fresh.
• Instant connection: Providing a valid Gemini API key now immediately triggers a model fetch and enables model dropdowns without needing a plugin restart.
• Model tooltips: Added hover tooltips to all model dropdowns showing the raw Gemini model ID for advanced users.
• Improved model sorting: Model lists are now intelligently sorted to prioritize the latest Gemini versions (eg Gemini 3.0 and 2.5 families).
• Refined model lists: Cleaned up dropdown menus by excluding experimental and device-bound (Nano) models by default.
• Grounding optimisation: Specifically restricted grounding models to Flash and Lite variants for the best balance of speed and cost during web search workflows.
• Model list debugging: Added a "Log items" utility in the Developer section to print the raw Gemini API response to the console, with automatic fresh fetch if data is missing.
• Dynamic budget scaling: Context budgets now automatically adjust when switching models to maintain a consistent capacity ratio.
• Tabbed settings interface: Refactored the settings UI into a clean, tabbed layout (Connection, Researcher, Explorer, Gardener, and Advanced).
• Improved settings architecture: Centralised tab rendering logic and standardised agent sections using a unified SettingsTabContext.
• Proportional reset buttons: Added "Reset to default ratio" buttons to context budgets, restoring them to sensible baselines (20% for chat, 10% for gardener) based on the current model's limit.
• Persistent debugging: Updated the model registry to persist raw API responses in local storage for a more reliable troubleshooting experience across restarts.
• UI layout optimization: Moved the Gardener model selection to sit directly above its corresponding budget setting for a more intuitive configuration flow.

Developer features

• GARS mathematical model: Formalized the graph-augmented relevance score calculation in ScoringStrategy.ts.
• Dynamic ontology config: Propagated ontologyPath settings to the background worker to ensure traversal logic respects custom folder structures.
• Shadow graph specification: Created a deep technical document (devs/shadow-graph-technical.md) covering architecture, pipelines, and algorithms.
• UI standardisation: Refined settings labels and messages to strictly follow sentence case for a more native feel.
• Critical error propagation: Updated the Indexer Web Worker to explicitly re-throw authentication and API errors back to the main thread.
• Throwing model discovery: Enhanced ModelRegistry.fetchModels with an optional throwOnError flag to allow UI-driven error handling during model refreshes.
• Security hardening: Removed a leaked API key from the test suite and replaced it with a safe dummy string.
• UI compliance: Standardised interactive notices to use strict sentence case in accordance with Obsidian UI guidelines.
• Lazy loading implementation: High-performance settings rendering that only loads section content when its tab is first activated.
• Ontology robustness: Fixed a console error that occurred at startup if ontology folders or files already existed. The plugin now handles existing structures silently and gracefully.
• Internal storage migration: Refactored the ModelRegistry to use Obsidian's vault-specific loadLocalStorage and saveLocalStorage for persistent model caching.
• Robust storage interfaces: Defined the InternalApp and InternalPlugin interfaces to eliminate any casts and ensure strict type safety when accessing internal Obsidian settings.
• UI auto-refresh: Implemented a reactive settings refresh mechanism that updates the UI automatically when background model discovery completes.
• Standardised logging: Refactored model registry and settings logic to use the project's central logger utility, removing direct console calls.
• Concurrency protection: Added fetching locks to prevent redundant API calls during rapid UI refreshes or plugin re-initialization.
• Settings sanitization: Implemented a boot-time sanitization pass that validates and caps saved context budgets against model-specific limits to prevent configuration corruption.
• UI architecture: Decoupled developer-focused controls into a dedicated Developer settings section.
• Constant centralisation: Refactored view types, sanitisation limits, and model ranking scores into src/constants.ts to improve maintainability and eliminate magic numbers.
• Architectural documentation: Enhanced devs/ARCHITECTURE.md with detailed Mermaid.js diagrams for Agent control flows and Model selection logic.
• Service safety: Replaced unsafe non-null assertions in LocalEmbeddingService with defensive checks to ensure stable task dequeuing.
• Service documentation: Improved JSDoc coverage for core services including OntologyService, GardenerService, and SearchOrchestrator to improve maintainability.
• Security masking: Implemented a recursive masking utility to prevent plaintext API keys from being leaked in developer console debug logs (eg when updating worker configurations).

[2.2.0] - 2026-01-22

User features

• Multilingual @ Mentions: Full support for Unicode characters (Korean, Japanese, e.g. Korean 가) in the @ mention suggestion box (Resolves #60).
• Improved @ Search: The suggestion box now remains open during selection even when typing spaces or punctuation, allowing easier multi-word file matching.
• Recursive Directory Context: Mentioning a folder with @ now recursively includes all Markdown files within that directory, ranked by semantic similarity to your query (Resolves #48).
• Context-Aware Chat: The Researcher now automatically includes all visible Markdown files as context when asking questions like "What's this about?". You can now chat with your open notes without needing explicit @ mentions.
• Prioritized @ Suggestions: The suggestion box now ranks currently visible files at the top of the list, ensuring your active workspace is always easy to reference.
• Native Suggestion UI: Restored native Obsidian icons and improved the suggestion layout for a more premium, integrated feel.
• Helpful Chat Guidance: Added a helpful hint to the chat input and updated system instructions to guide users on using @ mentions and implicit context.

Developer features

• Robust Context Resolution: Updated ResearchChatView to use getAbstractFileByPath for reliable file and folder resolution.
• Context Safety: Implemented explicit context budgeting for recursive folder expansions. The agent now prioritizes relevant files using similarity-based ranking and respects the user's contextWindowTokens setting.
• Constant Centralization: Refactored context budget calculations to use centralized SEARCH_CONSTANTS for better maintainability.

[2.1.0] - 2026-01-22

User features

• Folder suggestion in settings: Introduced an autocomplete folder selector for "Ontology path", "Gardener plans path", and "Excluded folders", making it easier to configure the plugin without manual typing.
• Improved excluded folders management: Redesigned the "Excluded folders" setting into a dynamic list view. You can now easily search for folders to ignore and remove them with a single click.
• System instruction reset: Added a "Reset" button to the advanced settings to easily restore the default agent behaviour and persona.

Developer features

• Reusable folder suggest component: Implemented FolderSuggest (extending AbstractInputSuggest) for consistent folder selection across the plugin UI.
• Settings refresh utility: Added a helper to programmatically refresh the Obsidian settings tab, ensuring the UI stays in sync after automated updates.

[2.0.1] - 2026-01-20

User features

• Unified agentic terminology: Standardised all major features under a role-based naming convention: Researcher for chat and reasoning, Gardener for vault hygiene and ontology management, and Explorer for similarity search and graph discovery.
• Gardener agent for vault hygiene: Introduced a proactive agent that analyses note metadata and suggests improvements based on a shared ontology. It operates on a "plan-review-apply" model to ensure user oversight and safety.
• Centralized ontology management: Established a formal directory structure (Concepts, Entities, MOCs) and an Instructions.md file to guide AI classification, ensuring consistent naming and tagging across the vault.
• Interactive hygiene plans: Refactored the Gardener's output into an interactive markdown interface. Users can now review, select, and apply specific metadata changes directly from the plan note.
• Background indexing: All vector indexing and graph relationship analysis has been offloaded to a dedicated web worker, ensuring the main thread remains responsive even during large vault operations.
• High-recall similarity search: Significantly improved the "similar notes" recall by bypassing Orama's default 80% similarity threshold. You can now see notes with lower similarity scores (down to 1% or whatever your settings specify).
• Seamless provider switching: Fixed a bug where switching between local and Gemini embedding providers would cause "unauthorized access" errors. The plugin now dynamically routes requests to the correct engine instantly.
• Model selector dropdowns: Replaced manual text fields with intuitive dropdown menus for chat, grounding, and code models, pre-populated with the latest Gemini models.
• Custom model support: Added "custom" options for all model categories, providing full control for power users to use specialized or experimental model IDs.
• Local model management: Standardized selection for local embedding models with automatic dimension validation and a new "force re-download" utility for easier troubleshooting.
• Improved synchronization: Refined the indexing engine to detect changes in file size and modification time, ensuring search results are always accurate.
• Default code execution: Changed the default setting for "enable code execution" from off to on, enabling the computational solver (Python execution) by default for all new installations.

Developers

• Agent service refactoring: Decomposed the monolithic AgentService into specialized SearchOrchestrator and ContextAssembler components to improve maintainability and allow for independent unit testing.
• Safe metadata management: Implemented a MetadataManager service to centralize frontmatter updates, using atomic file operations to prevent race conditions during automated vault maintenance.
• Shadow graph infrastructure: Integrated graphology within the indexer worker to track note relationships and wikilinks alongside vector embeddings.
• Async indexer worker: Implemented a Comlink-powered background indexer that manages an Orama vector store and a relationship graph concurrently.
• Dynamic routing service: Implemented RoutingEmbeddingService to handle multi-provider delegation, decoupling the graph indexing logic from specific embedding implementations.
• Index safety and model tracking: Enhanced index persistence to track specific embedding model IDs. The plugin now automatically triggers a full re-index if the model is changed, even if dimensions are the same, preventing data corruption.
• Strict type safety: Fully refactored the background worker to eliminate all any casts and eslint-disable comments, using Orama's native RawData types for robust state handling.
• Worker robustness: Implemented a 4-stage stability fallback (Threads -> 1 thread -> No SIMD -> Circuit Breaker) and improved lifecycle management with fullReset capabilities.
• Boot grace period: Added a proactive detector that triggers stable modes immediately if the worker crashes within 10 seconds of startup.
• Enhanced diagnostics: Improved worker-side logging for "empty file" scenarios and Orama state migration to help diagnose indexing coverage.
• Model hygiene: Added a quantized flag to the ModelRegistry to support loading unquantized models (like Potion-8M) and implemented worker-side event loop yielding to prevent 60s timeouts on large files.
• Stable mode persistence: Automatically updates and saves plugin settings when stable modes are triggered to prevent repeat crashes in future sessions.

[1.5.0] - 2026-01-10

User features

Sovereign intelligence (local + offline)

• Zero data leakage: You can now switch the embedding provider to Local in settings. This downloads an open-source model (like Nomic-Embed or Potion-8M) to your device, allowing you to index and search your vault without data ever leaving your machine.
• Cost savings: "Similar Notes" and search now work completely free, without consuming your Gemini API quota.

Efficiency

• Smart indexing: The plugin now intelligently waits 5 seconds after you stop typing before active re-indexing. This prevents "spamming" the Gemini API with partial edits, significantly reducing your token usage and billing costs.

Developers

• Transformers.js Integration: Implemented a dedicated Web Worker using @xenova/transformers to run ONNX models inside the plugin environment.
• Fetch Proxy: Created a message-passing proxy to route worker network requests through the main process, bypassing strict CORS/CSP policies and sanitizing headers to prevent 401 errors from Hugging Face.
• Debounce Refactor: Consolidated all indexing triggers into a single VectorStore.requestIndex method with a Map<FilePath, Timer> registry. This prevents race conditions and eliminates redundant "double-debouncing".
• Type Safety: Fixed critical Float32Array buffer detachment issues (copyWithin errors) during vector storage resizing.
• Fine-Tuning: Added dedicated settings for queueDelayMs and embeddingThreads to fine-tune performance on different hardware.
• Fixed InteliSense errors in Visual Studio Code. No user impact, but it makes the developer happy. PR44

[1.4.0] - 2026-01-03

Added

• Computational solver: The agent can now write and execute Python code to analyse data from your vault (e.g., "Read @Monthly Expenses and forecast next month's spend").
• Settings: New Enable code execution toggle for the Computational Solver above(Default: Off) and corresponding Code model selector in the Models tab.
• Settings: New Context window budget setting (Default: 200,000 tokens). This allows users to control how much "memory" the agent uses per request, balancing deep context against API rate limits.

Changed

• Settings restructure:
  • Settings restructured into logical functional groups (Researcher, Explorer, Gardener).
  • Models selection moved directly into relevant agent sections.
  • "Researcher" section now includes chat model, system instructions, and grounding settings.
  • "Explorer" section consolidates embedding provider, model, and similarity settings.
  • "Gardener" section (formerly Ontology) now groups hygiene and maintenance settings.
  • "Advanced" section focused on system performance and technical tuning.
  • Re-index vault and Refresh model list buttons moved to more contextual locations.
• Context engine: Replaced the static 50,000-character limit per note with a "Greedy Packing" strategy. The agent now reads entire documents whenever the token budget allows, significantly improving its ability to understand long reports and avoiding arbitrary cut-offs.

Developers

• Dynamic tools: Updated AgentService to dynamically construct the tools array at runtime. This resolves an issue where conditional tools (like the solver) were defined but not correctly passed to the model if disabled.
• Response Parsing: Refactored GeminiService to manually parse multi-part responses (text, executableCode, codeExecutionResult), resolving SDK warnings about mixed content types.
• Context Limits: Removed hardcoded MAX_TOTAL_CONTEXT constants. Context limits are now calculated dynamically based on the user's contextWindowTokens setting.
• System Prompt: Updated the default system prompt to include specific instructions on when and how to utilize the computational_solver tool.

Older versions

Older changes can be found in the repository's GitHub releases.