Skip to main content

Universal Cursor Hotkeys

Markdown table-aware cursor navigation & Chinese/Japanese word splitting — for Vim mode, for Emacs keybindings, and for Everyone.

For everyoneVim modemacOS (Emacs) style

We make the arrow keys, Home/End, and Page Up/Page Down keys you already use every day Markdown-aware and table-aware inside Live Preview. We also add CJK (Chinese/Japanese) word-boundary support — which doesn't work correctly out of the box. Vim mode gets the same treatment, and on top of that, we provide a full set of hotkeys for macOS-style keyboard shortcuts (Emacs keybindings).

Side-by-side demo: standard Obsidian vs. Universal Cursor Hotkeys navigating Markdown tables and CJK text

Overview​

Obsidian's Live Preview does a great job with Markdown tables — both rendering and editing — but cursor behavior inside them still has real gaps. Word-based operations also only recognize space-separated words, treating CJK (Chinese/Japanese) text as one long word instead of stopping at real word boundaries.

This plugin fixes both, for smoother cursor movement overall. It patches the cursor keys' own behavior — something you can't normally customize — and makes Obsidian's built-in Vim mode table-aware too, so Vim's own h/j/k/l/w/b/e/gg/G finally work correctly inside tables. It also adds a large set of Emacs-style cursor movement and editing commands — Kill & Yank, case conversion, Recenter, and more — bringing macOS-style keyboard shortcuts to Windows as well.

🔑 I just want better everyday cursor navigation →​

  • Make Home Markdown-aware
  • Make Page Up/Page Down work correctly inside Markdown tables
  • Add CJK (Chinese/Japanese) word-boundary support to Ctrl + ←/→ and Ctrl + Backspace/Delete

⌨️ I use Obsidian's built-in Vim mode →​

  • Move table rows up/down with j/k; move across cells with w/b/e
  • Add CJK (Chinese/Japanese) word-boundary support to w/b/e
  • Jump to the start/end of the note with gg/G, even from inside a table
  • Add table-structure editing commands

🅴 I use macOS-style keyboard shortcuts (Emacs keybindings) →​

  • Make Ctrl + P/N/B/F work correctly inside Markdown tables
  • Kill & Yank, with OS-clipboard integration and accumulation
  • Select text with Set-mark, unified with Obsidian's own Shift + cursor-key selection
  • Multi-cursor movement, Kill, and Yank

Acknowledgments​

  • The code and documentation for this plugin were developed with the assistance of AI.