Obsidian is customisable.
I’ve touched on this being one of the main reasons that I decided to make the app the core of my PKM system.
Because of its customizability, there is a lot of scope for optimising Obsidian for quick and efficient work, from templating to text snippets to document export.
When something is the centre of your system, you don’t want to waste time repeating the same functions and clicking around — you ideally use the keyboard and automation to execute everything and navigate everywhere rapidly.
I’ve written this article to cover the best ways (most of them are plugins) to optimise Obsidian, saving time in different ways when you’re using the app.
Let’s get started…
Core features:
These features come built in to Obsidian, so they are the first ones you should look to optimise when you use the app:
- Keyboard shortcuts (Hotkeys) — a very basic way to improve your efficiency in the app, but one of the most effective. Make sure you bind keyboard shortcuts to as many commands as possible, especially the ones that you use regularly. You’ll save seconds with every shortcut used, meaning you can claim back significant time with the months spent using the software every day.
- Command Palette— this is where you access the commands that you haven’t bound to a keyboard shortcut. There’s a setting for you to pin your most-used commands to the top of the palette, but there shouldn’t be much need to do this if you’ve used keyboard shortcuts. Regardless, the feature exists and it can save you time, so I listed it here.
I add keyboard shortcuts for as many commands as I can, because I use a lot of features buried within plugins that would otherwise be hard to reach. I have the command palette available (accessed with a keyboard shortcut, of course) to access the commands that don’t have a shortcut bound to them.
These are only basic functions in Obsidian. You can increase your productivity efficiency massively if you implement a certain three plugins that I’m going to share now…
Power user plugins — the big three
These plugins are some of the most popular in Obsidian, and if I were to guess, I’d say they form part of the workflows of almost all the app’s power users. They add so many features built to save time and extend the power of the software:
Dataview — one of THE most popular plugins in the history of Obsidian. It’s for rendering views of your notes in tables or lists, defined by some parameters that you write in a code block. I use this for maps of content in my folder notes for projects and other resource folders in my vault. It gives a great overview of content with certain properties.
Templater — a plugin that brings a wealth of power to templating features in Obsidian. You can bind a shortcut to opening a template insertion modal, where you pick from all of your templates to insert into the current document. There are all kinds of internal functions that you can use, which allow you to add variables to your templates, such as date created, as well as retrieving all kinds of values from the file to use in the template.
One of my favourite uses of Templater is to use the internal function <% tp.file.cursor() %>
. This allows you to specify where in the file your cursor jumps to when you create a file from the template. You bind a shortcut to the ‘Jump to next cursor location’ command and you can jump to the relevant point in your file without having to use the mouse to move and click.
It’s little customisations like this, which would be impossible in most other apps, that make Obsidian a great offering for power users that like to blast through a lot of work in a short period.
QuickAdd — I’ve talked so much about this plugin in a lot of my articles, but it really is a great option for power users. You can insert templates, snippets and build custom macros to combine all commands from across the entire app to perform complex actions.
The recent addition of AI Assistant also brings the power of large-language models to your second brain. You can use AI to summarise your notes, write outlines from your ideas and rephrase clunky sentences in your writing. There’s no doubt as to the potential of features like this in Obsidian, making QuickAdd a must-have for every power user.
I use the plugin to insert lecture notes when I’m working on university projects. I also use the AI Assistant to take these lecture notes and convert them into summaries of the main points, and then further into flashcards, so that I can export them to Anki and study them. As of when I’m writing this, I’ve just completed all of my first year university exams by revising for them primarily using AI-generated flashcards.
These are the three main plugins that every Obsidian power user should make use of in their vault. But there are plenty of others that provide useful features that increase your efficiency in many areas when using Obsidian. The rest of the article is going to focus on these lesser known articles…
Power user plugins — lesser-known options
- Tray — a simple plugin, this adds the functionality of minimising your Obsidian to the Windows tray when the app is closed. It also allows you to bring it up again with a global keyboard shortcut. This plugin is useful to have Obsidian easy to access at a moment’s notice. There’s no need to wait for it to load again.
- LaTeX Suite — a plugin I talked about when making Obsidian easier to use. It adds a configured set of snippets that make typing LaTeX syntax in your notes much faster. This is an excellent plugin for if you are writing technical notes, containing equations and formulae as LaTeX is not normally intuitive to type.
- Pandoc Plugin and Shell commands — two plugins that provide a similar function in my vault. This is exporting to different formats directly from Obsidian. Both are useful if you are writing docs that require output to a PDF whilst containing citations that need to be compiled into a bibliography. I use the Pandoc Plugin for rendering essays from .md to .pdf, and the Shell commands plugin for rendering essays from .qmd to .pdf — these contain code that needs to be run to generate plots in the final essay.
- MetaEdit — a plugin from the same developer behind QuickAdd, this plugin allows you to easily and quickly edit the metadata of your Obsidian notes, from anywhere within the note. You define different values that a property can take, and are offered to select one of these properties when you are adding metadata values. It also has support for progressing metadata properties in your notes, useful if you need to modify a property that changes with the status of the note.
- Linter — a popular plugin that allows you to format your notes neatly without having to pay much attention to this when you’re actually creating them. The plugin has an enormous selection of settings to modify that allow you to make sure that it formats your notes in the way you need. You can define settings for formatting metadata, paragraphs, headings, footnotes and more, as well as the plugin offering some spelling correction functions too.
These are some of the best smaller plugins that have the potential to speed up your workflow if you are a power user in Obsidian.
I’d like to point out that it’s difficult to learn these plugins and implement them effectively. I will say time and time again that you should focus on building a minimal setup that specifically allows you to create content. You should only integrate a tool into your system if it’s going to bring overwhelming benefit to your output. Otherwise, it doesn’t provide enough value for the effort it takes to learn and maintain the use of the tool.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article, and that you learned something that’s going to take your use of Obsidian to the next level in terms of efficiency.
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