More collaboration between plugins

Hello everyone,

I am new to Obsidian and still exploring around and constantly evolving my personal knowledge management system.

I am trying to set up a system to track different tasks, habits… events of all sorts in my life. I noticed that there’s the tracker plugin which is really cool and powerful.
However, it made me think of why we really need a separate plugin for that?

Since longevity of my system is really something important for me. I prefer to use as little plugins as possible. And this made me think, why not create more collaboration between different plugins and how they are developed? And try to see how they all try to eventually reach convergent goals.

In the example above for tracking things in the obsidian vault. Why not, rather than have a separate tracker plugin, use dataview to define the things I want to track and then pass the dataview results to a separate plugin specialized in visualization.

I think if the community approaches plugin development this way, as different complementary modules, it will allow us to have less things to manage and more maintainability in our vaults.

Would love to know what you guys think about this?

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Counter-point: dependency graphs can cause more problems than they solve. Many use cases don’t need or want dataview. Making it a requirement just for task management is an unnecessary complication for many use cases.

Having said that, many of the community plug-in authors do collaborate quite a bit and provide optional functionality in the presence of other popular plugins, Calendar and Dataview being prominent examples.

And, the Obsidian devs themselves are dedicated to not just crafting the core Obsidian experience, but cater to the plug-in author needs and constantly extend the plugin API as new use cases arise. For example, last year the plugin API added native task support that plugins quickly adopted.

Your observation is a fascinating one as it touches on a whole philosophical branch of software engineering - centralized planning vs emergent design. Each have their disadvantages and benefits. So far, Obsidian is striking a nice balance IMO.

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