I’ve been tweaking my note-taking systems too much recently, and haven’t been focused on creating content, so I decided to cut most things back to focus on the writing rather than the system.
This probably should have happened earlier to stop the overload of my system with all sorts of pointless features that were stealing my attention.
It doesn’t take that much to be able to take useful notes and plan good content from within the application.
I still use a good selection of plugins for my educational needs, but this list is going to be kept to what I use for writing and building online, which is my focus at the moment, seeing as university’s not happening during the summer.
With each plugin, I’m going to cover its purpose, and why I’ve kept it activated in my vault.
Let’s get started…
Dataview and Folder notes
In my vault, these two come hand-in-hand.
Despite the linking capabilities of Obsidian, I still use a folder structure to store all of the content that comes into my system. It’s loosely based on P.A.R.A. by Tiago Forte, meaning my folders look after my project notes as well as all the resources that I have in Obsidian.
For each project folder and a few of my resources folders, I’ve created a folder note to serve as an index. This allows me to see everything related to the project or the resources contained in that folder without having to expand the file tree in the sidebar.
Dataview’s role in the folder note is to render the view of the notes in the folder from within the folder note.
I have a template for a basic view of the notes inside the project folder, which I add using one of the plugins I’m going to cover later. It looks like this:
---
category: MoCs
---
```dataview
LIST
WHERE contains(file.folder, this.file.folder)
```
This places the index note into the category MoCs (Maps of Content) and creates a Dataview list of all the notes located in the folder.
Listing all the notes contained in some of my larger resource folders isn’t particularly helpful though, because I end up with such a long list of content. To solve this, I add things to this data view code, whether it’s specifying the category of note that I want to be shown or a certain tag that’s contained in a note.
An example is in my ‘Content’ resource folder, where I keep all the outlines for the content I write on the internet:
Using Dataview with some kind of folder notes plugin has been my go-to method for project management and indexing in Obsidian for some time now, so feel free to try out these plugins to see if they work for you. The project page also serves as a great way to add related tasks if you’re someone who manages tasks in the app too.
Outliner
I never used this Obsidian plugin before I started writing online, but since needing to draft article outlines and plans, it’s been extremely useful.
All it does is simply add more to the outlining functionality in Obsidian, including better formatting and vertical lines drawn between bullets at the same level.
There are also bullet-moving features, for increased organisation ease in your outlines, as well as a feature that sticks your cursor to your outline bullets to make editing easier…
When writing an article, having a guide like this in front of me helps me stay on track and prompts me to keep writing when my mind goes blank.
I’ve found that the quality of your outlining directly impacts the quality of your articles. Because of this, it’s something that I take seriously within the creative process, and this plugin makes the experience much better.
QuickAdd
I’d put this up with Dataview and Tasks as one of the most powerful plugins in all of Obsidian. QuickAdd allows you to query AI using scripts that you write in your vault, along with capturing text for input into templates using popup fields that can be configured any way you like.
On top of all of this, you can create macros that combine these functions with any other command from the whole of Obsidian.
If you’re a power user who likes to build workflows for improving your productivity in the app, then you probably already know about and use this plugin, but if you don’t, check it out and it’ll change your work for the better instantly.
In my vault, QuickAdd doesn’t serve many purposes in my creative workflow bar creating notes with specific templates in specific folders. It has more of a function in my academic workflows, where I use the AI features to generate flashcards and answer questions about content.
Despite this, the plugin’s important enough to survive the purging of unnecessary plugins in my workflow, so it wins a mention here.
Templater
This is the best option for making and using customised templates in Obsidian.
The plugin works using features called internal functions, which are a lot like variables that the plugin inserts when it’s called to. These can be things like dates, times, titles, content and tags.
One internal function that I use a lot is tp.file.cursor()
. This defines a specific cursor location to the template, meaning that with a hotkey, I can jump to each cursor location in order.
This is one of the small features brought to me by Obsidian plugins that compound over months and months of use to streamline my workflow and save me a ton of time.
If you want to be able to create complex note types and layouts with minimal effort beyond making a master copy of the note, check out Templater.
These are the top creative plugins. The ones that survived cleansing from my Obsidian vault. As I said in the introduction, you don’t need many features to create impactful content, only the capability to plan and write things down to create some kind of framework to write from.
I hope you’ve learned something new from this article, and as always, thanks for reading!