Turn Obsidian's File Recovery history into an LLM-ready review of what you've actually been writing — one tap, one note, ready to paste into a chat for interrogation.
Accompanying blog post showing how to use this to get a 15-20 minute podcast based on your Obsidian vault: https://jaan.io/lifelogging-with-large-language-models
Obsidian can contain fluidal structure, with crystals called microlites suspended in the flow of molten lava.
Similarly, you can view your notes in the Obsidian note-taking app through the microscopic modifications you make to them day to day, or week to week. These changes crystallize what is on your mind, what you have been working on, and where you are headed next.
Most importantly, they focus a large language model's attention on what is most salient, rather than overloading its finite context with entire files — most of which is irrelevant to what you care about.
Each set of changes forms a hunk (from "chunk"): the lines that changed in a file, plus some surrounding "context" lines. With large language models such as ChatGPT or Claude, this is known as context engineering.
It helps most when you have modified several files at once — some very small (only a few lines), others very large (tens of thousands of lines, such as a journal kept over a year, or book excerpts). Snapshots capture how your notes evolve over time, and they give a large language model a read on your state of mind from the notes you have captured or modified.
Obsidian's File Recovery core plugin quietly snapshots your notes as you edit. Microlite reads those
snapshots, groups them by note, and renders a single markdown note — microlite-hunks-YYYY-MM-DD.md
— with a per-day activity table (edit volume, active hours, context-switching), bulk-sync detection,
and heading-aware diffs of what changed, newest first. It shows renamed notes under their current
name, folds in each note's live content so fresh edits aren't hidden, and drops notes you only
opened but did not change.
Microlite runs entirely on your device and makes no network requests. It reads File Recovery snapshots and your notes' current content, and it writes one review note. It lists your Markdown files for a single purpose — detecting renames — and matches a renamed note's snapshots to its current file by content, reading a file only when its size is close enough to a snapshot's to be that note, or when it already has snapshots of its own. Nothing leaves your vault.
By default it also adds its output folder to Obsidian's Excluded files list (Settings → Files and links) so the generated review notes stay out of Search, Quick switcher, Graph, and backlinks. This edits only that one filter and never touches your own excludes; turn it off with the Exclude output folder from search setting.
- Enable the File recovery core plugin (Settings → File recovery).
- Enable Microlite.
- Tap the Microlite ribbon icon — or run Generate hunks (last 1 / 6 / 12 / 24 hours · 7 / 30 days) from the command palette. A dated review note opens; paste it into your LLM.
Settings let you change the default window, output folder, diff context, the full-content threshold, the bulk-sync threshold, whether the output folder is excluded from search, and an optional prompt template.
Works on desktop and mobile — it reads File Recovery in-process, no external tools required.
Obsidian's own Templates can't run a plugin command, so Microlite bakes this in instead: with the Prompt template toggle on, every generated note leads with your template — a fill-in-the-blank scaffold plus an LLM prompt, ready to complete and paste. It ships with a journaling + Acceptance-and-Commitment-Therapy default; edit it in settings, or flip the toggle off for the plain note. Four placeholders are substituted at generation time:
| Placeholder | Renders as |
|---|---|
{{time}} |
current time, e.g. 3:42 PM |
{{date}} |
today, e.g. Sunday, July 27, 2026 |
{{window}} |
the window's label, e.g. 7 days |
{{window_start}} |
the date the window opened (now − window) |
For example:
I've attached the last
{{window}}of Obsidian hunks from Microlite below, with some overlap with your previous context around{{window_start}}(it is now{{time}}on{{date}}).This upcoming week I'm … / Tomorrow I hope to … / Today I hope to … / Emotionally …
As an expert in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, provide stances to practice for the week …
Turn the Prompt template toggle off for a plain review note with no template.
Everything the plugin does is also available as a standalone Python script in manual/,
which reads File Recovery straight from disk and can also feed
hunk for an interactive terminal review. That script is the
golden oracle this plugin's renderer is tested against (npm test). See
manual/README.md.
npm install
npm run dev # rebuild on change → main.js
npm test # parity vs the Python oracle + privacy guard
npm run build # type-check + production bundle
npm run install:vault # build, then copy into a test vault (path in gitignored .vault-path)Point .vault-path (or the OBSIDIAN_VAULT env var) at a separate dev vault — never develop
against your main vault. Reload Obsidian to pick up a new build.
No vault-derived data is ever committed. Committed test fixtures are entirely synthetic; a guard
test (test/no-private-data.test.ts) fails CI if anything else slips in. Real-vault output stays
gitignored.
MIT
Questions, issues, or feedback: j@jaan.io