Becoming for Obsidian

Keeps your Becoming highlights in your vault: one note per book, article, video or podcast, with your notes and tags, updated as you read. It works on desktop and mobile.

Becoming is a paid service: you need a Becoming account with an active plan.

Install

1. In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins → Browse and search for Becoming.
2. Click Install, then Enable.

Connect

1. Open Settings → Becoming and click Connect. Your browser opens Becoming.
2. Sign in if you need to, check the device name, and approve. Only approve if you just clicked Connect in Obsidian.
3. Back in Obsidian the plugin connects within a few seconds and runs its first sync. If ten minutes pass without an approval, click Connect again.

Every connection shows up, with its device name, on Settings › Exports › Obsidian in Becoming.

Settings

Setting	Default	What it does
Base folder	Becoming	Where new notes go. Notes already in your vault stay where they are.
Group files in category folders	On	Becoming/books/Dune.md, Becoming/articles/…, Becoming/videos/…, Becoming/podcasts/…. Off puts every note directly in the base folder.
Sync when Obsidian opens	On	Syncs 30 seconds after your vault has loaded, so Obsidian Sync or iCloud can bring your notes down first.
Sync frequency	Every 12 hours	Manual, every hour, every 12 hours or every 24 hours, while Obsidian is open.
Resync deleted files	Off	Write deleted Becoming notes again in full at the next sync, including notes deleted before you turned it on.

Sync now and Resync everything are buttons under Sync, at the top of the settings, and commands in the command palette (Becoming: Sync now, Becoming: Resync everything). On desktop the status bar shows when the last sync ran, or that sync is paused or not connected.

How syncing works

Becoming writes each note once and from then on only adds to it.

• A book, article, video or podcast you have not synced before becomes a new note, in the same format as Becoming's Markdown export.
• New highlights on a note you already have are added at the end, under a heading such as ## New highlights added Oct 13, 2026. The highlights: count and exported_at: date in the note's frontmatter are updated in place; nothing else in the note is touched.
• Changes made in Becoming to a highlight that is already in your vault are not synced. Your own edits to a note are never overwritten.
• Becoming remembers each highlight it has written, so a sync interrupted by quitting Obsidian picks up where it stopped.

Renames, moves and deletes

• Rename or move a note, or the folder it is in, and new highlights still go to it. The plugin follows the rename, and if it ever loses track it finds the note again by its becoming_url frontmatter, so keep that line.
• Delete a note and it stays deleted: Becoming remembers the deletion, including one synced in from another device, and skips that note's new highlights. Turn on Resync deleted files to have deleted notes, including ones deleted before you turned it on, written again in full at the next sync.
• A note that is missing on one device without having been deleted, for example because Obsidian Sync or iCloud has not brought it down there yet, is written again in full, so new highlights always land in your vault. At worst your vault sync keeps a conflict copy; nothing is lost.

Resync everything

Becoming: Resync everything sends all your highlights again. Each Becoming note you have not touched since the plugin wrote it is rewritten in place. A note you edited stays as it is, and the fresh copy is written next to it with a number added (Dune 2.md).

One vault per account

Becoming records which highlights were written per account, not per vault. Two vaults connected to one account split new highlights between them, each getting only the ones it synced first, so keep one. The same vault on your desktop and your phone counts as one. To move to another vault, connect the new one and run Becoming: Resync everything there.

Network use

The plugin talks only to Becoming:

• api.usebecoming.com, to fetch your highlights as Markdown and to record which ones it has written.
• app.usebecoming.com, opened in your browser when you connect, and from the Manage devices button.

It needs a Becoming account with an active plan. If your plan ends, syncing pauses and every note already in your vault stays. Nothing from your vault is sent to Becoming except the vault's name, which labels the device when you connect.

The plugin sends no analytics of its own. Becoming's servers record each sync (when it ran, how many highlights it wrote and how long it took) to show it in your settings and to see how syncing is used. The privacy policy explains how that data is handled.

Your token

Connecting stores a token in the plugin's data.json, inside your vault's config folder (usually .obsidian/plugins/becoming/data.json), in plain text. It can only read your highlights and record what was synced; it cannot change anything else in your account. If your vault syncs through iCloud, Git or another service, the token travels with it.

Disconnect in the plugin settings forgets the token in this vault's plugin data; the token itself keeps working. If Obsidian Sync or iCloud shares that data between your devices, every one of them disconnects (Obsidian 1.5.7 or later picks the change up while open). Remove next to the device on Settings › Exports › Obsidian in Becoming revokes the token. A token unused for 180 days is revoked on its own.

Development

npm ci
npm run dev        # rebuilds main.js on change
npm test
npm run typecheck
npm run build      # production main.js

Symlink or copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/becoming/. To point the plugin at a local API, set apiBaseUrl and webBaseUrl in that folder's data.json and reload the plugin; they have no settings UI.

To release, run npm version <x.y.z> (it updates manifest.json and versions.json), then attach main.js, manifest.json and styles.css to a GitHub release tagged with the same version.

License

MIT