Personal project / Google Docs add-on
PromptSidecar
Reusable prompts,
kept in the document.
A lightweight Google Docs add-on for finding, copying and navigating reusable prompt blocks directly inside the document.
- My role
- I developed PromptSidecar as an independent personal project.
- Tech stack
- Google Apps Script
- JavaScript
- DocumentApp
- HTML/CSS
01 / The working surface
The document
and its margin
Original synthetic document. No real user content or model-generated responses.
Google Docs is a trademark of Google LLC.
The complete frame shows the prompt blocks in Google Docs beside the sidebar. Here, two cards match “relay”; the status counts all three indexed blocks.
02 / The idea
Why I built it
I wanted a lightweight way to organise and reuse prompts inside Google Docs, without moving their content into another application or database. PromptSidecar grew from that idea: a sidebar for finding prompt blocks, copying their text and returning to their place in the document.
03 / Back to the source
Find. Jump. Copy
Jump returns the cursor to a block’s start marker. Copy takes its full text, even when the sidebar preview is shortened. The document remains the place to make changes.
This detail shows the real Copy confirmation for Workshop notice. The full original also shows its two source paragraphs in the document.
04 / Engineering notes
Inside the sidebar
- The active document
- Explicit start and end markers define each prompt block in the active document tab. The index reads the text between them, leaving the document as the place to edit it. Incomplete marker pairs are not listed.
- A small client snapshot
- The HTML sidebar receives a snapshot and searches titles and full prompt text locally. Refresh is explicit. Jump uses a document position with a marker-text fallback; edits can make those references stale.
- The host editor
- Apps Script and DocumentApp handle document operations through asynchronous sidebar calls. There is no separate prompt database to maintain, but the integration depends on Google’s editor, runtime and permissions.