The extensibility of Obsidian is one of its best features (see ObsidianObsidian
There are many tools for digital [[personal knowledge management]]. I've used Evernote extensively, Google keep for a few months, Notion for a summer, OneNote for a day, I've watched videos on othe...).
Here are some of the plugins I have tried and tested personally that really helped me. Perhaps they can do the same for you.
Plugins everybody should have IMAO
- Advanced Tables makes it so much easier to use tables and even formulas. If you use any tables, use this plugin.
- Calendar if you do any daily or weekly logging or planning.
- Periodic Notes if you also want monthly, quarterly and yearly notes.
- Natural Language Dates so you can type things like @today or @friday or @two weeks from now and have it resolve to the correct date.
- Recent Files gives you a window of your most recently modified files. As within a given day you will probably only touch a specific subset of files, this is quite handy. Also helps to process any open tasks within notes at the end of the day. I keep this list visible all times.
- Style Settings makes it easier to adjust many themes, such as the popular Minimal Theme and Catpucchin.
- Window Collapse provides some shortcuts to easily open or close the left and right sidebars. This is great when you often use Obsidian side by side with another window, and you need more text width.
Plugins that make Obsidian more visual and appealing
- Banners allows you to add banners and icons to the top of your notes.
- Icon Folder lets you add icons from certain icon sets to files and folders.
- File Color allows you to color files and folders.
- Emoji Shortcodes makes it quicker to add emojis. Just type a double colon and type part of the word you are looking for.
- Hider allows you to hide various parts of the user interface, making the interface more clean.
Other valuable plugins
- Dataview allows you to query notes and tasks in notes based on their contents, links, tags and yaml data. This opens up whole new worlds, but does require some programming and can be a bit finicky to get right.
- Templater allows you to do more advanced templating than the core Templates plugin. Can be fun and handy, but the basic Templates works fine for most things.
- Better Word Count does what it says. Handy when you are writing content.
- Reading Time is similar to the above, but provides an estimation of reading out-loud time instead. Handy when you are writing content, presentations or videos.
- Commander
- Custom Frames provides more flexibility for iframes (for example to include Todoist in your daily and project notes).
Plugins I am currently testing
- Strange New Worlds (BRAT - so beta) shows a little pop-up when hovering over internal links.
- DB Folder provides a nice way to display folder contents as a table with a row per note and selected yaml attributes per column.
- Projects provides a set of different displays to folder contents
- MAKE.md makes Obsidian a lot more like Notion, but it does not seem to be nicely with the Catpucchin theme. That is why I'm currently not using it, but sticking to Banners and DB Folder instead)
- Todoist Plugin does not seem to be working correctly for me. Need to figure this out, because it would be very handy. Using iframes in the mean time.
- Workspaces Plus allows you to easily switch between workspaces for different types of activities. Sounds like this could be very beneficial.
- Smart Typography nicely resolves certain characters, such as em-dashes and arrows, but this can also be annoying, for example when you don't want it to adjust what you are typing.
- Folder Note makes it so that when you click on a folder, it will open a corresponding note, which for example can list the notes inside the folder in a nice way, or you can make it a map of contents.