I’ve been a heavy user of Obsidian for a few years now and I’d be lost without it. It’s not just notes but the links between them that helps me connect all the dots. Here’s a list of my top plugins at this time.

While I’ve linked to each plugin’s Github repository, all plugins in this post are available through the Obsidian plugin repository.

General plugins

• Auto Link Title: I drop lots of links into my notes; this grabs and inserts the page title. It saves me seconds multiple times a day and makes my notes more readable.
• Paste URL into selection: insert links into a selected text using ctrl/cmd+V – given how many websites I work with on a daily basis, the time saved adds up.
• Various Complements: auto-completes words – for example, if I type “Obsidian”, it’ll suggest a link to my existing Obsidian note. Useful about 80% of the time because it saves me from duplication; annoying the other 20% of the time because I just want to write something down.
• Omnisearch: while the default search in Obisidian is fine, the search results from Omnisearch are better due to the weighting algorithm.
• Dataview: lets me query my notes, for example pull up all notes related to this week – those are tagged with 2024-05. Or all books that I’m currently reading. Or projects that are currently open. It’s incredibly powerful and I’m barely scratch.
• Image Toolkit: when you click an image, it will be popped up so that you can preview, zoom, etc.
• Multi-column markdown – I use columns mostly for templates where I want to show information in a concise way. I’ve created templates to remember the Markdown used most often.

Periodic notes

I consistently work with daily notes and occasionally with weekly/monthly/yearly notes. Here are the plugins that support this process:

• Periodic notes: expands on the idea of daily notes and introduces weekly and monthly notes, adds a bunch of quality of life options such as hotkeys.
• Calendar: creates a simple calendar view in the sidebar for visualizing and navigating between daily, weekly, etc., notes. While I can and do use hotkeys, the visualization is helpful.
• Templater: this is an incredibly powerful plugin; I only really use it to manage templates for my periodic notes.

Photo by Han Wei Sheng on Unsplash

I chose this header image because the purple is similar to the purple in the Obsidian logo, I think jellyfish are fascinating, and I liked it.