Selection Prompts

Obsidian Gemini Scribe allows you to create custom prompts that operate on selected text in your editor. These prompts appear in the context menu when you right-click a selection.

Select some text in the editor, right-click it, and choose Gemini Scribe: Apply prompt... to pick a prompt. The same picker is available from the command palette as "Explain selection with AI".

Why Selection Prompts Are Tagged

Selection prompts share the Prompts folder with session prompts, which shape how the agent behaves for a whole conversation. The two are written differently — a persona like "Subject Matter Expert" isn't an instruction you'd run against one paragraph — so the plugin keeps them apart with a tag:

• Prompts tagged gemini-scribe/selection-prompt appear in the "Apply prompt..." menu and not in the session prompt dropdown.
• Prompts without the tag appear in the session prompt dropdown and not in the "Apply prompt..." menu.

If you have untagged prompts in your Prompts folder, the "Apply prompt..." picker shows a reminder at the bottom explaining how to add one.

How to Create a Selection Prompt

To create a new selection prompt, create a markdown file in your prompts directory (default: gemini-scribe/Prompts/) with the following frontmatter:

---
name: 'My Custom Prompt'
description: 'What this prompt does'
tags: ['gemini-scribe/selection-prompt']
---

Your instructions for the AI go here.

You can use the `{{selection}}` placeholder to control where the selected text is inserted.
For example:

Please translate the following text to French:
{{selection}}

Key Requirements

• Tags: You MUST include the tag gemini-scribe/selection-prompt in the frontmatter for the prompt to appear in the selection menu. Prompts made with the "Create new custom prompt" command start out as session prompts; add the tag to convert one.
• Location: The file can be anywhere in the Prompts folder, including subfolders.
• Placeholder: Use to specify where the selected text should be placed. If you omit it, the selected text will be appended to the end of your prompt.

Bundled Prompts

The plugin comes with several bundled selection prompts. They're built into the plugin rather than stored in your vault:

• Explain Selection: Gets a clear explanation of the selected text.
• Summarize Selection: Gets a concise summary.
• Explain Code: Detailed walkthrough of selected code.
• Fix Grammar: Fixes grammar and improves style.
• Convert to Bullet Points: Converts text to a list.

Vault prompts take precedence over bundled prompts if they share the same name, allowing you to customize the behavior of bundled prompts.

Migrating from the selection-action tag

Earlier versions referred to this feature with the tag selection-action. The tag has been standardized to gemini-scribe/selection-prompt as part of a broader move to namespace plugin-owned tags under gemini-scribe/*.

If you have existing prompts tagged selection-action, rename the tag in their frontmatter to gemini-scribe/selection-prompt and they'll appear in the selection menu again. If you'd like the AI agent to help with the migration, ask it to "update all prompts tagged selection-action to use gemini-scribe/selection-prompt instead."