Is this project open source? Yes
Is this project completely free? Yes
Is this project vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory: [Index Cards]( Index Cards - Obsidian Plugin )
Index Cards — a card-based research and reading notes plugin
I just published my first Obsidian community plugin: Index Cards.
The idea is simple: when you’re reading or researching, you shouldn’t have to think about where a note goes. You just write it down — title, note, source — and file it. The plugin mimics the physical index card workflow that researchers have used for decades, adapted for a digital vault.
How it works
Cards live inside categories, categories live inside projects. A project might be a book you’re reading, a course you’re taking, or a paper you’re writing. The plugin opens as a full-width tab and stays out of your way until you need it.
Features
Projects, categories, and subcategories
Card editor with formatting toolbar and autosave
Ctrl+hover preview so you can scan cards without opening them
Search across all cards in a project
Move, copy, duplicate, and bulk export cards to Markdown with frontmatter
Compare two cards side by side
Recently edited list across all projects
Academic Mode (off by default) — citation fields, a citation parser that reads Chicago, SBL, MLA, APA, and Turabian, and bibliography generation
Philosophy
Physical index cards were never meant to be filed forever — they were how you thought through a problem while you were working on it. This plugin works the same way. Cards are fast to create, easy to reorganize, and meant to be exported when you’re done, not accumulated indefinitely.
Desktop only. Feedback and bug reports welcome on GitHub.
This is my first published plugin. I’d love to hear how it fits (or doesn’t) into your workflow. If you run into bugs or have ideas, GitHub issues are the best place. Thanks for checking it out.
Export to Outline is the headline feature. Instead of exporting cards as individual files, you can now generate a structured Markdown outline from your entire project, organized by category and subcategory, with card titles as headings and note content beneath them. It opens in a sandbox tab so you can review and edit before saving to your vault. If Academic Mode is on and citation fields are filled, footnotes are appended automatically.
Two citation fixes also landed in this release:
The bibliography and footnote generators now correctly distinguish between journal articles and book-series entries (like NICOT commentaries). Previously, any card with a series title was treated as a journal article. Now fixed.
A parser bug that truncated titles at commas has been resolved. Titles like The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 1–39 now parse correctly across all five citation styles.
Desktop only. Bug reports and feedback welcome on GitHub.
A few updates, all aimed at the spots in the workflow that still had a little friction.
Quick capture. Select text in any vault note, press a hotkey, and it becomes a card in your current project with a link back to the source note. You no longer have to open the plugin to file a thought while you’re reading, which was always a little at odds with the premise that cards should be fast to create. Bind the hotkey under Settings → Hotkeys.
Search now reads citation fields. Searching within a project matches author, title, source, publisher, place, and year, not just card titles, notes, and tags. If you work in Academic Mode, you can finally pull up every card by an author’s name.
Automatic backups. A snapshot of the card data file is taken on startup, keeping the five most recent copies. They’re stored so they survive a full uninstall and reinstall in case a semester of research ever comes down to it.
Also in this release: a citation-parser fix so edited volumes keep their editors and translators credited instead of folding them into the title, plus some cleanup under the hood.
Open in Obsidian | Community Directory