The best Obsidian plugin for organizing your notes (and your life).

Obsidian There’s a note-taking app that stores everything on your computer in plain text documents—but that’s just the beginning. There are super fast searches and keyboard shortcuts, plus you can link any of your notes to any other note. Not everyone gets into it, granted, but if you do, it changes the way you think about writing and note-taking.

But where things get really wild are the plugins. There are over 1,600 of them, all created with love by other users, which you can browse and install in Settings. I couldn’t begin to tell you which ones are the best—it will depend on what you’re looking for from an application. But I can tell you that with these plugins, you can turn Obsidian into exactly the tool you’re looking for. Below are the plugins I think new users should check out first, if only to get an idea of what plugins can do.

I’m including links to the Github page for all these plugins, mostly for reference. Installing plugins from within Obsidian is much easier than installing them manually: just go to it Setting > Community plugins > Browse. And find the plugin there.

Organize anything with Kanban.

Credit: Justin Pott

We’ve talked many times about the Kanban method, which involves a series of columns that you can drag cards between. There are plenty of dedicated apps for this, the most popular being Trello, but there’s a catch: you have to remember to open them. That’s why I like it. Kanban Plugins for Obsidian. With that, I can create Kanban boards in Obsidian. Each board is just a text document containing multiple 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 — one that lives alongside your other notes. I use it to organize my entire writing workflow, from brainstorming to writing to editing to invoicing. I can’t recommend it enough.

Ignore Markdown with this toolbar.

There's a toolbar at the top of the window with standard formatting tools: Undo, Redo, Headings, Bold, Italic, Strikethrough, Underline, Highlight, and more.

Credit: Justin Pott

Obsidian is built around Markdown, a simple way to format text files. I personally like it: it’s a faster way to add simple formatting to documents. It’s not for everyone, however. Editing the toolbar This handy extension adds a formatting toolbar to the top of each text window with common formatting options. Everything is still formatted using Markdown, but you can apply that formatting with the click of a mouse button if that’s your preference. For some people, it’s just a way to get formatting done until you learn how to use Markdown. For others, it may be an alternative to learning Markdown entirely. There is no wrong answer here.

Copy notes to other apps, complete with formatting.

The Obsidian command palette here has "Copy as HTML" as an option. You can see that a keyboard shortcut has also been assigned.

Credit: Justin Pott

Speaking of formatting: sometimes you want to copy text from Obsidian and paste it into another app. If the app in question doesn’t support Markdown, it will be toggled. That’s why I use Copy as HTML.: With this plugin, you can copy and paste all formatting with ease. You can trigger it from the command palette if you want, or you can add a custom keyboard shortcut. I use it to copy text and paste it into Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and even Lifehacker CMS—it works perfectly every time.

Quickly retrieve content from any website.

Capturing and tagging articles from the web is an essential part of many research workflows. I use Extract the URL. An extension to this. Similar to Reader Mode in browsers, this tool can grab the article—and only the article—of any URL you provide. 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 from the URL will be copied into the current note. You can use it later to create your own reading service if you want.

Review your journal every day.

Here's a look at my journal! A year before writing this article I stayed in a lovely BnB.

Credit: Justin Pott

We’ve talked about how great it is to use Obsidian as a journaling app. gave Journal Review Makes the process even better. Also, you can configure the sidebar so that you can display entries from the time of your choice. I, personally, like to see entries from one, two, three, four, and five years ago, although I will inevitably adjust this as I have more journal entries for more years. I’m really enjoying seeing what past versions of me were thinking — it’s teaching me a lot about the ways I am, and am not, growing. This plugin makes it possible.

Credit : lifehacker.com