Community Plugins

Community plugins keep some pieces of software alive. When development stops on a product, often the users can keep producing forks of the initial project and continue developing their own functions and uses for the app. In Obsidian’s case, even while production is still going, they implore users to develop their own plugins to meet their own needs.

One thing should be stressed; community plugins should only be prioritized after learning the ins and outs of core Obsidian. Obsidian has tons of features, large and small, some we haven’t gone over. Take your time to explore Obsidian before branching out.

Dataview

Dataview is an extremely powerful plugin. One so powerful, I barely understand how to use it. It’s prime use is for creating more advanced tables than Obsidian allows you to create. I use this on my main tracking note to keep a list of all open un-checked boxes to appear at the beginning of the note. I have a note that goes over a video on how a beginner approach to Dataview.

Excalidraw

I love Excalidraw. In my humble opinion, Excalidraw is a better version of the canvas feature with even more options. Two easy ways to open up a new Excalidraw file:

  1. The Ribbon gets an Excalidraw button after installing it
  2. You can use the Command Palette to choose your option (new drawing, where to open it, how to show it, etc.)

Excalidraw gives you lots of options to start new drawings. Through the command palette, you can get a look at how many things you can do. Sometimes you want to automatically embed your new drawing into your file, which has it’s own action and hotkey. Sometimes the new drawing should appear in a new tab or window, which are both separate options.

Excalidraw offers shapes, lines for connection, a simple text editor with options for colors and customization, easy image integration, and even some presenting tools that are useful when going over complex data.

Style Settings

Style settings does exactly what it sounds like it does; provides additional customization options. Without the style settings plugin, we could achieve the same customizations, but we’d have to edit some files. Style settings saves us the trouble of rummaging through CSS editing and let’s us do customizations within Obsidian.

Templater

Templater is a plugin I use pretty much everyday. It’s a more complex version of using regular templates, with some needed quality of life changes.

One feature that saves time is the startup template settings. I have templates that automatically apply properties and a horizontal rule to my notes. I even have it so that if it’s a specific folder, it will notice and give a different template.

This is all achievable withy Templater’s unique syntax to grab session variables. We can get easy things like the notes title, to more complicated structures like conditional statements.