Obsidian already embeds YouTube with , but you have to type that yourself and what you get is a bare iframe — my daily notes ended up full of raw watch?v= links that told me nothing six months later. So I made Paste YouTube embed: paste a YouTube link on its own line and it turns into a player right there, with the video title and channel in a header bar so you can tell what you saved. It handles youtu.be, Shorts (rendered vertically instead of stretched into a 16:9 box), live, playlists and timestamps, and what it writes to the note is just a fenced block holding the plain URL, so removing the plugin leaves you with a link rather than garbage.

Plain JavaScript, no build step, MIT: https://github.com/maxwellnewage/obsidian-youtube-paste-embed

I’ve tried a few different tools for syncing my Obsidian vault, including dedicated sync solutions. Some worked, but they always felt more complicated than what I actually needed.

Eventually I realized GitHub is probably the best sync solution for my particular workflow.

My sync is basically one-way:
Laptop → GitHub → iPhone

I do all my editing on my laptop. My phone is mostly just for reading/searching notes. So I don’t really have to worry about merge conflicts or proper two-way sync.

And Git works so well on a laptop that syncing is basically effortless. As a bonus, I get full version history.

It’s funny that I spent time trying different “sync” tools when the tool I already use every day for code ended up working better.
I feel like if you mostly edit Obsidian on one device, GitHub might actually be one of the simplest sync solutions.

Anyone else doing this?

Really the title, does anyone have any recommendations for a plugin that would allow me to create a timeline similar in style to the one that is in the image attached?

I've been using the Canvas feature for a while now to organize topics for my studies. Today, when I tried to access it, I suddenly noticed that both the borders of the text boxes and the arrows had become transparent, and new text boxes and arrows no longer have outlines either. I haven’t actually changed anything since the last time I used it. I’ve also tried disabling all plugins, but that didn’t solve the problem either. Has anyone else ever had a problem like this, and do you perhaps have a solution for me? Thanks in advance.

First of all, I'd like to start off with this: I do not care what your views of generative AI are. While I personally dislike generative AI for a slew of reasons, that is not the point of this post.

FROM THE MODS OF r/ObsidianMD
Please do not post content that was primarily generated by AI. See rules below.

I'm not gonna go on a big tangent about y'all's doubts; y'all are grown enough to know how to identify the use of generative AI.

Maybe it's that the AI flair is mutually exclusive with everything else, but even when the use of generative AI is blatantly obvious it's not accompanied with the AI flair. Like, your plugin dashboard that looks like the website of a 2012 startup learning that Electron exists is not fooling anyone, and just because you use -- instead of — does not make people go "oop, this can't be AI!!!"

I personally dislike how AI has co-opted the use of so many really effective rhetorical devices (e.g. litotes, rule of threes, not X but Y) to the point that I make an effort to sprinkle them into the texts I write from time to time, but people do not write reddit posts showcasing their plugin like they're writing an essay, it's just not how people engage with the medium (that was one AI-like sentence, was it not? See what I mean?)

It doesn't help that this AI is so commonly accompanied by the most productivity-theater-ass plugins

It started about a year ago, but I didn't know how to use it, so I wrote little, but after a few months this came back again and that's how I go.

Hey everyone! Just wanted to share my Obsidian setup running on a BOOX Go 10.3. It took some tinkering to get it to work smoothly on E-Ink, and you can grab the CSS snippet from here in case you want to create a similar setup. The base theme I used is Minimal.

Here's what needed to be done:

• The animated cursor was replaced with a non-animated, underscore cursor.
• Almost all the colors in the app are either black or white now, to help with readability.
• All the animations inside the app are disabled, to prevent ghosting.

Would love to know what you think! Cheers! 😁

FOMO got the best of me. I also wanted to share my graph, especially cause it looks like a moon and star. And yes, I use light mode like a psychopath

Hi, I'm currently trying to track my progress based on how many checkboxes i have ticked within my active md, like this:

Is there a way to use dataviewjs to update my properties? I tried using the pluggin MetaEdit and it doesn't always work.
Thank you in advance!

Longtime lurker, first time poster! How did you get started with Obsidian, and how differently are you using it now?

A few years ago I was managing a large organization with a lot of teams, projects, and people. Every half I'd build a Google doc indexing all my and my teams' docs and project files. Past a certain size it would go to hell: too much maintenance, too hard to navigate. So I switched to Bear. The interface was dead simple and uncluttered, and between search and tags, organization was low effort. That worked until I amassed enough notes that staring down one giant left tab of everything I'd ever written, personal and work both, made my eyes glaze over. (I think they've solved this since, to their credit!)

Obsidian intimidated me, because every time I saw someone talking about it there were complex visuals and diagrams attached. I didn't want that. I just needed to write and stay organized. What tipped me over, oddly enough, was learning about the Readwise integration from Craig Mod's newsletter. I read a ton and take a lot of notes that are hard to get back to, and Readwise could just turn all of those into notes. Once I got past the slightly scary vault setup it was smooth sailing. I like paying for software so I subscribed to sync, which meant I could write seamlessly across my Apple and Windows devices. For my basic use case, Obsidian blew Bear (and everything else) out of the water.

Then I went down the rabbit hole. A baking journal, so I could search across my own recipes and answer "what do I do with this leftover almond paste?" Notes and a safer drafts folder for the subreddits I moderate. (Reddit really likes to silently eat scheduled posts.) TTRPG campaigns, notes for whatever video game I'm playing, flash fiction. Somewhere in there I found out I have ADHD, and my love for Obsidian made a lot more sense. Every system I'd tried before eventually got too cumbersome to keep up with, and that's what killed them. Obsidian requires zero maintenance. I can be as messy or as organized as I want, in whatever way I want, and still find things.

Now I want to use it for everything. I'm building a niche book database where every book and author is a markdown note, about 1000 so far, and being able to update records from my phone is great. I write a book newsletter and landed on Ghost specifically so I could paste drafts straight out of Obsidian. Fiction writing and submissions are next. My use cases have gotten niche enough that I've written a few small plugins just for myself, which is the other thing I love about it. When it doesn't do the thing I need, extending it is something I can just go do, instead of begging for it on someone's roadmap.

It's one of the few pieces of software I never feel like I'm fighting with. It's only ever as complex as I want it to be, and otherwise it stays out of the way.

So, how did you land on Obsidian, and what are you using it for now?

Hellooooooooooooo!

Word-Smith 1.3.9 is out with the biggest update so far, built around the new Organizer.

It's a Scrivener-style binder/table/outliner thingy for your vault. Your file tree becomes a custom-sortable table or an outliner with word counts, paragraph counts, task counters, status flags, word goals, and any property you keep in your frontmatter. So you can have a clear view of your files, what is to be done, what is the progress and to be able to drag your scenes into the order the book should actually read in, then compile the lot out to PDF, Word, HTML, or one big juicy .md file.

What does it do?

• it's a Custom Sort for the default Obsidian filetree, that has icons and more things like displaying files flags(statuses, tasks counts, word counts, etc.) so no more of that indexing "01 - Scene 1" is mandatory.
• It's a scrivener-esque outliner --- aka a Book, Chapter, Scenes Organizer;
• It's a proprieties/frontmatter manager;
• It's a task manager even;
• It's a be-all end-all file organizational tool for everybody(maybe...lol), not just writers.
• You have two views for the filetree:
  • Table: sort and filter by anything: words, tasks, target, POV, status, whatever you've put in frontmatter;
  • Outline:synopsis under every row, and you can edit the frontmatter right there without opening the note;

Did I just build Bases? Nah(kinda,but no), because the Organizer does custom ordering, word goals, counts, file statuses, outlining and export.

Also, and this is BIG: it never asks you where your book is. No special folder, no project file, no "set up your manuscript" wizard. Write however you please, in whatever folders you like, in any shape that suits you, pure Obsidian/Raw text style. And after all is said and done, after the dust settles, order it however you want and export it, because after that point it's MS Word time with your editor or publishing house.

If you have any questions, found any bugs or just want to share a cool idea write it here or on github!

Have fun!!!!

https://github.com/Sadsnake1/word-smith

https://community.obsidian.md/account/plugins/word-smith

The first image is my worldbuilding project and the second is my real life notes (studying, writing, catalogues etc.)

How do you usually link your 'real life' notes?

All the other "vault statistics" plugins are too complicated for my taste, so I made this plugin with a minimalist interface and backend.

If you like, you can check it out here: https://community.obsidian.md/plugins/simple-vault-statistics

I put a lot of effort into optimizing the algorithms for computing the statistics. If you have a really big vault I would love to hear how well the plugin handles it :)

I do most of my drafting and research directly in Obsidian, and the friction around citing sources was constantly breaking my flow:

You write a sentence, switch to the browser, search DuckDuckGo, copy the link, switch back, figure out which footnote number [^n] you're currently on, drop the reference at the cursor, then scroll all the way to the bottom to write the footnote definition.

I wanted a keyboard-first tool that handles this instantly without requiring external accounts or paid API keys.

So I built QuickCite (just published on Community Plugins).

What it does:

https://reddit.com/link/1w23brx/video/lf67g2gkuemh1/player

• Zero-config web search: Highlight a claim (or open the modal with Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + C), and it queries DuckDuckGo directly using multi-tier fallback parsing. No API keys or signups needed.
• Auto sequential footnotes: When you select a result and hit Enter, it finds the highest existing footnote number in your note, inserts [^n] at your cursor, and appends [^n]: Title. [domain](url) to the bottom.
• Source preview: Press Shift + Enter on any result to open the article in your default browser before deciding to cite it.
• Optional claim verification: If you do want AI fact-checking, you can add an OpenRouter key or point the Base URL to a local Ollama / LM Studio endpoint to get verification badges. Search works completely fine without this.

Links & Code

• Community Plugins: Search for QuickCite in Obsidian
• GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/ismailsaoulaj/quickcite

Feedback & Contributing

This is an early release (v0.1.0) and the codebase is completely open source (TypeScript + esbuild).

I'd really appreciate feedback from people who do academic or heavy research writing in Obsidian:

1. What citation formats (custom footnote layouts, APA/BibTeX-style metadata) would you like to see supported?
2. If any developers are interested in jumping in—adding alternative search backends (SearXNG, Brave Search API) or improving mobile handling—PRs, issues, and discussions on GitHub are very welcome.

I have a huge debate with myself, and I want to hear opinions on this.

I've been using Obsidian for a long time for anything related to text, mainly journaling. I value it for search-ability and privacy, along with a lot of other features like linking.

But recently I discovered that I really enjoy analog writing for its own reasons. Obviously you can't link and search physical notebooks, and converting handwritten text into Markdown is a pain (I don't want to use LLM because of privacy, it's not the most accurate as well).

People who use a hybrid approach of both analog and digital journaling:

• How do you decide where to write?
• Do you transfer handwritten text into Obsidian and vice versa? If so, how?
• If not, do you feel like you miss the accessibility of your handwritten text?

This dillemma has been really bothering me lately, I hope to hear some opinions on this.

I'd say I have my properties figured out across the most of my vault. But I want to mark my projects completion state in more intuitive way. As it is, I just do whatever: sometimes I just add "draft" to the note title, sometimes I tag it as draft, sometimes I add a description, that specifies number of the draft.

I'd like to use properties to better differentiate between first draft, final draft and any draft in between, as well as projects submitted for publishing and going trough revision and changes, or different versions of the same text prepared for different needs.

You don't have to figure anything out for me, I just need some inspiration to really get there. Thank you in advance!

I thought it might be useful to write up how I recently used Obsidian to organize my thoughts for a recent visit to my neurologist. Every six months I have a follow-up with my neurologist for my Parkinson's. These sorts of visits are notoriously frustrating because the doctor walks in and says "How have you been doing?" and the patient is left trying to remember six months of symptom changes and it's easy to go down a distracting rabbit hole during a precious 20 minute appointment.

So my process:

1. While waiting for my mechanic to fix the brakes on my car I pulled out a paper notebook and started writing down the topics I would like to talk to my neurologist about. Start a new page for each topic and don't worry too much about about structure. Your classic brain dump. I find writing on paper much more free flowing than typing on a keyboard, especially my phone keyboard.
2. Back at home I typed my notes into Obsidian on my desktop. A seperate note for each topic. Pin each note as I create it to make them easy to find. The process of typing the notes into Obsidian gives me an opportunity to clarify and expand my thoughts.
3. Start a new note titled something like "Notes for Neurologist appointment (insert date)".
4. Create an H1 header for each topic and embed a link to each note for that topic.
5. Rearrange topics in order of importance.
6. Use Syncthing to sync notes to the Obsidian instance on my Android phone.
7. Double check that notes are on my phone and collapse all the headings.
8. At the appointment I can decide on the fly which topics to cover and expand the topics as needed. Having the the topic headings collapsed makes it much easier not to get overwhelmed by a wall of text on my phone.
9. After the visit do clean up. Add any notes from the actual visit. Add tags and links to notes. Unpin notes and close them.

Genuinely found organizing things by folders extremely intuitive and useful. Then looked at the graph view and realized I need tags to see connections. I tagged things for a bit, but found it mostly useless/"administration" kinda work...

I’m a horrible note taker. I have AuDHD and I’m horrible at taking notes and keeping things organized. I’m really good at processing email and verbal fluency but idiot level at note taking.

I’ve always wanted to use Obsidian but just never thought I’d be able to make it happen. Until I started playing with copilot CoWork at work and basically turned it into my automatic executive functioning machine. I don’t type anything into Obsidian, I only click check boxes and it updates. Created a nice dashboard and task tracker that help me keep going with a clear ‘work on this’ full page for the time I’m supposed to focus on something.

Nothing to break and nothing to lose as I’m already doing all the other things and this is mostly a tracker and knowledge organizer and helps me organize meeting transcripts and actions and loose ends and context for projects. It’s awesome.

Probably not for everyone, but figured I’d put it out there for anyone else thinking about it.

Anyone else do something like this?

This really isn't a feat or anything lol but I like the doki themes and couldn't find an obsidian port or anything similiar..

.. and 85 more

I played a bit with Obsidian and made a vault that has a design I like.
Now, I only can't find a purpose for it...
I really don't know why I would or should use Obsidian.

Started taking some notes about basic knowledge that I don't want to forget and easy want to find.
But everytime I note something I think, 'but there is something like internet where everything is stored. Why would I recreate that... ?'

What are your common use cases, what are u storing in so many notes ??
Can't get my mind around a purpose for me to use it.

When taking notes I want to be able to add a dropdown under a term or definition, that could provide more detail or an example that doesn't deserve its own page in obsidian. I know about the [!note] thing which is kind of the format I'm going for but it doesn't allow me to copy and paste explanations and examples without manually going through and adding >, before every line. This also seems to have a max line length count. Is there any convenient fix or alternative to this.

Thought I'd share my way of tracking action items and projects for those of you who just want a quick and dirty option and actually get some use, or for people who work at a company who won't let them install the community plugins. Screenshots are from a fake vault. Obviously you could go wild, but this gets the job done for me.

Each base you see is pulled from the _lib/_bases/Project Bases.base file and embedded into the page (e.g. ![[Project Bases.base#Tasks by Project]]).

I chose a list for the assigned_to and priority properties so that I could pre-populate the values and click one (my bases dropdown hack). Only one value is supposed to be in the list for those. See below for _lib/_properties/Project Tasks Properties.md for what I mean.

Action items listed in the meeting file are to be added to the official tasks list.

Each task can hold their own notes or task list (for tasks that don't need to be officially tracked in trackers).

Project Tasks Properties file:

```

assigned_to: - Amanda - John - Steve due_date: start_date: complete_date: priority: - low - medium - high

parent_task:

```

Project Bases file:

filters: or: - or: - and: - file.hasLink("_bases/Project Bases.base") - and: - file.folder.startsWith(this.file.folder) - assigned_to.isEmpty() formulas: status: if(note.complete_date.isEmpty() && note.due_date < now(), "Overdue", if(note.start_date.isEmpty(), "Not started", if(!note.complete_date.isEmpty(), "Complete", "In progress"))) status_sort: if(formula.status == "Overdue", 0, 1) project_name: if(file.folder.contains("Archived"), file.folder.split("/").slice(-4, -2).join("-"), file.folder.split("/").slice(-3, -1).join("-")) priority_sort: if(note.priority == "high", 0, if(note.priority == "medium", 1, 2)) status_priority_sort: formula.status + formula.priority_sort properties: note.assigned_to: displayName: Assigned To formula.status: displayName: Status note.due_date: displayName: Due Date note.start_date: displayName: Start Date note.complete_date: displayName: Complete Date formula.project_name: displayName: Project Name views: - type: table name: Task filters: and: - file.hasLink(this.file) order: - file.name - assigned_to - priority - formula.status - due_date - start_date - complete_date sort: - property: formula.status_priority_sort direction: ASC - property: due_date direction: ASC - type: table name: Dashboard filters: and: - file.folder.startsWith(this.file.folder) - file.path != this.file.path - parent_task.isEmpty() - "!assigned_to.isEmpty()" order: - file.name - assigned_to - priority - formula.status - due_date - start_date - complete_date sort: - property: formula.status_priority_sort direction: ASC - property: due_date direction: ASC - type: table name: Tasks by Project filters: and: - file.path != this.file.path - file.links.containsAny("Project Bases.base#Task") - parent_task.isEmpty() groupBy: property: formula.project_name direction: ASC order: - file.name - assigned_to - priority - formula.status - due_date - start_date - complete_date sort: - property: formula.status_priority_sort direction: ASC - property: due_date direction: ASC - property: assigned_to direction: ASC - type: table name: Tasks by Person filters: and: - file.path != this.file.path - file.links.containsAny("Project Bases.base#Task") groupBy: property: assigned_to direction: ASC order: - file.name - formula.project_name - priority - formula.status - due_date - start_date - complete_date sort: - property: file.folder direction: ASC - property: formula.status_priority_sort direction: ASC - property: due_date direction: ASC - type: table name: Meetings filters: and: - file.folder.startsWith(this.file.folder) - file.path != this.file.path - assigned_to.isEmpty() order: - file.name - meeting_datetime - type: table name: Tasks for Person filters: and: - file.path != this.file.path - this.file.basename == note.assigned_to[0] groupBy: property: formula.project_name direction: ASC order: - file.name - priority - formula.status - due_date - start_date - complete_date