- It seems like every time someone asks me how to do something in Obsidian, my answer is there's a plugin for that. And that's because the plugin ecosystem for Obsidian has exploded. No other note-taking tool
has this many plugins. That's part of Obsidian appeal, but you can't or really
shouldn't install all of them. Some of them are very niche or specific to different use
cases than what you have, and also some others are very complex. So in this video, I'm gonna show you every single plugin that
I currently have installed in my main Obsidian vault. Let's get started right away. So it looks like I've
got 49 plugins installed. Installed, not enabled. And I'll go through
those when I get to them. The first is admonition. I'm going to be going through some of these very quickly, especially if I've already
created videos on them. Admonition is something that I tackled in the callouts video,
so go check that out. It is basically a way to enhance and extend the callouts
functionality of Obsidian. So you can kind of create
your own callout types, which is awesome. So I use that. This is also created by Jeremy Valentine, TTRPG plugin extraordinaire. There's also advanced slides. I have a video on this. I make all of my presentations on this. This is a way to essentially use Reveal.js as a base to create
presentations that use markdown. So you can actually do this with the core plugin slides in Obsidian, but advanced slides just lets you control
the background a bit more and set themes and templates,
and things like that. So I do still heavily use that. And if I had my way, I would
never do a presentation that isn't in advanced slides because this just like treats
presentations as notes, as code, as plain text files
the way that they should be. The next one is advanced tables. This is like undersold. I love markdown, but
doing tables and markdown is not the best experience. Maybe I can show you that. So this is a brand-new note. And the way that you would
normally create tables with markdown is you
use this pipe character, you have, like the column one name here, and then column two name, and then you would have
to go to the next line and then do this, and then
three, things like that, and then three more dashes and then a pipe character, and then it actually
makes it into a table. So then, for each one
you would have to do, this is column one value,
and then another pipe, and then Col two value. So that's how it usually works, and it makes it into a
table when you render it. There's an easier way, and that's with advanced tables. With advanced tables enabled, so you can do the same
thing, Name one, Name two, and then you just hit Enter, and it's nicely formatted it for you. And then you can type
something really along here, and then you Tab, and it went over to
the next column already so you didn't have to
do the pipe yourself. You also notice that it adjusted so that it is nicely formatted. So even if there's something
here when you hit Enter, you see how that pipe is kind of, because of the white space
next to what I typed, it's kind of not in line with the rest of the Name two pipes. When I hit Enter, then it's just like
formats it really nicely. Such a simple thing. But yeah, I use tables a lot in markdown and so I always have that enabled. Banners is a plugin that's
really just for TTRPG. I mean you can use it for other things. It basically does the Notion thing, where a Notion you can set like a cover for your notebook or whatever and it just has this nice image. So you can use it for anything, but I mainly use it for TTRPGs. Better Word Count is a funny one. Okay, this is not just for TTRPG, but I also do use it for TTRPGs. So this is a way to kind
of highlight some text and then it'll show you how
many words were in that text. I actually use this to
track how many words my character does for the sending spell, but I also use it for things
like when I respond to ACFP, a call for papers or a call
for speakers to presentations. They usually want an
abstract that is, you know, exactly 150 words or whatever it is and that's what I use it
for just to be able to see exactly how many words is in each one. I have the Buttons plugin as well. This is a little hit or miss. I've found that it is
stable in some things but it isn't stable in others. So for example, in my TTRPG one, I have a session button
here and it used to work, but for some reason it no longer does and I'm not entirely sure why. One thing that I found out was this thing inexplicably sometimes
just gets hard coded and so I actually haven't
been using it in this context and I've just been using
templates to add new sessions. However, in some contexts, like for this Kickstarter I've Backed, if I click on a new crowdfunding project, it works really well. New project here, yeah. So that button worked really well and I'm not entirely sure why. This behavior is kind of talked about. I can't remember where I read or heard the developer Shabegom talk about Buttons, but they did say that they're
working on something new. They are aware of some of the flakiness that surrounds Buttons, but the thing is like being
able to physically click a button and have something
happen is just so cool that I still put up with its quirks. ChatGPT MD. Okay, so I have this and text generator as the AI kind of plugins. I do use them sometimes, but I am also still afraid
of sending information out onto the internet and I find
myself being really paranoid. Whenever I use it, I open up like the developer
tools on the side here and I look at the network and see like what is it actually
sending to the internet. And honestly, I think most
people should do the same. I think that there are a
lot of AI apps in Obsidian that are sending more information to other people's servers
that you don't control than you might think or
that they might disclose. So I keep this disabled, I probably should just delete it here because I do all of my
kind of AI experimentation in test vaults now anyway. So there you go. I have 48 plugins, less than 50. I do have Checklist. I have this disabled right now because I don't really do task management in Obsidian anymore. I have done different iterations of this. I know the tasks plugin is super popular. I use checklist when I was
using it for task management. Sometimes I still like it,
but most of the time I don't so I just keep this disabled. The Copy button for code blocks. Okay, I can show this quickly. I don't think I've ever talked about this and it's occasionally
asked about in videos. So if I go to regular expressions. So this is a code block written in Python. So I'm gonna actually show
two plugins and one in this. One that I haven't mentioned
yet, but while we're here. The first is this copy all button. So if I click on this one, I can see that it's copied to clipboard and then what I can do is
I can put this in my IDE or wherever else I wanted
it and it's just, yeah, I could like go into it and
then highlight it, you know, and then copy it. But it's just easier sometimes
to just do it with a click. The second one is Editor Syntax Highlight. I also get questions about this because, and we're kind of
preempting it a little bit. So if I disable this, this is what the Python
actually looks like. Even if I'm setting Python as
a language in the code block, it's just kind of, you know, bland. But since you're setting
the language anyway, Editor Syntax Highlight
lets you highlight it according to that language a syntax, the way that you might expect from an IDE. So if we go into that again, now it's like all nice and colored. And by the way, this works
for frontmatter as well. Woo, sneak peek. This is an Obsidian feature
that I'm testing right now. But it also does this cool highlight where it just has the property in a different color than everything else. So I find that useful, especially since I have quite a few notes that have code blocks in them. It just helps to kind of distinguish between each thing and
helps me understand it. Then there's Dataview. I have talked about this so much. Still super useful. It's in my top 10 plugins. Wouldn't be without it. Dice Roller. I've also mentioned quite a bit. I use it to actually roll dice in TTRPGs. I also use it to do things
like randomly show me a note that has the TVZ or to be processed. Tag for me and it just is a great tool for sparking randomness. I use it to roll on random tables that I've put together
for like test heuristics or things like that. Lots of things you could
do with Dice Roller. I talked about Editor
Syntax Highlight already. Now Etherpad is something
that's an interesting concept but I think is not quite there. One of the issues of it is that it relies on this other project called Etherpad, which you have to host separately. So I host Etherpad on my own instance in Digital Ocean. Then I connect that instance
to this Etherpad plugin and I can send specific
Obsidian notes to Etherpad. It's supposed to be kind
of like Google Docs. In practicality, it's not
as good as Google Docs. It doesn't really do comments as well. And while it does do two-way sank, it's not as robust as I would like. If you're a Patreon, I already did a Patreon
exclusive video on this. So if you'd like to join my Patreon and see exclusive videos, then you can click on the link up there. I've also talked about
ExcaliBrain a lot and Excalidraw. These two are kind of related because ExcaliBrain uses
Excalidraw, and requires it. Excalidraw is a separate app actually, but the Obsidian Excalidraw plugin in particular brings that functionality of that app into Obsidian. It is basically Canvas but on steroids. It can do way more than Canvas can. You can put images. You can draw freehand. It does some OCR. You can do Mind Maps. You can, you know, link to
certain parts of an image the way you would a section of a note. So many things you can do with it. Check out the video that
I've created on that and the video on ExcaliBrain, which builds upon Excalidraw and instead turns it into
a supercharged graph view. So both of those I use quite heavily. Fantasy Calendar is also
something that I really love. Fun fact is that I started
using it for TTRPGs. But I actually use it more
for my content calendar now. So I even have a shortcut for it. This is like how I track
everything that I'm doing in my personal life and also at work. It's color coded. There are some issues
with like text wrapping. Jeremy, maybe you could fix that. But I still haven't found
anything that is as good and as simple to use. Ooh, Fantasy Statblocks is a good one. This is another TTRPG-only plugin and I use it for monsters
and also for NPCs sometimes. I've shown that in a few TTRPG videos, so I won't show that here. Hider is a very simple one. It's by kepano, who is Stephan
Ango, the CEO of Obsidian. He created the minimal theme, and a lot of his work
is based on this idea of like less is more. And so I actually really like Hider and it does a very simple thing. It gets rid of certain
elements on the screen. So I used it to get rid of
this toolbar that was here, that was so ugly that was constantly filling
up with different plugins. I don't like to use it. And as a result, I think
my Obsidian workspace just looks so much cleaner
and less distracting. Initiative Tracker I still
use heavily for TTRPGs. I've also talked about that. Kanban is something that I still use. I have tried to use projects. I'm trying to migrate
everything into projects. However, project still doesn't
have like a full Kanban view where you can drag and drop the cards. And so I'm in this weird
position where I am doing both. I am using the frontmatter
for both right now. So I'm using the frontmatter for projects and I am also using a Kanban card board, so I always have this enabled as well. List Callouts, so simple but also so good. It's by MG Myers. And it is just so that if
I open a new note here, it is kind of like an
abbreviated version of a callout. So typically you would
insert a callout like this and this is what it would look like. You can also do List Callout. So if it's within a list, you can't really add a callout in it because there's like
a dash in front of it. And so instead, what you can
do with this plugin enabled is do things like, This is a great idea. So I have an Obsidian
List Callout plugin page and here are the things that you can do. So all of it is based
on just using something after the bullet point so that you can kind of
style it in a little bit of a different way. This doesn't show up in publish
though, so there's that. But within Obsidian, it's pretty cool. Okay, we've got to move
a little bit faster here because there's a lot more to go. Okay, Meld Encrypt. This is something that I use
really for very private notes like therapy sessions
and coaching sessions. And it's a way to basically
password protect your vault and there is no way out. Like there's no forgot your password. If you forget it, then
you've forgotten it. So it's a good way to encrypt things. Minimal Theme Settings
is a plugin that is based around the minimal theme itself and I turn it on when
I go back to minimal, but I'm on AnuPpuccin right now. Note Refactor is a really good one where I think I've shown it before and it lets you kind of
have a very long note and then just highlight something and say, okay, create a new note and the first heading on my highlight should be the file name of that note. Just a little bit of a
quality of life improvement when you're refactoring your
notes, which I do a lot. Novel word count. This is like, I like this plugin, but it is just very difficult
to deal with sometimes. It makes my vault quite slow. So I only enable it in certain situations when I really need to know
the word or page count within my vault. It is pretty cool when it works. I just wish it were a
little bit more performant for a larger vaults. Oh, this is a plugin that I was working on as a way to learn about plugins. I don't have anything to
demonstrate right now, so I kind of forgot about this plugin and I don't really have
something good to show you. Okay, maybe I can show
you kind of like an idea of how it works. This is a plugin that I
made in an effort to learn about how to make plugins. But like many, many things that I do, I never kind of really finished it and I'd like to go back
to it at some point. But at its base, it's
a TTRPG-related plugin, specifically for D&D Beyond. I still have one group
that uses D&D Beyond. And I'm a healer and I like
for the HP of different people to be updated within
my initiative tracker. I know, it's super niche, but it was like something
cool that I was doing. So for example, my character Scura, which is what it's set to do
right now, has an HP of 51. I know because she just had a long rest. So what I could do,
what I would normally do is go in here and then
heal her up to full. However, I was looking for a
way to do that for different, for multiple people at once and also to not have to manually do it. So instead, there is a
command that I can do, which right now is that. And it says Updated Scura HP 51 out of 51, and you'll see that this
one was updated too. So my idea was that it could
update the entire party's HP and maybe other things as well. Like it can actually
also change, you know, the AC or or whatever based
on what is on D&D Beyond. So it's more like a
learning project for me. But there you go. That's a plugin that I have. Here's Obsidian Leaflet. It was supposed to be for maps, but I really only use
it for like TTRPG maps. So I think I've shown it before, but here's what it looks like. It is an interactive map. So I provided the image, but then I can also like
hover over any of these and then link them to
a certain other note. So for example, if I click on that, it goes to the Bromkiln Hills. And I can even have my own custom image. So this is an NPC in our game
and I'm tracking her movements or her parties movements just
so that I know where she is. I've got TFTHacker's BRAT plugin. Oh, this is undersold really. It's not really useful unless
you like to beta test plugins, but this essentially makes it really easy to try out, you know,
alpha versions of plugins even before they're actually
officially released. I do this a lot and so I have
a whole bunch of plugins here that I have set up to work with it. There's also this Strange
New Worlds plugin. This is interesting also by TFTHacker. I like it, but I found
that for some of my notes there was definitely a performance hit. So I don't always enable it, but let's go ahead and enable that just to show you what it looks like. So every link here is parsed and there's a number
that's shown next to it. That number is basically
the number of backlinks, so number of other notes
that link to this note. So there are 69 other notes
where I've mentioned Wally, and this one pops up like
a little hover window where I can go over where
exactly those notes were. So it can be pretty handy sometimes. And you know what? I haven't tried this in a while. I know I tried an earlier version and it did have performance updates, but this page is pretty link heavy and I'm not seeing the
slowness that I saw before. So maybe I'll actually
just leave it enabled. TFTHacker does some really cool stuff. So back here, Omnisearch. Look, I tried it. It's supposed to be a better
search engine for your notes. I found it slow and confusing and the UI was very cluttered. I mean, I'm not entirely
sure I've installed it but not enabled it right now. Omnivore is another one that
I really want to get into. It's basically a Readwise alternative. I love that it is open source and I would really want to switch to it, except that at this point, Readwise just has so many integrations. I believe Omnivore only has
a limited amount of things that it can process highlights for. Like it can't do podcasts or
tweets or anything like that. So this is something that
I'm keeping an eye on, but I'm not using actively. Outliner is something that
I installed right away because I came from RoamResearch and I was really missing
the ability to work outlines the way that you can with RoamResearch. So I always enable that
and it does things like you can, in a list, you
can kind of move something up and down. So like 91 is there now and
I've moved it before 90, so I'm just doing that
with keyboard shortcuts. It also does this thing where it has like an indentation line so that you know when you
have a lot of things like this and you're not sure
which ones are lined up, those indentation lines, which Roam had by default,
shows you where you are. And then you can also
independently fold them so that you can fold this entire thing if you just want the parent one or you can just fold at this level. So it does a lot of cool things like that that I enjoy with bullet points. All right, Periodic Notes. I have I think two full
videos talking about how I use Periodic Notes. Periodic Notes is a plugin
that lets you create notes according to different
formats for regular reviews. So daily, weekly, monthly,
and even quarterly. It can even let you have
multiple sets of those. So you can have like one
for personal, one for work. This next one is Postgres,
SQL for Obsidian. If you use Postgres, this idea might also be appealing to you. This is a way to parse your metadata and put it in a Postgres database. And once it's in the database, you could use something like
Grafana to visualize it. So I really love this idea. I've played around with it a little bit, but I think still a few
things that I need for it to really be useful. So I would like to get back to this, which is why it's still installed but it's not enabled for now. I've done a live stream with Marcus Olsson who is a friend of mine and ex colleague, and he was the one that created projects. Projects is a framework and a kind of like a platform
for, he says project planning, but it can really be
visualization of anything. So the idea is that you
have the one database and you have multiple
views of the same data. Excellent idea and one that is definitely worth watching out for.
There's Query Control as well. I like to have like the backlinks here and Query Control adds these extra icons so that I can, you know, copy results or search through them
or or sort the order. It's very reminiscent of what's available in the search panel and it
just puts them right there with an easy reach if I wanna use them. QuickAdd is something
I've done a video about. Excellent, excellent plugin. Love it so much. It's in my top 10 plugins
of Obsidian of all time. Highly, highly recommended. I use it so much. So just to give you an idea, I said I wouldn't talk about it, but like just look at how many macros and how many other things
I've set up for it. Like that's how much I use it and it is one of those
things that saves me time. Reading Time just says how long
something will take to read. So like right now the untitled
note that we created together says it's a four-minute read. I'm not entirely sure how useful that is. I think at this point I was
drafting blog posts in Obsidian, whereas now I just create
notes most of the time and then do the blog post as kind of a hodgepodge of
different Obsidian notes. Anyway, I don't use it as much as I have, but actually I think
it's good to be cognizant of how much reading time a note takes and maybe that's even more useful than like number of characters or words, or something like that. Readwise Official, I've done many videos about love Readwise. been an avid user of Readwise
for a very long time. Paid a lot of money out of my own pocket even before I had a YouTube channel. I'm an extreme fan of Readwise and I had a hand in prompting the team, if I might say so myself
to create this plugin because before this I
created a Python script to do the same thing, to bring my Readwise
highlights into Obsidian. Of course this is a way
better implemented version than my hacky script, so I use it all the time and it runs every half hour, I believe. Settings Search such a simple thing. But it just adds this search field here so that if you know of a
setting that you want to use but you don't know which plugin it's in or where it is in the options and it will search
everything to core plugins and community plugins, it is super useful. So I always enable that. Just a small thing but useful. Show Current File Path is another one. I don't know why it
doesn't do this by default. So like right now you can
see at the bottom here it says ttrpgs, Temporary
White Circle, and World. So it shows the folder path that it's in. It kind of has like breadcrumbs
of the different folders that that particular file is in. And that's usually how I spot when a note is in the wrong folder. Like because of my templates, I had it created in a certain folder that I didn't want it in
so then I know to move it. Spaced Repetition, I've
briefly talked about. This is a flashcard plugin. Honestly, my language learning
has been on the fritz lately because I've been traveling quite a bit. But I do wanna get back to
it so it's gonna be enabled so that I can use it at any time. But it's cool because it brings
a lot of Anki functionality, if you know that app, into Obsidian. And all you need to do is let
it parse your markdown notes and then assign a tag to that note so it knows what language it is. And then it creates flashcards
based on space repetition. So it's not just a binary yes or no, like did you know it or didn't you? But like if you knew it really well, it'll show it to you maybe in a month. But if you got the right answer but maybe weren't so sure about it, then maybe it'll show it to you in a week. So it it is a little bit smarter. Style Settings is something
just for appearances. A lot of Obsidian themes
use Style Settings as a way to add like optional features that you can toggle on or off or maybe you can adjust like some colors or something like that. You can of course go
into the CSS yourself. I don't know about you, but I don't like going into the CSS. And I am not a frontend developer, so I am pretty lost when I look at CSS. And Style Settings just makes it easy. So I always have that. Ooh, Supercharged Links. I was not a fan of this at first. I think Leah Ferguson told me about it when I had her on my channel
when I was interviewing her, but now I don't know why I didn't like it. So what it does is very simple. It adds an icon to a note
based on certain conditions. So if we go to Supercharged Links here, so you can set conditions. So if there's a note that
has in the frontmatter type colon PC, then you
should put this icon, this rainbow icon next to it,
and so on and it goes down. You can also, instead of
using the frontmatter, you can use the path instead. And it just means that
it is very easy to tell when you have a lot of text. Whether something you're linking to, okay, this is a TTRPG
thing I just realized. Okay, so I do have like
blogs and presentations. See, not just TTRPG but also TTRPGs. So like, all of these have dice. These six is in front of them because they're all session notes. These have people because
these are factions. So here they're kind of
separated out already. But you know, for
example, if I wrote Palor, if I didn't have Supercharged Links, you might not know whether that's an NPC or a faction or a place. But because there's a
lightning symbol in front of it and that doesn't actually
change this link by the way, it just changes how it's displayed. I can tell at a glance that
this is a deity in this world. So love Supercharged Links. I don't know why it took
me so long to understand how awesome it was. Okay, we're in the home stretch. I've talked a lot about
Templater, so I will skip that. Still love it. Still use it heavily. And I also use it a lot
for running JavaScript and that is just a little
bit of an extra way that I automate some things in my vault. Text Extractor, I think I had
to have this for Omnisearch, but I don't really need OCR, I guess. So I think I'm going to delete this one. So we're down to 47 plugins. This is great. I should make more videos like this. So I end up with fewer plugins. Text Generator, I mentioned
earlier, is an AI based one. This and ChatGPT MD, I think, are the best
contenders right now. However, I'm still kind of wary about doing this in my main vault, so I've disabled it for now. I have Translate. You know what? I typically have found
myself not needing this. This is a way to translate. I prefer to use DeepL. I really loved it because it doesn't just
use Google Translate. It uses DeepL, which I've found has better language algorithms
than Google Translate. But the reality is when I'm typing a note, I usually know what it means already so I don't need to translate it. So I'm actually going to delete this. Great plugin if you need that. So what are we down to 46? That's awesome. Okay, the last one is Vault Changelog. Vault Changelog was created by this person, Badr Bouslikhin. Vault Changelogs is a plugin that I use quite a bit actually. And what it does is it
creates this changelogs page. And in my case, I have it set up. Ooh, the Untitled one is there. I have it set up to put
down the last 500 notes that I've worked on and
the date and the time. So that is it. So now I've got 46 plugins, awesome. That was a long list of plugins, but I do constantly get this
question from many people who just want to know
like all of the plugins that I'm using now, I do wanna say though, this isn't like the best plugins that are out there for Obsidian. Some plugins I really see the value of, but maybe not for me or
maybe not for my vault. I don't think that if you are a developer and I don't have your plugin,
I've probably tried it. I rotate plugins and all the time and some of the plugins that I showed were not necessarily ones that
were like tried and tested. They were just being tested. So this is a current snapshot
of the plugins that I have and let me know in the comments if there were some
plugins that maybe you use that you think I should, because I'm always interested
in seeing other plugins. If you'd like to see more
about what my top 10 Obsidian community plugins list would look like, then check out this video
where I go over just that. (speaking in foreign language) and Happy Pride Month. Thanks for watching.
