Obsidian comes with a selection of so-called core plugins that already offer interesting and important functions. These can be activated in the settings. The Obsidian ObsidianNote-taking app with local Markdown storage and bidirectional links. Popular for personal knowledge management. Open source, with a large plugin community. Stores data as local Markdown files – no cloud dependency developers could have enabled these feature extensions by default, but Obsidian is meant to be as individual as you want it to be. Every unnecessary function should be avoided, as it could get in the way of the perfect workflow.
In addition to the core plugins, you can enable community plugins and suddenly have over 1,400 plugins at your disposal, covering almost every function and connection to other systems.
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Under Browse, you can search the community plugins and sort them by number of downloads, release or update date, and alphabetically.
If you click on a plugin in the selection, you’ll see details about its function and usage. Now you (or at least I) are tempted to overload Obsidian with plugins, since almost all of them sound interesting and useful. However, I would recommend using Obsidian without any community plugins at first and getting familiar with the basic functions. This also includes a basic understanding of Markdown MarkdownSimplified markup language for text, using simple characters like #, *, []. Used by Hugo, Obsidian, GitHub, Notion and many other tools. All content on fricklr is written in Markdown and its fundamental syntax.
However, there are some plugins that can now safely be described as “standard equipment” for Obsidian, as their functions are so useful that they take Obsidian to a completely new level.
These are the kinds of plugins I want to introduce here, because I believe they belong in every Obsidian installation.
Calendar
After installation, the Calendar plugin hides in the right sidebar of Obsidian and enables very fast access to the daily notes of a specific day.
In the plugin settings, you can also enable the display of calendar weeks. If you then click on the corresponding week in the calendar, Obsidian offers to create a new note for that week.
Lots more functions are available with a right-click on a calendar day.
ReaditLater
ReadItLater creates a new note for links from the clipboard. The plugin doesn’t limit itself to just the bare link, but can embed content completely. If you have a link to a YouTube video, tweet, Vimeo video, Mastodon, or TikTok content, the content or, in the case of a video, the player is embedded in the note.
I’ve assigned ReadItLater to the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+L, giving me the shortest possible path to quickly bring content into Obsidian. With various variables, you can determine which metadata should be created automatically and what the note should look like.
Omnisearch
No matter how well you organize and sort your notes: once your Obsidian vault reaches a certain size, you also need a powerful search function. Omnisearch finds content within notes, but also text in images or PDFs.
Here, too, it’s advisable to assign the function to a keyboard shortcut, so you always have it quickly at hand - even though there’s an icon for it in the left toolbar.
Advanced Tables
I love Markdown because you can write quickly and without distraction with it. What’s no fun at all, however, is creating tables with Markdown. This is where the Advanced Tables plugin comes in. You simply start with a pipe | and create the table header with it. Use the Tab key to generate additional columns.
The real highlight of Advanced Tables, however, is that you can even use formulas with it, for example to quickly calculate a sum, etc. Navigation through Advanced Tables works with the same keyboard shortcuts as in MS Excel.
Editing Toolbar
Not everyone is a fan of Markdown or is just in the process of learning how to use it. To still be able to format content quickly and easily, you can install the Editing Toolbar plugin.
It provides a convenient toolbar with formatting commands, just as you know them from any word processor. The plugin also offers a simple table generator, emojis, as well as individually configurable functions and buttons to insert predefined content blocks, for example.
Janitor
If you use Obsidian frequently and for a long time, junk like orphaned or empty notes and images also accumulates. With Janitor, you can also search for very large files and files that aren’t referenced anywhere. Janitor can also consider an Expire attribute that you can automatically insert into every note with frontmatter. Once the “expiration date” of the note is reached, Janitor suggests it for deletion.
This keeps Obsidian clean and organized. As a precaution, you should make a backup of the vault before a major cleanup. Since it’s just a folder structure, this is very easy with Obsidian, and in case of doubt, a manual copy to another directory is sufficient.
Plugin Update Tracker
Once you’ve installed a few community plugins, they naturally need to be kept up to date. The Plugin Update Tracker helps with this. It shows in Obsidian’s status bar whether and for how many plugins updates are available.
With a click on this display, the updater opens and you get a detailed overview of the plugins for which updates are available. You can then first look at the changelog and then update either all at once or only selected plugins.
Excalidraw
Excalidraw is more than just a plugin. It’s a complete application within Obsidian. Even though Obsidian comes with Canvas - a similar functionality as standard that’s getting better and better - Excalidraw is still unbeaten.
From sketches, to handwritten notes, to flowcharts, mind maps, whiteboards, mood boards, and much more - Excalidraw offers everything. Even mockups for app and web development are possible with it. So it doesn’t always have to be Figma.
Omnivore
The Omnivore plugin requires a free Omnivore account. Omnivore is a bookmark management tool similar to Pocket or Raindrop.io.
For me, Omnivore has replaced exactly these tools, because it not only saves the URL of the page, but also its content, so that it’s still available even if the page no longer exists. In addition, Omnivore can also save PDFs in a searchable way and is simultaneously a read-it-later tool. There’s a nice browser extension for Omnivore, where you can also leave notes or highlight text when capturing a page.
With the Omnivore plugin for Obsidian, you can retrieve content from Omnivore via its API APIApplication Programming Interface – defined interface through which programs communicate. Home Assistant offers a REST and a WebSocket API (e.g. for MCP) directly as an Obsidian note. This works either manually or at configurable time intervals.
You can set which Omnivore content should be synced using filters. Here, too, you can use variables to determine what the notes should look like and where the Omnivore content is stored.
Dataview
Dataview is probably the most powerful, but also the most complex Obsidian plugin. I consider it so essential that, in my opinion, it should be part of the core.
Dataview can create lists and tables from all kinds of properties and frontmatter data. With Dataview, you can also visualize data as diagrams, list all to-dos of a category and/or time period - across the entire vault.
I use Dataview, for example, to list all notes that I created or edited on that day in my daily journal. All Omnivore and ReadItLater content from that day is also displayed with Dataview.
It’s important to know that Dataview can only display content, not edit it. The primary formats for the Dataview display are:
- Tables
- Lists
- Tasks
- Calendar
A syntax helps here that, with more complex queries, is reminiscent of SQL. So if you’ve already worked with SQL databases, you’ll find your way around a bit more easily. In Dataview, this is called DQL (Dataview Query Language).
To display all notes with a specific tag as a list, for example, the following script is sufficient:
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To find all files that were created or edited on the same day the note containing the Dataview was created and that do NOT have the tag #omnivore, I use the following Dataview in my template for the daily journal:
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The output then looks something like this:
Dataview has a somewhat steeper learning curve, and I frequently had to look at the very good documentation and experiment even more. The Dataview Example Vault helped me with this, which you can download from GitHub. It contains sample data as well as a large selection of different Dataview codes that help with getting started and that you can play around with yourself.
At the latest, once you’ve understood the application and use of Dataviews, you’ll know why you don’t want to - or can - do without Obsidian anymore.
Which Obsidian plugins do you use or can you recommend?
Hi! I'm Markus – the Fricklr. ⚡ Electrical engineer, 🎵 musician (bass, guitar, keys) and professionally 'something with the internet' 🌐 for over 30 years – nowadays with AI too 🤖 – a 55-year-old generalist from Bavaria, Germany.
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