My Obsidian Journey Part 2

The plugins

Read part 1 of my Obsidian Journey

So we are back with part 2 of my Obsidian journey and in this one I am going to break down my list of plugins I use… Now I am not sure if I am boring you here, but I am doing it for completeness, but if you would like me to add anything. go into depth on anything etc. then leave me a comment or I will leave it here.

First and foremost is…

CoPilot

This is my number one go-to tool in Obsidian. It gives you access to multiple AI models via their APIs and you can ask it questions about a particular note or ask it about your whole vault. If you are running a local LLM like Llama 3 then you can use that thus saving API costs. Saying that, I use it all the time with GPT-4 and I spend only a fraction of what a ChatGPT+ subscription would cost… and when you are not using it, it costs you nothing.

Over the last few months I have been creating and using my own prompts to speed up research/writing etc. which you can call directly from CoPilot, this is such a great tool because you stay in your distraction free environment whilst getting access to AI.

That being said, I have also started using this…

MeshAI

MeshAI is as it says an AI plugin which effectively is a simplified version of Fabric. What this gives you is a complete library of pre-written prompts (patterns) for hundreds of use cases, and you can chain multiple prompts together.

To explain this, let me give you an example:

I could pass in a transcript from an audio recording and get it to convert that to an article, once the article is created I can then get it to summarize all of the key points into a bulleted list.

Having access to hundreds of pre-written prompts is a great timesaver, and these prompts are community-driven and are usually better than the ones I write myself.

One other tool I use that is not related to Obsidian is SudoWrite. It is an AI solution for assisting authors to write primarily fiction books, it has a nice interface and has thousands of plugins (which are prompts) to help with the writing process.

Now you know me, I like to keep everything in-house and I have been moving a bunch of these over to custom patterns so I can get access to all of the features I use inside Obsidian. I have also been working on a dedicated writers plugin as a side project.

Account Linker

I like to make my notes as visually pleasing as possible, and this simple little plugin provides linked coloured buttons to social media profiles like this:

Advanced Canvas

This plugin enhances the basic canvas plugin with a bunch of features to enhance its style and overall usefulness.

These include independent grouping of notes outside of nodes, flowchart shapes, border styles, arrow styles, path-finding styles, custom colours, portals (canvas-in-canvas), and a bunch of other useful features.

Advanced Tables

The basic table inside Obsidian is pretty much useless, this plugin adds the following features:

Auto formatting, Excel-like table navigation (tab/enter between cells and rows), spreadsheet formulas, add, remove, and move columns and rows, set column alignment (left, centre, right), sort rows by a specified column, and export to CSV.

Auto Classifier

This is a simple plugin that will automatically help you create tags in your notes using the ChatGPT API. The plugin can analyse your note (It can be title, frontmatter, content or selected area) and suggest relevant tags based on the input with tags in your vault that you already use.

I tag everything I write so I can do a quick search and find every note I have taken with that tag. I suggest you spend a few weeks or so writing and using tags before you turn this on.

Auto Link Title

Simple but useful. When you paste in a link into a note it goes and fetches the page, grabs the title, and pastes that into your note and hyperlinks it.

Better Export PDF

Better Export PDF is an Obsidian PDF export enhancement plugin that adds the ability to export bookmarks outline, export preview and add page numbers to PDF compared to the official PDF export function.

Better Word Count

Turn off the built-in word count plugin and add this one. It provides more information and you can get word counts from highlighted paragraphs etc.

BRAT

The Beta Reviewers Auto-update Tool or BRAT for short is a plugin that makes it easier for you to assist other developers with reviewing and testing their plugins and themes… or beta testing as most of us would call it.

You will need this to install some plugins, such as this one…

Breadcrumbs

For data nerds this is very usual for building typed knowledge graphs, for most, you can ignore it and move on. If you want to read more then you can find out more here and install with BRAT.

Canvas Keyboard Pan

I spend a lot of time in the canvas, and this plugin does what it says on the can and makes scrolling around quick and more efficient. Again, simple but useful.

Caret

This is a useful plugin for interacting with your favourite LLM via the canvas. It will visually create conversations as cards and you can have multiple branches so if you ask it a question then it will bring up a card with the answer and then you can say ‘but what of I wanted…’ and this would create an alternative branch linked to the first.

It is hard to explain how useful this is, but I use it for brainstorming with an LLM where all the options are laid out in-front of me visually.

Colored Tags

Allows you to have custom colours for your tags. Simple but useful.

Colored Tags Wrangler

Adds a lot more features to tags such as adding colours to cards on your Canvas based on the tag, changing Kanban card colours, adding colours to a folder you created etc.

Colored Text

A basic plugin, but as I work visually I like to have text in different colours for different things. I often colour a sentence or paragraph when editing to rewrite, I have colours for TODO notes etc.

Crafty

This Obsidian plugin enables you to attach tooltips to each node on a canvas. Additionally, it offers seamless navigation between nodes.

CSV Table

I use this to embed CSV data directly into a note every-time the note is opened instead of permanently converting data to markdown and statically including it in a note.

I do this so I can scrape data periodically and save it to my obsidian directory, then the next time I look at the note, I have the latest data in there. This allows me to have live reports or view trending tweets etc. without leaving Obsidian.

Dashboard Navigator

There are a bunch of dashboard plugins for Obsidian, this is the one I use and I usually have it open on a second monitor. It shows me recent files, journal entries, canvases etc. and you can customise it to your own tastes. I would still like to hack this some more to make it work perfectly for me as its pretty basic.

Editing Toolbar

I like storing my data in markdown format but don’t like writing in it, this plugin adds a traditional word processor toolbar to the top of your notes. Perfect.

Epub importer

A simple plugin that imports .epub files and coverts them to markdown format.

Extract URL Content

This plugin takes a URL, grabs the content, and pastes it into a note. This is a quick and easy way

File Color

This allows you to select colors for your files and folders in the file explorer

Folder Notes

This lets you attach notes to folders so that you can click on the name of a folder to open the note like in Notion.

Geulo

This plugin Fetches all the YouTube videos you have liked, search and sort them with multiple sort options, and add them to your daily note in Obsidian.

Harper

Harper is a grammar checker that runs entirely on your device without any additional setup. Just enable it, and you get fantastic, private, and open source grammar checking, instantly. Its not as powerful as Grammarly but works well enough for my daily use.

Highlightr

This allows you to highlight passages in your notes in multiple colours.

Iconize

You can use this to add custom icons to your files or folders. It comes with a built in library or you can add your own.

Journals

This is my go-to journaling system. It has a good set of features that make it tailorable to your own needs, for example:

• Calendar based journals (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly notes)

• Interval based journals (like financial quarters or sprints)

• You can configure many different journals based on your needs

• Every note type configured separately (path to store, templates etc)

• Variables to insert journal related data into paths/note name/template content.

• Creating current journal notes on vault open

• Opening journal note on startup

• Code blocks for journal notes for easier navigation

Juggl

This is an alternative to the built in graph viewer. It is very customisable and you can also embed graphs directly into your notes. You probably wont need this until you have a large pool of notes but I find it extremely useful when I am in research mode.

Kanban

This enables a standard Kanban style interface inside Obsidian which you can customise to your own needs. I have one for general tasks and then individual ones for separate projects.

Keyword Highlighter

This allows you to maintain a list of keywords that automatically get highlighted in the colour of your chaise when they are present in your notes. I use this so I can easily spot things like TODO: or REVIEW when I come back to a note I was working on.

Link Exploder

I almost always have a master note for a project I am working on, this will have a bunch of links to other notes as I flesh out the idea. This plugin will take the note and build a canvas from all of the links and back-links.

Obviously you can add notes to a canvas manually, but this makes the process quick and makes sure you have any semantic links created.

Again this a use-case a lot of people might not have, but useful if you need it.

Obsidian Kindle Plugin

If you use your Kindle a lot and are always highlighting passages in a book this plugin will automatically sync with Amazon and maintain a note with your highlights.

Omnisearch

This is an essential plugin. I use it like the quick switcher on the mac or QuickLook on the PC. It allows you to search everything in Obsidian. It will search your notes, PDFs, and even images and switch to them or embed a link to them quickly.

It can even OCR text in PDFs and images, for example I have been using it to find text in some old scans of documents and it works great.

Optimize Canvas Connections

If you use the canvas a lot then this little tool will automatically declutter your canvas by reattaching links to the closest edge, keeping thing neat.

Outliner

This works similarly to most outlining tools providing indented lists etc. I generally write by creating outlines first so I use this a fair bit.

PodNotes

This is another of my daily tools. I listen to a lot of Podcasts and this makes it easier to write notes on those podcasts. It features:

• Podcast player built into Obsidian.

• Add any publicly available podcast through search, or custom feeds by URL.

• Track played episodes & playback progress.

• Create podcast notes from templates with metadata about episodes.

• Capture timestamps & link directly to the time in the episode.

You can also use it to play any audio file and make notes on that too.

Pocket

Enables you to automatically bring in Pocket saves based on a specific tag.

PopKit

Another simple and useful tool that brings up a menu when you highlight and right-click on a selection of text. Provides quick access to Bold/Italics etc. You might not need it depending on how you work, but handy non-the-less.

Share Notes

Instantly share / publish a note to the web. Notes are shared with your full theme and should look identical to how they look in your Obsidian vault.

Simple CanvaSearch

Depending on how much you use the canvas, this plugin can be a godsend. What it basically does is perform a search which is limited to the canvas and its notes. It is not perfect and could do with updating a little but when you have 100+ items in a canvas it is handy.

Slurp

Slurps webpages, cleans off all the crud, and saves them to Obsidian as nice, tidy Markdown files. Think Pocket, but better.

Strange New Worlds

This is a little bit like Smart Connections but as you are writing it helps surface links and show information in other notes relevant to the one you are working on and will add a pane to the right with extracts of information from those notes.

When I am writing long pieces of content and have gathered multiple notes for the article, I find this an amazingly quick way to remind me of facts etc. that I have written down.

Timelines

This generates a horizontal or vertical chronological timeline of all notes with the specified set of tags.

Whisper

You can either upload an audio file or record yourself directly inside Obsidian and it will automatically transcribe what your have recorded.

Wikidata Importer

This plugin pulls data from the Wikidata database into your Obsidian notes.

Zotero Sync

The tool I use for syncing Zotero annotations with Obsidian Notes.

And there you have it, my complete list of Obsidian plugins. I hope you found it useful.