Having written a recent article containing tips to overcome the learning curve of Obsidian, I wanted to follow up by giving some plugins that reduce the complexity of the software. This is contradictory to a point that I made in the previous article, which was to avoid complexity, but these plugins require very little maintenance and improve the usability of Obsidian significantly, so I thought they’d be worth sharing
1. Advanced Tables
One of the most popular plugins of all time in the Obsidian Community. This plugin gives you some additional control over creating and formatting markdown tables in your notes. This is notoriously difficult in markdown and Obsidian, so this plugin is a must-have if your notes often contain tables.
You add a pipe character, write the title of the column and press Tab to create a table. The plugin gives you a sidebar that contains buttons for functions such as adding and deleting columns and rows and exporting the content of your tables to .csv format, useful if you work with your data elsewhere, like in Excel.
The plugin automatically aligns columns as you add data, which is useful when working in source mode in the editor, where the pipe symbols can easily become misaligned.
Overall, a plugin that adds some order to a function of Obsidian that’s often a point of annoyance for those using the software.
2. LaTeX Suite
LaTeX is a bit of a necessary evil for those who use Obsidian in a more technical way — perhaps in lecture notes or lab reports for sciences students. I’ve had to use LaTeX to record equations and chemical formulae at points throughout my degree, so this plugin has been an excellent time-saver.
What it does is add a set of shortcuts into the Obsidian editor to make typing LaTeX syntax a lot easier. You can best see the time saved if I give an example:
Here is the Nernst Equation — for calculating the ion potential of a membrane (used in neuroscience) — in LaTeX and with the rendered output…
You can see how many symbols are involved in rendering the final output of the equation.
With LaTeX Suite, you don’t need to type all the symbols or even know how to use them because the plugin creates a series of intuitive shortcuts, called snippets, that allow you to insert the syntax quickly.
You type mk
to add $$
and place your cursor in the middle. Typing /
after a character (x
for example) adds \frac{x}{}
and places your cursor in the second set of brackets ready for completion of the fraction. The Tab
key allows you to navigate the LaTeX easily by jumping through the sets of brackets.
If you don’t use LaTeX, you can easily disregard this section of the article. Despite this, I know that many of us, myself included, use Obsidian for academic work. Such uses for LaTeX syntax can easily find their way into our work. This plugin has been exceptional in saving me time, allowing technical notes in Obsidian to actually become a viable way of recording information from my lectures.
It takes very little maintenance and the default snippets provided with the plugin are very intuitive, giving time spent learning the plugin a high return on investment.
3. MAKE.md
A newer appearance on the Obsidian plugin scene, MAKE.md aims to create a more intuitive note-taking environment in Obsidian.
This plugin would be the ideal starting point for those moving across to Obsidian from other web platforms that aren’t markdown based. The plugin contains a simple-to-use extension to the editor in Obsidian, based on slash commands like in Notion, meaning you don’t have to have a deep understanding of markdown syntax to format your notes.
A good option for those of you who manage projects in Obsidian, you can create ‘Spaces’ that contain relevant files from different folders. You can create databases (or ‘Contexts’) based on different metadata in your notes as well. This could be tags or other custom properties.
MAKE.md also contains a feature that the developers call ‘Blink’, which is a search function integrated with a file viewer that allows you to make rapid edits to your notes without opening them in the main editor view.
I used this plugin for a while. I wanted more flexibility from different functions in the app though, so I moved on to more customisable options. Even though I don’t use MAKE.md anymore, if you want an all-in-one plugin, then this is one of the best options to improve ease of use within Obsidian.
4. Editor Syntax Highlight
Another very popular plugin, this is a must-have for anyone that works with code blocks in their Obsidian vault. It’s a perfect fit for this list, because it doesn’t even provide a settings page. This means you can’t waste any time trying to configure the plugin. It just fades into the background and does its job.
This job in question is simply to highlight syntax in code blocks in the editor. This makes functions with code in Obsidian considerably easier because it’s now easier to read and distinguish between different elements. I have used the plugin in the past for programming plots in R for my university lab reports.
You might be thinking ‘I’m not a programmer, so this plugin doesn’t apply to me’. Hang fire, because Editor Syntax Highlight also contains some Obsidian-specific functions outside of writing code. It highlights your YAML metadata, for those of you who like to use Dataview and other metadata-related plugins. Limited highlighting for Dataview syntax when querying metadata from across all notes in your vault is included as well.
Overall worth installing because it takes no effort to maintain or setup.
5. Outliner
This one’s more general. There are many benefits to taking notes in outline format — you can nest bullets under more important ones, creating very well-structured notes and content plans. I use this plugin most for planning all the articles you’re reading here on Medium, as well as my other work.
This plugin adds functionality and quality-of-life improvements to bullet points and outlining in Obsidian. It lets the cursor stick to bullets and checkboxes and binds the Tab
and Enter
keys to indent and outdent actions for the bullets.
The developer also recently added a function that allows you to click to drag and reorder bullets, building on the organisational and structuring functions that the plugin already had. There’s also an accompanying plugin called Zoom, that allows you to zoom into different bullets as in outliner-based tools. This brings the functionality of Roam, Workflowy and Tana into Obsidian, so you don’t have to feel as though you are missing out on this feature.
Overall, Outliner is a great plugin that makes structuring and outlining content enjoyable and easy. It takes very little setup as well and is very stable, to the point where I’ve never had any problems using it.
6. Calendar
I used to log everything in daily notes in Obsidian and I know that there are many people who still do the same.
This plugin is a must-have for those people. It places a simple calendar widget in your sidebar that allows for quick navigation of your daily notes.
Despite not receiving an update in the last two years, this plugin still works in the most recent versions of Obsidian. The developer, Liam, works at Obsidian now, so my guess is it’ll remain highly compatible with the upcoming versions of Obsidian, too.
Like Editor Syntax Highlight, this plugin doesn’t have any modifiable settings. This is great for beginner users of Obsidian because there aren’t any points where you could get caught up and distracted from creating content in your daily notes.
Conclusion
I selected these plugins because of how easy and intuitive they make Obsidian to use. I continually preach digital minimalism when choosing what tools to use in your workflows, so don’t feel obliged to check out all the plugins that I provide here. Merely investigate the ones that have the potential to provide value in your system. Thanks for reading!