Hi :) Ever since I've started using Obsidian I have tried many different plugins and these are the 12 plugins that I still have installed and use pretty much on a daily basis in alphabetical order. Calendar by Liam Cain is one of the most well-known and most installed plugins in Obsidian. Calendar works closely together with daily notes.
You can create daily notes by clicking on a dates and easily search for previous days, months or even years by navigating through the little widgets that it creates in your sidebar. You can add the days of the week as well. The only thing that I don't love is that it gives you these dots per day based on how many words you write in your daily notes on that day.
I have since remedied that by making the threshold per dot really high, I think I made the threshold like 5,000 words or something. Much higher than I usually write in my daily notes so now every single daily note just looks like a single dot and that is just what I prefer. I also noticed that this plugin hasn't been updated in a while, however it's still works great at least on my Mac.
Haven't had any problems with it so let's hope it stays that way since it's one of the most downloaded and one of my most used plugins in Obsidian. The next plug-in is Court sheets. It's a very niche plug-in but I think that's what's so special about Obsidian, there truly is a plugin for everything.
I use Court sheets for my guitar tabs. If you create a code block and add the right command to it it makes it way easier to format chord sheets with lyrics and a chord above it. You can transpose, kind of like what you see on Ultimate Guitar but without annoying premium locked features, popup videos or chords that randomly disappear because of licensing issues.
It also has another wonderful feature, which is auto scrol. l I love this feature because when you're like playing the guitar you don't want to constantly have to stop and scroll down because you get out of time, mess up in the middle of a song, um, it's just not great. Autoscroll is a lifesaver, I love it.
Footnote Shortcuts is a plugin that lets you add footnotes really easily by letting you add them as a hot key. I have mine set as CMD+A and it will automatically add a small 1 and move your cursor to the bottom of the page setting you in completely the right place so you can just copy paste a link or add citation in whatever way you want, or are required if you're in University (citation is a pain I know). It's really simpl, really only has one single use but a really great one.
It lets you change the name of the footnote heading and settings if you so desire and yeah, it just streamlines your footnote experience a bit - as the name suggests. Hider is a plugin that lets you hide features in the user interface that you don't use and don't want to see. You can use it to hide a ton of different things but I mainly use it to hide my vault name and to hide the toggle buttons on the sidebars cuz I prefer to always have my sidebars visible anyway.
I never collapse them it's honestly a great way to unclutter - or declutter I should say - your user interface from things you don't need. These UI elements can also be bound to a hotkey so if you want some things to be easily switched on and off you can do that as well. Homepage is one of my most used plugins.
Homepage lets you open a specific note, canvas or workspace upon launching Obsidian. My homepage is a list of indexes or Maps of Content (MOCs) so that I can easily navigate to anywhere in my Vault just by clicking. I spoke at length about my preference for using indexes over using a large folder structure in my previous video if you're curious about that and the reason I like homepage so much is that I have it set up to automatically open if I don't have any other notes open.
So whenever I click the last note away it will automatically open homepage again and I just prefer to have it in front of my face at all times. It also adds an icon to your ribbon menu on the left for easy navigation and if you use the Obsidian mobile app you can even set up a separate mobile page if you so desire. You can also set up a hotkey to open the homepage at any time if you prefer doing it that way.
Natural Language Dates is another plug-in that I use for a very specific purpose and that is to add the current time using a hotke. I like to write short entries in my daily notes in a bulleted format, kind of like interstitial journaling or rapid logging in a bullet Journal format, and I use the Natural Language Plugin to quickly add the time at the beginning of each bullet point so I know when I wrote a specific entry. This plug-in makes so I don't have to write the time manually each time which just saves me time and creates a little less of a hurdle for journaling dumping thoughts, anything really.
:) It also allows you to auto- suggest using any character and it will automatically add the dates allowing you to cross link between daily notes without having to type out the dates. It's such a small thing but it makes working in daily notes so much more frictionless and I love that. Omnivore is a free open-source reading app that I use for reading articles and newsletters.
It's not perfect in my opinion it's not as good as Readwise - you can tell the app is a lot less mature. However Readwise is way too expensive and Omnivore is free so I am willing to put up with its quirks. So what I do is I copy articles into the Omnivore app or I use the browser extension and then I read them and and I highlight them and then I sync them to Obsidian using the Omnivore plugin.
This does not go completely seamless like I said the app does have some quirks, for example after reading and syncing an article I usually have to delete the article from Omnivore because otherwise you will end up with duplicates the next time you sync which isn't great but I'm willing to put up with that because like I said it's free and I love being able to read articles whenever I want in a distraction free location and being able to highlight stuff. Paste Image Rename is a very simple plug-in - it's all in the name really. Paste Image Rename creates a popup whenever you drag an image or another attachment into Obsidian and it allows you to quickly rename something.
I really like this because I often take a lot of quick screen grabs and I don't want to end up with a ton of files that are called screen grab 1-1-4-3 or whatever. It also allows you to set a renaming pattern - for example you can set it to automatic rename the image to whatever the title of your current note is so the images will always have a corresponding note because they have the same name. And this makes searching images in the search bar a lot easier.
Quick Switcher++ is an improved version of obsidian's native Quick Switcher plug-in. It allows you to do a lot of things, for example. to find files by headings instead of by file name.
It searches Obsidian bookmarks, it runs Obsidian commands, it navigates to related files if you use multiple vaults. You will love this plugin because it makes switching from vault to vault a lot easier. You can exclude folders from search and so much more that I didn't even mention here.
I definitely don't use all of the settings this plugin has to offer but what I do use I really like. Somehow my most used section of this plugin is the fact that it shows me recent files, which surprised me too but because I get distracted easily and I'm always catching myself and then circling back to whatever I was doing before I got distracted and these recent files really help me because it gives me that visual cue. Kind of similar to what the homepage provides for me but in the quick switcher it helps me remind myself what I was doing before I got distracted because I remember that note that I had previously opened it.
Sounds stupid but it works! It has helped me more times than I can count. Remember Cursor Position is maybe the simplest plugin I use.
As the name suggests it's a plugin that remembers where you left off the last time you opened a file this is very helpful if you switch from note to note a lot which I do sometimes so you don't constantly have to navigate back to where you were before. That's all it really does and it does it well Style Settings is a plugin that I use in combination with the AnuPucchin theme (I don't know if I'm butchering that name, sorry) and it creates a somewhat cuter and more colorful look to my Obsidian. It gives you so so many more options for changing your theme, adding colors, of course this isn't a necessity at all but it does bring me joy especially my rainbow folders on the left.
I also really like the import section in the Style Settings plugin, in fact I exported my style settings and I put them in a paste bin link in the description box of this video so if you wanted to copy my exact Obsidian style you can download the AnuPucchin theme the style settings plugin and then copy everything that's in the paste bin in this import section and your vault should look exactly like mine. If it's not your style you can of course play around with it on your own you don't have to do that you can also add CSS Snippets to customize your vault even further although I personally haven't really felt the need to add those. It's important to note that not all theme support style settings by the way I know the AnuPucchin theme does which is what I have and I know Blue Topaz does as well.
Last last but certainly not least the Tag Wrangler plug-in. Honestly this plug-in is integrated so well that I often forget it's not native to Obsidian. Tag Wrangler has so many good use cases - it allows you to create subtags using a ''/'' (forward slash) you can easily nest them in your list of tags and collapse every child tag under its parent tag.
It also allows you to rename tags which native Obsidian does not allow you to do and that has helped me out majorly before. It also improves search because you can now add a tag as a requirement to your search for example I tag all my daily notes as #DailyNote so if I want to search for something specific and I only want it to include my daily notes I can do that. You can also create ''tag pages'' which is a note that is linked to that specific tag I don't personally use this option but I've heard others have found this really helpful.
Those are the 12 plugins that make my Obsidian life a lot easier. Thank you to all these wonderful developers for creating these wonderful plugins for free. I know developers often don't get paid anything or not much at all and these are often side projects so I did want to extend my thank you to them.
There's definitely a lot more plugins that I could download and use however I personally try not to rely on plugins too much; plugins are often like I said side projects for Developers and they don't always get maintained although they are open source so others can always pick up the plugin if it's abandoned. But still in 10 years if obsidian is not the hot new software anymore we could end up with a graveyard of plugins. This is why I prefer to use plugins that make my note taking a little bit easier and more streamlined but if the plug-in wouldn't exist anymore it's not like my vaultwould like fall apart you know.
I also don't love personally plugins that add a ton of code or otherwise drastically change the contents of a note because in my humble opinion it's just not as future proof for me. Anyway that was a side tangent - let me know if you liked this format because this is the first time that I did a video with just a voice over and not my disembodied hands I'm just a disembodied voice now so let me know if you like this format if not I can always change back just wanted to switch it up. Thank you for watching this video :) Don't forget to subscribe and like this video If you enjoyed it and I will see you very soon bye!
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