Disclaimer
Is this plugin open source? Yes
Is this plugin completely free? Yes
Is this plugin vibe-coded beyond the author’s ability to comprehend how it works? No
Community Directory:https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/card-workspacePlugin website:
https://kenanlian.github.io/card-workspace/en/
Card Workspace — a visual workspace for organizing and rethinking your notes
I’d like to introduce my first Obsidian plugin, Card Workspace.
It’s a visual workspace for gathering, organizing, and rethinking your notes.
I originally built it to solve a problem I kept running into with my own notes.
As my vault grew, I realized that capturing notes was the easy part. Over time, though, the vault started to feel more and more like a storage room: lots of useful things were in there, but I wasn’t really revisiting, reorganizing, or connecting them into something I actually understood.
At some point I realized that, for me, the missing part wasn’t another way to capture notes. I needed a better way to look at existing notes again, bring related ones together, rearrange them, and gradually turn them into a clearer understanding of a topic.
That’s what Card Workspace is built around.
You can browse your notes from different angles — folders, tags, properties, search results, backlinks, and outlinks — and work with them as cards with content previews.
From there, the workflow is roughly:
Gather → Organize → Reframe
Gather: start from the structure you already have
You don’t need to reorganize your vault first, and you don’t need to learn a new query language.
You can start from a folder, optionally include its subfolders, then narrow things down with tags and frontmatter properties.
Search is built directly into the workspace. I’ve also spent some time improving search for Chinese text and mixed Chinese/English queries. Matches are highlighted in the card preview, and each note shows how many matches it contains.
The idea is simple: your existing vault structure stays exactly where it is, but you can quickly get a much more focused view of the notes you currently care about.
Organize: save useful views as Card Boxes
Sometimes you spend a while filtering your notes until you finally get exactly the set you want.
I didn’t want to rebuild that same view every time, so Card Workspace lets you save it as a Card Box.
A Card Box can continuously collect notes that match a set of folder, tag, or property rules. As your vault changes, the box updates with it.
You can also manually add or remove individual notes, and each box can keep its own sorting, grouping, pinned cards, and view state.
Importantly, a Card Box does not move or duplicate your notes. Your files stay where they are. The box is just another view over your existing Markdown files.
I find this useful for things like:
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a topic I’m researching over a long period
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an ongoing project
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a reading list
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a set of related notes I want to revisit regularly
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a snapshot of backlinks around a particular note
The card view itself can also be grouped and sorted in different ways, and groups can be collapsed when you want to focus on just one part of the workspace.
Because each card includes a preview of the note body, I find it much easier to remember what a note was actually about without opening every file one by one.
There are also batch actions for common cleanup work, including adding or removing tags, moving notes, adding notes to a Card Box, deleting notes, and merging multiple notes.
Reframe: bring old notes back into what you’re writing
This is probably the part I use the most myself.
When working on a note, you can open its outlinks or backlinks as a card stream.
The source can follow the active editor automatically, or you can pin it so that the related-note context stays in place while you move around the vault.
You can search within those linked notes as well, and if you find a useful set, you can save it as a Card Box for later.
The part I care about most is what happens next:
you can drag any card directly into the editor.
When you drop it into the document, you can choose to insert it as:
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a wikilink
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an embed
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the note content
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the title + note content
You can choose each time, or set a default.
This means that when I’m writing, I don’t have to keep switching windows, opening old notes, copying something, going back, and trying to find where I was.
Old notes can gradually be pulled back into a new piece of writing and reorganized into a new context.
That’s probably the part where, for me, scattered notes start turning into actual understanding.
A few design principles
Card Workspace does not introduce a new note format or database.
Your notes remain normal Markdown files, and folders, tags, links, and properties continue to work the same way they already do in Obsidian.
The plugin is meant to be another workspace for looking at and working with the notes you already have, rather than a separate system you have to maintain.
Feedback is very welcome
This plugin started as something I built for my own workflow, so I’m sure parts of it still reflect the way I personally use Obsidian.
I’m especially curious about one thing:
When you already have a lot of notes around the same topic, how do you usually reorganize and reuse them?
And if you try Card Workspace, I’d also love to know if there are any interactions or default behaviors that feel awkward compared with the way you normally use Obsidian.
Bug reports, performance issues, confusing behavior, or simple “I wish this worked like…” ideas are all very welcome here or on GitHub.
