Standard Garden

The modern web is noisy, chaotic, and sterile. We are constantly bombarded by feeds, notifications, and generic interfaces that treat writing as fleeting content rather than knowledge.

standard.garden is an antidote to this noise. It is a minimalist, poetic publishing platform designed as a quiet digital ecosystem. By focusing on timeless typography, organic color palettes, and natural connections between ideas, it provides a sanctuary where your thoughts can take root and grow at their own pace.

This plugin is your local greenhouse. It transforms your Obsidian vault into an artisan’s toolkit that shares the exact same visual DNA and philosophy as the publishing platform, allowing you to sculpt your writing environment and tend to your thoughts before sharing them with the world.

🪚 The Artisan Tools

Standard Garden bridges your local Obsidian vault with our curated design system. It provides a suite of silent tools designed to help your ideas flourish without distracting you from your writing:

The Gatehouse: Publish your polished notes directly to the web with a single click. Your thoughts remain entirely local until you decide they are ready to bloom.
Woodcuts (Design System): Instantly change the aesthetic and mood of individual notes. Cultivate different atmospheres depending on what you are writing.
The Mycelium Engine: A quiet companion that uncovers hidden connections and unlinked mentions naturally as you write, encouraging you to weave your ideas together.
Ask Garden (RAG / Discussion): Ask questions directly against your note garden. The system embeds your query, retrieves semantically similar notes from your vault via Cloudflare Vectorize, and generates an AI response (Llama 3.1 8B on Cloudflare Workers AI) grounded only in your own knowledge.
Seedbeds: Automate the organization of your vault. When a seedling (note) is planted in a specific folder, its metadata is automatically structured.
Smart Snippets: Manage CSS snippets effortlessly to customize the grain of your vault without restarting.
E-ink / Boox Support: Optimize Obsidian for E-ink screens (like Onyx Boox) with custom high-contrast CSS (animations/transitions disabled) and physical button navigation mapping.

🔒 Privacy & Data Usage

Obsidian is a local-first application, and Garden respects that philosophy.

By Default: The plugin operates entirely locally. No data leaves your machine. The design system, themes, and CSS injections are all processed directly within your local Obsidian vault.
Publishing (Opt-in): If you choose to link a standard.garden account, the plugin can publish your notes to the web.
- What is sent: Only the notes you explicitly mark with publish: true in their frontmatter, along with any locally embedded images they contain.
- Where it is sent: Data is transmitted securely to the standard.garden API.
- Control: You can unpublish a note at any time via the command palette, which removes it from the remote server immediately. Authentication is handled effortlessly via secure tokens.

🛠️ Architecture

Garden implements the Standard adapter for Obsidian. It is one piece of a layered design system that spans the web, IDEs, and Obsidian:

Layer 3: User overrides (frontmatter tokens — per-note escape hatch)
Layer 2: Themes (@stnd/themes — bundled, compiled from tokens.yaml + theme.scss)
Layer 1: Adapter (.stnd-adapter — this plugin — Obsidian DOM mapping only)
Layer 0: Framework (@stnd/styles — the golden ratio, the rules, same everywhere)

The body class .stnd-adapter activates the adapter. When disabled, the plugin acts purely as a publishing engine (The Gatehouse) with zero visual changes to your workspace.

📦 Installation

From the Obsidian Community Plugins

(Pending review)

Manual Installation

Download the latest release (main.js, manifest.json, styles.css) from the Releases page.
Place them inside your vault at .obsidian/plugins/standard-garden/.
Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin.

📖 Usage

Use the frontmatter of any note to control its appearance and publishing status:

---
theme: booky
cssclasses: [my-custom-class]
publish: true
---

🔮 Future AI Directions / Development Ideas

Here are additional AI integration ideas made possible by the Cloudflare Workers AI + Vectorize stack:

Editor Writing Copilot: Shortcuts or commands to generate summaries, brainstorm content, or autocomplete text in the active note.
Automatic Metadata Generation: Auto-suggested tags and intelligent frontmatter structuring based on text analysis.
Live Link Suggestions (Mycelium Autopilot): A panel showing potential semantic links to other notes in your garden in real time while writing.

🏗️ Development

Garden relies on the @stnd/styles and @stnd/themes packages.

Important: Always build the plugin before testing or deploying. Use pnpm (preferred) to ensure workspace-linked packages are resolved correctly.

To build and deploy the plugin locally:

pnpm install       # install workspace deps
pnpm build         # bundle and deploy to your local Obsidian vault

The build script bundles JS/CSS into dist/ and (when possible) deploys the plugin into the configured vault path (see build.js).

Performance note

Theme/frontmatter refresh is intentionally scoped to the active note (and the currently selected theme note) to avoid visual stutter while typing.
Text Trim is scoped to reading/preview surfaces and does not apply to markdown-source-view.

License

MIT