Use case or problem
I’d been eagerly awaiting 1.14 because I’d seen a Kanban view for Bases on the roadmap. I’ve been using the obsidian-kanban plugin for a while, and while it does the job well enough, it’s never felt snappy and the drag-and-drop on mobile leaves something to be desired. The project is also mid maintainer-handoff, so the idea of moving to something supported by the core team got me excited. I installed 1.14 today, reconfigured the frontmatter in a bunch of my notes to work with Bases, started dragging cards between columns (so smooth!) and fell in love.
That is, until I hit the one thing I can’t live without: there’s no way to make vertical position meaningful. Within a column, order is whatever the view’s Sort setting says - a drop only changes the group property. I’m a pretty obsessive Kanban user (Trello, Jira, Notion, several others) and this is the first board I’ve seen without it. I drag across columns to change state, but to prioritize what might be 10–15 notes in a column, I drag up and down. That’s one of my most frequent uses of a Kanban board, and today it’s not possible.
Proposed solution
When a card is dropped within a column, write an order property to the note the same way the group property is written on a cross-column drop — effectively a “manual” sort option for the Kanban view that persists to a property (e.g. order, configurable). Cards without the property could fall back to the view’s existing Sort. A few community Bases-kanban plugins already do exactly this, so the data model clearly works; having it native, snappy, and on mobile is the dream.
Current workaround
Adding a numeric property (kanban_order: 10, 20, 30…) to each note and sorting the view by it. It works, but reprioritizing means editing numbers in the table view or the properties panel instead of dragging — enough friction that I’ve gone back to the community Kanban plugin for now.
Related feature requests
I searched and couldn’t find an existing request for in-column card ordering in Bases Kanban — happy to merge into one if I missed it.
I’m a huge fan of Obsidian. No other tool comes close for the impact on my productivity, and I pay for Sync to support the team. I understand Obsidian isn’t open source, but if there’s any way I can help make this happen, let me know.
