Hey @helroy… I had a read on the plugin on github…would like to know how you like it. The author admits it is mainly to have meta bind buttons target the main page from a side panel view. But this functionality is fully already supported - and nicely - by meta bind itself. I use it daily. So I am unsure what benefit this plugin brings? What’s your thoughts? Perhaps something escaped me?
Cheers
First of all sorry, @stella , if you feel we’re hijacking your post, but I guess there are lessons to be learned for all of us in exploring this slight detour related to task management and note management in general.
A common way for starters to organise any note is to include some queries related to the type of note at the top of the note. This could be navigational aids, or summarising aids, and so on. This will down the way lead to the same code being duplicated in many notes, and if you want to change it it’ll demand many changes in different notes.
The intermediate variant is to use something like dv.view() to call an external script to do all of this. I’m currently using dv.view("js/header") in most of my notes to build this kind of stuff, and it is working rather nicely.
However, after seeing the Nav Link Header I saw that I could possibly up the game even another notch, and don’t have any script references at all within the note itself. Maybe I could do all the stuff outside of the note? As an example this would leave the daily note with just the text of that note, and no extra stuff in it, and the plugin would show the extra bits and pieces I wanted on top.
Finally, and here the Contextual Sidecar enters the picture with an opportunity to modify the main page without any (or possibly just a little tag) can add buttons and overview and what-not in a side panel without me ever having to think too much about changing all the daily notes, or all the templates or … . It can just live there as a side panel, and present me with the information/actions I want… And it can adapt with various folders/tags to show different bits and pieces.
So I’ve got high hopes for this sidecar plugin, but I’m still evaluating it, to see if I can implement my dream scenarios of having very clean and to the point notes with little or no unrelated stuff in the note itself.
I understand the philosophy and vehemently agree. But I feel you did not answer the question. Why would one use this contextual sidecar plugin, when you can already make an .md file, put meta bind controls in there that already can target other notes, and put this .md file in the sidebar?
I am genuinely asking because I use sidebars a lot, and if this plugin has something extra to offer, I would love to know. Cheers!
Tempted to chime with: the Note Toolbar plugin’s extensive features are hardly discussed at all. Apparently it can run a bunch of stuff, which would look cool on top of a file that wouldn’t need to be added any queries.
Not a fan of repeating the same things with templates, even if the resulting files largely contain any more queries than those with dv.view methods.
More at:
I have not found the time to tinker with these yet, so nothing from my side to offer.
Thanks for chiming in @Yurcee!
Got to say…I had a quick look on github…pretty active dev work; seems to do a whole ton; precisely in the area discussed in this post. I really love what I read. I used for a friend the commander, and it has its uses. I don’t use it since I am a heavy user of keybindings. But this would complement some of the stuff I need. As @holroy aptly said, templated navigation in top of a daily note is a problem. And we all know we tweak stuff all the time, so central code is crucial.
So yeah, I love this plugin and will take it for a spin.
And to @stella, again sorry for hijacking this thread…my offer to help still stands if you like what I had to say about tasks. I am sure others will help too if you ask.
Cheers
Good man.
Welcome to the forum!
We needed a mountain guy after a caver (@DiCaver).
I reckon holroy is somewhere in the middle, thickening thin ice!
So @Yurcee, you and @holroy can take air and water as elements, and we can form some strange superhero group … but I’m not sure if Obsidian is our Kryptonite or Popeye’s spinach 
Cheers, Marko 
… oh, and @MountainMan - welcome!
Thank you, and hello DiCaver!
I looked over Note Toolbar Plugin some more.
I see you can add any command pallet’s command.
But…
Taking holroy’s comment to heart (he is correct), I would like to replace my top nav bar for daily note (prev day, today, next day) and do it with the nav bar. So…how does one add basically pieces of dataviewjs code? Only way I can think of is to use quick view, which then allows you to register it as a new command pallet command…am I on the right track, or is there a better way? Cheers
A few of us (@holroy, @MountainMan , @Yurcee , @DiCaver ) took this thread into a slightly different direction than the OP likely intended for it. I’ll try to summarise the key idea we started to discuss:
dv.view() or similar means to execute/embed an external querySo why this topic, and what’s the purpose? As I said in the first point above it’s about discussing which tools are available to create navigational aids connected to a note (and with a dependency on the note, so that daily notes could have their adaption of it, and general notes could have a slightly different adaption, and maybe project notes their variant).
In addition a tool where you could show relevant meta-information and actions related to a note. I imagine in such a note you could possibly have some action buttons/menus related to updating/changing properties, maybe some summation queries (like showing task overviews/collation related to the current area), or if you’re like me and assign types to your notes it could show such information possibly with the option to change the type (and trigger template actions to adapt it to the new type), or other aids in keeping your vault in a tidy and orderly manner.
All stuff which is not directly relevant within any given note, but would apply to different groups of notes, and would be better suited in a dedicated area, like in the sidebar. Kind of similar to infoboxes in Wikipedia, but potentially with a more dedicate content towards actions related to the note.
So there you have it; A way too long post, on a subject which at least (and hopefully some of the peopler in that other thread) would like to discuss further with pros and cons of the various plugins, or new candidates achieving some part of this in an even better way.
@MountainMan , in the other thread you asked question related to why the Contextual Sidecar plugin. To me it offered a new way of having a tight connection to the current note, and also the ability to have different panels depending on either folder placement or tags. This opened up some doors related to having dedicated elements/panels for various groups of notes.
It’s a bummer though that it’s not been updated for a while, and seems to have gone into a slight freeze. And as I stated earlier, I’m still evaluating it (and it could very well be replaced with something else now that this thread is here 
). You say that Meta bind can easily do that connection, but I’ve not experienced that much with it in this context, so I’m not sure how that would look. Do you have any examples?
Another question on the main topic is also How could we easily add different elements/panel for different group of notes?
At one point in time I made myself an active notes panel mainly using Dataview scripts, but that was in my early days using Dataview, and it experienced some slight delays and it was mostly for pure information (and not very actionable). So this Contextual sidebar plugin was kind of a new approach, and fresh wind into that concept of having informational aid in the sidebar.
All I can add for now is that this thread comes on the heels of another, where a Rich Foot plugin hack was mentioned as another method to strip dailies of queries within the note.
I was going to write there before but I slipped out of the 28 day bracket.
I understand most of the regulars and other frequent posters who help forumers like to offer implementations if they are personally interested in aligning the requests with prospective solutions for their own use cases. I am currently waylaid by other projects but what I’m most interested in what people can get out of Note Toolbar’s latest functionality with regard to query results in an overlay modal. That’d be cool.
That was my post. I’m working on a plugin based on Rich Foot that puts info about my journals in the footer. Working well so far, though I just played with the sidebar plugin after seeing it mentioned here and now I’m wondering if that might be a better option. I’ll probably use both for a time and see which I prefer.
Hey @holroy, thanks for the nice write up here. Well done and I am sure it will be useful for others.
You asked how you can target another note from a note in a sidebar using meta bind controls. I am pasting here a multiselect meta bind I have in my sidebar. This multiselect gets generated by code, and using your idea I saw in some other post, gets written to a specific placeholder in that side not %%HABITS%%. This multiselect is generated by code, as you likely guessed, because each day my daily note changes, based on the date. I did not accomplish to auto generate the file automatically if it was not done yet, so in my code if that happens I simply create a link for me to click on…and then the code reloads. It’s easy enough and works for me. I am not pasting the code here…if you want me to, let me know I will do so…just go easy on me, I am not js programmer, so I clobbered it together…
INPUT[multiSelect(
option(brushMor, 🦷 Brush Teeth Morning),
option(breakFast1hr, 🍳 Breakfast within 1 hr of waking),
option(breakfastNoCarb, 🍳 Breakfast no Carbs),
option(hadProteinShake, 🥛 Had Protein Shake),
option(tookSupplements, 💊 Took all Supplements),
option(reflectOnWritingBook, 📚 Relax 1/2hour with music & reflect on writing book),
option(woreRedGlasses, 👓 Wore Red Glasses at Night),
option(brushEve, 🦷 Brush Teeth Evening),
option(floss, 🦷 Floss at Night),
):05-Calendar/01-DailyNotes/2025/04-April/2025-04-02-Wednesday.md#habits]
As for your other musings, how could we have code or controls in the sidebar to control bunch of files at once…tempting…but I got nothing as of yet…
Cheers
It would be nice to see the code to find the reference you’re using, as my attempts so far has been lacking related to being updated when I switch notes. And I believe arriving at some good code for that, would be very beneficial for us all. Ideally I would like to attach to some event in tabs changing, but I’m not sure if that can be done cleanly from within a sidebar note.
( editorial note: And you might have noticed all the posts from the other posts were merged into this, so if you could either edit/update your first post (which now is the header of this thread) to either reference my writeup, or add a section to introduce this thread that would be nice. )
That last line in meta bind control is the magic sauce. It’s in the docs for meta bind too; you can use any file in your vault to target the frontmatter property. It has no bearing on the code that produces this meta bind control dynamically per se (well except that I need to generate the meta bind control dynamically due to daily note changing - perhaps that is what you are after…)
I will post the code at a later time today and look into your suggestion about the post.