The Best Obsidian Plugins for Organizing Your Notes (and Your Life)
Obsidian is a notes app that stores everything as text documents on your computer, but that’s just the beginning. There are extremely fast searches and keyboard shortcuts, plus you can link to any of your notes from any other note. Of course, not everyone understands this, but if you do, it will change the way you think about writing and note-taking.
But what’s really wild are the plugins. There are over 1600 of them, lovingly created by other users, which you can browse and set in the settings. I can’t tell you which ones are the best – it will largely depend on what you’re looking for in an app. But I can tell you that with these plugins you can turn Obsidian into almost the tool you need. Below are the plugins that I think new users should try first, if only to get an idea of what the plugins can do.
I’m including links to the Github pages for all of these plugins, mostly for reference. Installing plugins from within Obsidian is much easier than manually: just go to Settings > Community Plugins > Browse and find the plugins there.
Organize Anything with Kanban
We’ve talked a few times about the Kanban method , which involves a series of columns that you can drag cards between. There are many dedicated apps for this, the most famous of which is Trello, but there’s a catch: you have to remember to open them. This is why I like the Kanban plugin for Obsidian. This allows me to create Kanban boards directly in Obsidian. Each board is just a text document with a few lists, meaning they don’t take up much space, and you can even edit them directly as text documents if you want.
It’s just a great implementation of a useful tool that sits right next to your other notes. I use this to organize my entire writing process, from brainstorming to writing, editing, and invoicing. I can’t recommend this enough.
Ignore markdown using this toolbar
Obsidian is built on top of Markdown, a simple way to format text files . Personally, I like this: it’s a faster way to add simple formatting to your documents. However, it’s not for everyone, and that’s where the editing toolbar comes in. This simple extension adds a formatting toolbar to the top of every text box with common formatting options. Everything is still formatted using Markdown, but you can apply that formatting with one click if that’s what you prefer. For some, it’s just a way to get formatting tasks done until you learn how to use Markdown; for others, it may be an alternative to learning Markdown completely. There are no wrong answers here.
Copy notes to other apps with formatting.
Speaking of formatting, sometimes you’ll want to copy text from Obsidian and paste it into another application. If the application in question does not support Markdown, this will be a problem. That’s why I use “Copy as HTML” : with this plugin you can copy and paste with all the formatting. If you want, you can call this up from the Command Palette or add your own keyboard shortcut. I use it to copy and paste text into Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and even the Lifehacker CMS – it works perfectly every time.
Quickly capture content from any website
Retrieving articles from the Internet and tagging them is an important part of many research processes. For this I use the Extract URL extension. Similar to reader mode in browsers , this tool can fetch the article (and only the article) of any URL you provide it with. My favorite way to use it is with the Import from Clipboard command, which you can find in the Command Palette or by assigning a keyboard shortcut. Just copy the URL, run the command, and the entire article at the URL will be copied to the current note. If you want, you can use this to create your own Read Later service.
Review your diary every day
We talked about how great it is to use Obsidian as a journaling application . A journal review makes this process even better. With it, you can customize your sidebar to display posts from any time period you like. Personally, I like to see entries from one, two, three, four, and five years ago, although I will inevitably adjust this as I have more and more years of journal entries. I really like seeing what past versions of me were thinking – it teaches me a lot about how I grow and don’t grow. This plugin makes this possible.