Title Fetcher

An Obsidian plugin that renames a note to the title of a URL stored in its frontmatter.

Drop a url property in a note, run the command, and the file is renamed to the page's <title> — cleaned up for the filesystem, with social-media noise stripped out.

Features

• Rename from a URL property — fetches the <title> of the page at the note's url frontmatter property and renames the file to it.
• Three ways to trigger it:
  • The ribbon icon ("Rename note from URL property") renames the active note.
  • The command palette command Rename note from URL property renames the active note.
  • Right-clicking a folder offers Rename notes from URL property, which renames every markdown note directly inside that folder (processed in small batches to be respectful to servers).
• Title cleanup — strips social-media suffixes (e.g. Instagram's • Instagram photos and videos, Threads' • Threads, Say more) and decorative emoji. A trailing (@handle) is removed when a full first-and-last name precedes it (Tom Cruise (@tomcruise) → Tom Cruise) but kept when it's the only identifier (Tom (@tomcruise)). Shouted, all-caps names are title-cased (OLIVIA PARKER → Olivia Parker).
• Filesystem-safe names — removes characters that are illegal on macOS or disallowed by Obsidian (:, /, \, ^, [, ], #, |, control characters), collapses whitespace, and truncates to 255 characters.
• Duplicate handling — when a note with the same title already exists, appends a number (Title (1), then Title (2), Title (3), …) instead of failing. This can be turned off in settings.

Usage

1. Add a url property to a note's frontmatter:

   ---
   url: https://example.com/some-article
   ---

2. With that note open, click the ribbon icon or run Rename note from URL property from the command palette.

3. The note is renamed to the cleaned-up page title. A notice confirms the new path.

To rename a whole folder at once, right-click the folder in the file explorer and choose Rename notes from URL property. Notes without a url property are skipped.

Settings

• Mark duplicate file names (default: on) — if another note already has the name, add a number to the end: My Note (1), then (2), (3), …. When off, the note keeps its old name.
• Check entire vault for duplicates (default: off) — count a name as taken if any note in your vault has it, not just notes in the same folder. Requires Mark duplicate file names to be enabled.

Installation

From a release

1. Download main.js and manifest.json from the latest release.
2. Create a folder named title-fetcher inside your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory.
3. Copy main.js and manifest.json into it.
4. Reload Obsidian and enable Title Fetcher under Settings → Community plugins.

Building from source

This project uses Bun.

bun install      # install dependencies
bun run dev      # build to dist/ and watch for changes
bun run build    # type-check and produce a minified production build

The build outputs main.js and a copy of manifest.json to dist/.

Notes

• This plugin is desktop only (isDesktopOnly: true) and requires Obsidian 1.11.0 or later.
• Filename sanitization is tuned for macOS; some other platforms allow characters that are stripped here.

License

MIT © DecafDev