Obsidian has become by favorite note taking app, after having used Notion, Ever Note, Onenote and having written my own raw markdown files. Obsidian’s philosophy of not saving remote data, and letting you have access to the raw files has been key to my love for the program. On top of that, Obsidian having released a mobile app, as well as support for plugins, has only increased my love. I even use Obsidian and sync it by hand to Github on my phone. After having experimented with many plugins, I’ve decided to showcase my list of my favorites.
Tasks
As you start to build out more files, you’ll find that it will be rather difficult to keep track of you TODO items across all your files. For example, I have over 450 files at the time of writing this, and relying on simply CTRL + SHIFT + F across the entire vault isn’t the best option. For example, this doesn’t support handy features like reoccuring tasks or due dates for example.
This plugin allows reoccuring tasks to be created, as well as due dates. However, the biggest benefit to this plugin is that you can write some queries to search your entire vault, which will render in the display view. For example, here’s my tasks.md file:
# Tasks
## Overdue
```tasks
not done
due before today
```
## Due today
```tasks
not done
due today
```
## Due in the next two weeks
```tasks
not done
due after today
due before in 14 days
```
## No due date
```tasks
not done
no due date
```
## Done today
```tasks
done today
```
Once viewed, this will render with the results of our tasks based on our query. You can read more about the queries for the Tasks plugins, and how they work here.
Dataview
Much like the queries in the Tasks plugin, the Dataview plugin lets your query the rest of your notes. You can get all notes that have a specific tag, or do more complicated queries like fetching all notes in a directory grouped by some value and sorted. Its very powerful.
I haven’t found a usage for this in my workflow just yet, but its second on my list by pure flexibility.
Tag Wrangler
This plugin allows you to easily view all your tags throughout all your notes. This is really handy if you mispell a tag or happen to accidentally use two close, but different, tags and instead want to merge them. This makes your Obsidian graph that much more useful!
Editor Syntax Highlight
This plug allows you to put the language of the code in your code block, and have it render syntactically, when you view the page. This is a lovely plugin if you’re into software.
Kanban
Having access to Kanban swimlanes makes some note taking that much easier. I’ve been using this plugin to help coordinate my wedding, which was before I learned about the tasks plugin above.
Again, this plugin will look like text until you render. This plugin works best with the UI rendered, as you can create tasks right in the UI.
Note Refactor
This plugin allows you to take a section of a note and move it to another note, or a new note. This is handy, as it more easily lets you focus on writing your content first, and breaking it apart second.
Advanced Tables
This plugin is a life saver if you’re going to use any markdown tables at all. I used to use tablesgenerator to generate my tables, but have found this plugin to be useful as well, especially when offline.
Moving Forward
I’ve seen many plugins being added to Obsidian, so always keep your eyes open for new ones.