Obsidian Gems of the Year 2021 nomination - Plugins

Dataview
Repo Link
My words pale in comparison to what it can do for the various users of Obsidian, but personally? It allows me to build landing pages and dashboards, automatically generate tables from hundreds of notes, create my own wiki, and even fetch me news about upcoming video games.

37 Likes

Excalidraw
Repo Link

Feels a bit phony to nominate my own plugin… but Excalidraw has truly transformed my PKM workflow. It is all that I wanted a good sketching tool to be. By being able to link drawings to documents and to one another, Excalidraw has become an integral part of my knowledge graph. It is practically integrated into all my workflows: book summaries, maps of content, meeting notes, creative thinking, blogging, and much more.

30 Likes

Tasks

Can’t work without this plugin. Helps a lot across all notes to keep objective and work done.

11 Likes

Obsidian 5e Statblocks
https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-5e-statblocks
I would nominate all of Javalent’s plug-ins for TTRPGs (Dice Roller, Initiative Tracker, Fantasy Calendar, Obsidian Leaflet and Admonitions) but the Statblock plug-in is once that I absolutely rely on all the time when DMing sessions and it’s made the whole process of prepping notes, encounters and DMing the sessions so much easier. On top of that Javalent it super responsive to feedback and pushes updates at a very high frequency. It’s safe to say his suite of plug-ins are at the centre of the TTRPG-Obsidian crossover community.

10 Likes
  1. MetaEdit

  2. Repo

  3. I use it to quickly add YAML properties+values or Dataview inline fields to single notes or to all notes in a specific folder, with a simple right-click from the File Explorer. I have also set up a hotkey for the command to use in the note I’m in. It also allows me to remove or change the properties already present in the page, seen in the command window. All around a true gem for organizing metadata.

5 Likes

Kanban

Living in it these days. An astonishingly useful way to organize thoughts, projects, inventories as variable-sized cards on a grid. Using some CSS to customize color and prominence per tag assigned to each card. I’ve wanted this for years, and mucked around with various half-realized kanban apps. On Obsidian’s foundation, Matt has made an absolutely definitive, easy-to-use implementation, an essential.

21 Likes

Quickadd
:raised_hands:t4:
Love this plug-in. It makes my workflow so much easier, also in terms of housekeeping, since I can configure it to log my meeting notes for example to a project notes. Saves me time and worry.

14 Likes
  • Name; Fantasy Calendar
  • GitHub repository link; GitHub - valentine195/obsidian-fantasy-calendar
  • Ok so this was a really tight race with QuickAdd but somebody else just nominated QuickAdd so my conscience is clear. Fantasy Calendar changed my life. Literally. It has made writing the Roundup immeasurably easier, because I have a little visual floating on the corner of my screen at all times that functions as a weird little to-do list; I can always see whether I’ve started the next issue of the Roundup or planned out something for my newsletter the Iceberg, so when something crosses my dash when I’m at my desk I don’t have to bookmark it and think about whether I’ve already got a file started (and create multiples by accident, which I used to do all the time), I can just click to open it up. My newsletter hosting software doesn’t let me see a visual overview of what stuff I’ve already scheduled or drafted for a particular day, and I’m bad at numbers so just looking at the file list isn’t that helpful and doesn’t help me differentiate between statuses because I’m the worst at updating my metadata. But “Fantasy” Calendar has cheerfully let me hijack it for my real-life problems, while also being the only calendar “app” I’ve ever come across in years of searching that actually supports my nonsensical 10 “month” lunar calendar for my fantasy world.
11 Likes

Templater
This plug-in is a life saver and is by far my most used plugin, saving me a lot of time entering information but also helping me give consistent structure to those notes that need it. So flexible and powerful!

25 Likes

Map of Content for Obsidian
I’m putting this forward as well as I find it very valuable for understanding and managing content around key topic areas. It’s also ideal when there is a natural hierarchy to notes of which I have many. Looking forward to this plugin maturing and evolving even more!

5 Likes

Text Snippets
Repo
I enjoy templating in Obsidian in a sense that i can type text and it will write some markup/markdown, making it easier to create titles in the pages. The ability to create custom auto-complete statements is another big one aswell.

Overall this plugin makes it easier to be consistent between my pages, and for someone who enjoys consistency and reliability this makes me happy

3 Likes

Reminder
Interoperability with tasks, quickadd and nldates with customizable snooze options and tight integration with the system. It is simply the best and easiest experience found for working with reminders, even when compared to other paid apps.

4 Likes

Tasks

I have been using this plugin to manage my daily routine. I am a forgetful person and frequently forget what I need to do. With this I can manage both my short-term tasks and long-term goals. Of course, dataview and quickadd are both extremely helpful for my workflow; if I have three votes my votes would go to them three. But if I must choose one most relevant plugin, it’s tasks.

7 Likes

My nomination goes to my favourite plugin Breadcrumbs!

This plugin is perfect for structuring your notes so you can always find everything back you ever needed. All papers on a certain topic, or topics that are related to it? Easy! All papers from some author? No problem! All restaurants in the city of Utrecht? Just there! Navigating between days and years? Hovering just above your note! And all of this without requiring code blocks in your notes: Just there in the sidebar of Obsidian!
Breadcrumbs is the primary method I use to structure my vault, and I couldn’t be more happy with it.

17 Likes

Readwise

It allows me to accumulate annotations and notes from many types of sources, e.g. Inoreader for RSS, online articles with Readwise’s browser extension Highlighter or Hypothesis, PDFs, etc., into Obsidian. After this, I can arrange when and how to handle those annotations and notes with Dataview.

7 Likes

Map View
Github: esm7/obsidian-map-view
Add location data to any note and display it on the world map.
Ideal for travel preparations, History research of places or buildings, Journaling of places where you have been.

4 Likes

Excalidraw
obsidian-excalidraw-plugin
Allows text and drawing / image annotation in one tool. Wonderful!

8 Likes
  1. Advanced Tables
  2. GitHub - tgrosinger/advanced-tables-obsidian: Improved table navigation, formatting, and manipulation in Obsidian.md
  3. Makes it possible to work easily with constructing tables in markdown
14 Likes

Tabout, a plugin that let’s you tab out of parentheses, both round and square, footnotes, italics and bold markers, and pretty much everything. This is super useful if you find it easier to hit the tab button instead of the arrow keys, which it is for me since my laptop keyboard makes it harder to quickly navigate to the arrow keys purely by touch.

Image in Editor
Repo Link

I like spending most of my time in Editor and rarely switch to Preview mode. Image in Editor plugin helped me a lot to support my workflow and see images, pdf files directly in the Editor view. The additional option to see the transclusions in Editor is also very helpful!

10 Likes