Sidemark for Obsidian
Google Docs-style comments for your Obsidian notes, without putting review markup in your Markdown.
Sidemark for Obsidian is a community-maintained plugin by Adam Coddington. It stores comments in .review.yaml sidecars alongside your notes, bringing the MRSF review workflow into Obsidian.
Community integration
This MIT-licensed plugin is maintained in its own repository, independently of the Sidemark / MRSF core tooling. For plugin support, feature requests, and bug reports, use the plugin's issue tracker.
What You Can Do
- Select a passage and add a comment, reply in a thread, or resolve and reopen discussions.
- See highlighted passages in the editor and their discussions in a sidebar.
- Suggest replacement text, then accept or decline it. Accepting a suggestion updates the note.
- Keep highlights attached as you edit, and manually re-anchor threads when needed.
- Work with comments written by other MRSF tools; the plugin picks up external note and sidecar changes.
Install
- In Obsidian, open Settings > Community plugins > Browse.
- Search for Sidemark.
- Install and enable the plugin.
- Select text in a note and choose Add comment from the right-click menu or command palette.
Open the Obsidian plugin directory
For manual installation and the full usage guide, see the plugin README.
Sync your sidecars
If you use Obsidian Sync, enable syncing of other file types so your .review.yaml files travel with your notes.
Shared Comments, Plugin-Specific Workflows
A note named Plan.md keeps its review data in Plan.md.review.yaml. The Markdown remains readable without the plugin, and the sidecar can also be used with the VS Code extension, CLI, and MCP server.
The plugin extends this shared format with x_-prefixed fields:
| Extension | Purpose |
|---|---|
x_prefix / x_suffix | Context before and after a quote to distinguish repeated passages |
x_suggestion | Replacement text and the accepted or declined result for suggested edits |
These are plugin-specific extensions, not standardized MRSF suggestion behavior. Other tools can work with the shared comment fields without offering Obsidian's accept/decline workflow. Do not assume that they interpret these extensions or reproduce the same anchoring behavior.
The plugin also renders comment text as Markdown, while MRSF defines comment text as plain text. Formatting and Obsidian wikilinks may therefore appear differently in other tools.
Credits and Links
Thank you to Adam Coddington for bringing MRSF sidecars to the Obsidian community. The plugin builds on Tandem Comments by Leon Pawelzik and its contributors, and uses the @mrsf/cli library.