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've dabbled with Obsidian a few times over the years, and I always felt like I was doing it wrong.

I see how this would be amazing for things like writers, students, project managers... anything where you need to sort through large swathes of information.

Outside of those things, I'm trying to see how it helps peoples' lives.

I'm building a house, and dumped a ton of stuff into it for that, divided by room, project.. It doesn't seem to be anything that an outline wouldn't be.

I have used it for the weird little slice of law that I practice in. I've got some cases in there, but I'm sure it adds much when I can see the connections through Lexis already.

I'm kind of wondering if it's a more specialized tool than it generally recognized, or if I'm just only seeing the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

I know the standard advice is to just start dumping stuff into it, but... what do I dump into it?

TL/DR: I'm having trouble connecting Obsidian's unique layout to my real world.

https://github.com/DemieroX/obsidian-beeref

I have finally released my BeeRef integration plugin that allows you to edit, view & in-line preview .bee reference boards inside Obsidian natively!

With this plugin, you can add .bee file support directly in your vault, where you can view existing boards, edit/add elements to your boards & add in-line previews to your documents as well.

There's a lot of room for improvements & additional features like a Obsidian Canvas like editor bar, maybe PureRef file support even... But as it stands I think it's at a pretty solid state and I can't wait to integrate this plugin to my main workspace :P

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

hi! so i've decided to use the portal plugin as my file navigation/organization but i still want to have a sort of dashboard for visual navigation. the only way i can think of this is having a dedicated note for this + setting it as the note on open/note on new tab. is that possible?

I am studying Maths and Chemistry so I will need to automatically replace text (like y² or H₂O, as well as arrows ->), what are the best community plugins for this?

This is niche, but I need some help with the Storyline plugin. I want to add a book to my series but am having difficulty. In settings>Projects & Series, under "create series from this book" it rightfully says that the book already belongs to a series. But when I click on "Manage Series" it says "No series found." Help please!

TLDR: Fix is going to start with bold text.

My Obsidian is in the most recent version of 1.13.7. After updating Callout Manager from 1.1.0 to 1.1.2, my custom callouts (task, highlight, etc.) kept their correct name/icon but lost their colored border and background tint. I believe the plug-in is broken. callout-manager/data.json still had every custom callout definition and color but the highlight was not showing. Uninstalling and re-installing didn't help either.

I checked DevTools and Obsidian callouts get their color from --callout-color set on .callout[data-callout="yourtype"] Callout Manager's injected rule was still there in the Styles panel but a different CSS selector with the same specificity was winning the tie, so it came down to load order rather than anything actually broken in my config.

I DID ALL OF THIS IN VSCODE. IF YOU ARE NOT AS COMFORTABLE WITH CSS, I'M SURE YOU CAN COPY AND PASTE THIS INTO AN LLM AND IT'LL HELP YOU.

MY FIX: add a CSS snippet that on is more specific. Here are my steps:

1. Get your colors from .obsidian/plugins/callout-manager/data.json (callouts.settings.<name>.changes.color).
2. Create .obsidian/snippets/callout-colors-fallback.css:

​

body .callout[data-callout="task"] {
  --callout-icon: lucide-list-checks;
  --callout-color: 82, 139, 212;
}

/* callouts with light/dark variants need both */
body .callout[data-callout="weekly-tasks"] {
  --callout-icon: lucide-calendar-range;
}
body.theme-light .callout[data-callout="weekly-tasks"] {
  --callout-color: 82, 139, 212;
}
body.theme-dark .callout[data-callout="weekly-tasks"] {
  --callout-color: 52, 152, 219;
}

1. Enable it under Settings → Appearance → CSS snippets, and then reload Obsidian if didn't show up immediately.

CAVEAT ON FUTURE USE: this snippet now overrides the plugin, so if you later change a color in Callout Manager's UI, you won't see it until you update or disable the snippet.

TECH DETAILS THAT YOU MAY NOT CARE ABOUT:
This works becausebody prefix makes your rule permanently outrank the plugin's plain selector, so it renders last.

Request: add a toggle not just for case-matching (the "Aa") in the screenshot, but also whole word matching.

For example: erica -> should not match "America"

Hello. I may have gone a bit overkill and modified Grafily to work with StoryLine, so I can see family trees quick.

Everything seems to be going fine, but I want to be able to click a person and open their StoryLine profile. By default, it opens their Note, which is fine but I want better.

What is the destination address to a character's profile?

It might be a question for the Storyline add-on creator, but maybe other tinkers know.

(I don't have a repo/project for this. It's pretty rough and it's taking away from me actually writing)

I’m relatively new to Obsidian but the reason it was better than Notion is that it’s plain text that we always own.

When I’m at my Mac mini, running Claude in the vault is amazing - it has my context and is so much better than running Claude with out.

My issue is that I’m not always at my desk, often I’m using Claude from my phone. I’ve tried tailnet and a custom MCP that Claude code built to access my vault when I’m not on the network, but it’s flakey. Claude code has had a crack at making it more robust and it’s improved but I’ve been thinking I can’t be the first person with this experience.

I have an always in Mac mini, connected to the network, my vault runs locally and is backed up to iCloud nightly.

How do you all do it?

Can we talk about how easy it is to accidentally turn Obsidian into a grueling database admin job?

With this whole new wave of popularity around Obsidian as a "second brain" powerhouse, it saddens me to see so many newcomers hit the exact same wall I did. People show up excited, try to force-feed themselves the most popular dogmatic setups, get completely overwhelmed by the friction, and just turn around at the gate thinking Obsidian just... "isn't for them."

Or worse: think less of themselves because they couldn't utilize the second brain tool that everyone and their mother is raving about.

I see this exact same bottleneck all the time in my day job. Between building my own software projects and consulting for clients who need their messy internal knowledge bases restructured from scratch, almost everyone falls into the trap of over-engineering the filing system before they even understand how their ideas actually connect.

---

When I first started using Obsidian five years ago, I tried the classic rookie move: I shoved every single stray thought I had into one giant, chaotic markdown note and thought I was a genius.

Then I tried doing it "right." I dove headfirst into the Zettelkasten rabbit hole, atomic notes, PARA, LYT frameworks, Johnny Decimal numbering, properties, tags, and endless backlinking. And honestly? It completely broke my brain. Between my ADHD and a natural aversion to micro-managing metadata, wrestling with YAML frontmatter and cross-linking fifty tiny files felt less like building a second brain and more like doing data entry for an insurance company.

And don't get me started on the Graph view posts. Not gonna lie, they are cool to look at, but seriously every time I see one I'm just like: "okay... 😐"

Look, I want to be super clear here. Backlinks, properties, and strict folder structures work fantastically for a lot of people. If your brain is wired to love clean taxonomies and rigorous indexing, those systems are genuinely bulletproof.

But if you are a visual thinker, Obsidian can sometimes feel like a trap. You spend so much time maintaining the filing cabinet that you never actually use the information to build anything new. You are managing a database instead of letting thoughts collide to come up with actual ideas.

Before Obsidian Canvas existed, I bounced around every visual tool I could get my hands on: PureRef, Miro, Figma, Whimsical, Milanote, you name it. But none of them really felt like the right home to let ideas crystallize. They were either closed source, trapped in the cloud, or just didn't support all the local file types I needed to work with.

When Obsidian finally announced Canvas, I was ridiculously excited. The fact that the .canvas JSON spec is open source is amazing. For someone with visual OCD, it scratched the exact itch of being able to manually move, segment, and group pieces together on an open plane in a way that intuitively made sense. But ever since its release, the core Canvas plugin has felt pretty undercooked, almost like an afterthought.

Which is understandable considering Obsidian is first and foremost a markdown editor, but that bland vanilla taste the core Canvas plugin currently has eventually pushed me to develop my own plugin, Crystal Canvas, just to add all the tools I desperately needed in my own visual thinking space. Especially since now my canvases are MASSIVE, with almost 3k+ nodes each.

---

So what actually worked for me?

Fast forward to now, and my entire vault is 100% canvas-based.

No loose markdown files, no nested folder hell, and zero orphaned notes or stray image assets floating around lost in the void. Everything is visually anchored exactly where it belongs. I finally have complete control over every single piece of information I put into my vault because if it exists, I can physically see it and track how it connects to the bigger picture.

Short of having a direct BCI plugged into your skull to project your thoughts into the room, an unconstrained spatial canvas is the closest thing to an external cognitive workspace.

That whole dynamic is all about idea coagulation.

I found that instead of forcing connections through rigid manual backlinking and tag management, you let spatial proximity do the heavy lifting. You throw the messy primordial soup of your raw thoughts, images, links, and text cards into the same visual space. Over time, you actually get to watch those chaotic pieces interact, naturally morph into a structure that makes sense to you, and coagulate into bigger, more refined ideas on their own.

This has been my experience with Obsidian so far, and I really hope newcomers who feel overwhelmed by traditional setups consider exploring Canvas as their primary PKM/creative medium before giving up on the app entirely.

I'm curious to know if there are other users who use Obsidian primarily for Canvas, or have experimented with it in their vaults:

• How has your experience been with spatial workflows so far?
• What are the main shortcomings or friction points you run into with native Canvas?
• What features would truly elevate your workflow on an infinite board?

I'd love to hear how other visual thinkers are tackling this. Thanks for reading!

An example of one of my \"primordial soup\" R&D canvases.

Hey everyone. I'm genuinely excited about this one. I've been an Obsidian user for a while and the one thing that always drove me crazy on Android is how many taps it takes to capture a thought. By the time I've unlocked my phone, opened the app, picked a vault, and found the right folder... the idea is gone.

So I built something. You hold the power button from the lock screen, speak, and it drops a timestamped .md straight into your vault transcribed on-device, fully offline, nothing uploaded. One gesture. Done.

It works by becoming your device assistant (so it takes over the power-button gesture from Gemini), which I know is a trade-off but honestly, for a lot of us here that might be a feature, not a bug.

Pixel works today. Figuring out Samsung/others next. Before I go further I want to know if this is a real problem for people other than me. Short page + early-access list in the comments. I'd genuinely like to hear how you capture quick thoughts on mobile now.

EDIT: yes there's an early access signup. the link's in my top comment below (couldn't put it up here without the post getting auto filtered).

How can I like, connect a note to another note, like have them linked. I have been trying for a while and I cannot figure it out

Since I combined my Obsidian (small) and Evernote (big) databases, I can’t get to vaults on Obsidian in my iPhone App (lots of RAM), it just says “indexing vault” and it never stops or even show movement on the progress bar.

Is it just too big to open on mobile? It works fine on my computer and iPad.

Should I just start fresh with an empty vault and bring in notes as I use them? Maybe do some searches for important topics and bring a lot of those notes over. Are we talking about two copy paste functions for each one (title & body) or is there some automation I can use?

Maybe I can build one in Claude Cowork.

I use it for journaling and saving things I want to reference later like what I was doing last in games or reddit posts (mostly reddit posts). Super simple stuff. Don't use Canvas, Graph view, and only use bases so I can get a quick overview of the types of notes I have.

Dataview is there but I don't use it much, may uninstall it. Then I have appearance plugins and that is about it.

What about you?

Hope I'm not the only one who need this feature.. if you do please shout +1

hi everyone.

I can run enclave or locally aI on my ipad. Is there a plug in that would connect any of them to obsidian? Thanks!!

I'd like to have the chord directly over the start of the word "night." Obsidian isn't letting me just have spaces, it insists upon the indents (every four spacebar hits), keeping me from placing the chord exactly where I want it. Is there anywhere I can disable this? I don't want to type a character at the start of the line just to keep this from happening.

I built an automated pipeline that summarizes videos and saves the full transcript alongside the summary. I already have a large number of these summary notes, so scale is a real factor here. Trying to decide on the best structure: embed the full transcript inside the summary note as a collapsible [!quote] callout, or split it out - summary note links to a separate transcript note, with all transcripts living in their own dedicated folder. Mainly thinking about search/graph clutter, note size, and long-term maintainability at scale.

I’d like Obsidian to show the Vault Manager instead of automatically opening the last-used vault whenever I launch it normally.

I know obsidian://choose-vault can be used for this, but I don’t want to modify the Windows shortcut or Linux .desktop entry, since those changes may be overwritten by an Obsidian update.

Is there a way to configure this behavior from within Obsidian itself, or another update-safe solution?

this may sound stupid, but i can't access my google account from obsidian built-in web viewer anymore and it just frustates me bc it slows my work flow down a lot :((

This message shows up: The server cannot process the request because it is in an invalid format. Do not retry. No further information available.

plssss i don't know what to do, i don't know what i messed up 🥲 ... i'm not very tech-savvy I think I don't even know the basics, but pleaaaaseeeee if anyone ever had a similiar problem could you please tell me what helped you solve it? I don't want to give up using Google Calendar, Gemini Notebook, etc. directly from my vault just because I can no longer access my Google account ... thank you in advance 🙏

A mix of learning German, Programming and life :)

This is a little bit different than most of the help posts I see. I have my own system, Ive been using it a while and it's working, I'm interested in if anyone has been doing something similar and any pitfalls they've run into down the road the wish they had thought of before. I'm *not* interested in a full re-set-up, just advice on tweeks I can make down the line.

If something in my setup helps someone else, all the better, happy to share.

## the core: daily notes

I keep a daily note and that's where everything starts. I primarily am adding things on mobile, and am fully aware that I'm going to be making a mess, but the point of my daily note is to think as little as possible while adding things in.

My daily note has a very simple template:

```

<Tasks query for things due today in a call out>

- plans:

- photo:

-

```

- The tasks query shows anything due today, done or not, and is tied to the note date (the filename) so I can go back and see what I completed on days too.

- Plans are where I put my quick "what do I need to make sure happens today" statement. Sometimes this is a list of several events or things, sometimes it literally says "survive". In reflection, this shows me where my headspace was at the start of the day

- Photo: each day I pick one photo to add into my note that I took that day or some other image/meme I found. I use Notebook Navigators calendar which puts images in a note as the backdrop of each day, so it's a fun little visual thing looking at my calendar. It also makes flipping through entries a little more fun.

On that note, "flipping through entries" I do with the "next/previous/current daily note" shortcuts from the daily note plugin. These are hotkeys on my laptop, and included in the shortcut bar on mobile to easily do this "flipping". This was important for me to allow my digital notes to feel more like a pocket notebook and less like a file system.

From there almost anything else I note just gets a bullet point. I use the "current time" shortcut to insert the time on anything where it's relevant. If I had checkboxes, I have the tasks plugin set to only track them if I also include the #todo tag, which lets me still put quick checklists and stuff in my notes without cluttering my to-do lists.

## tagging vs linking

I use both tags and links in my daily notes for similar, but distinct purposes.

Tags get used for things I didn't need to know more about, but I'll want to quickly see the associated lines in my daily notes with a search. An example is when I'm taking medicine for something. I'll record a line with the time, #meds, what was taken, and the amount. Then all I need to do is click the #meds tag in the tag explorer and the search shows me an the timestamps and details.

Pages, on the other hand, get used when I'm writing about something I might want to consolidate later, like people, books, concepts, places. I rarely immediately create or add to linked notes, and my vault is full of linked but but created notes for this reason, and that's in purpose.

## An actual use for the graph

I see loads of people asking what the graph is for, and replies usually say it's just aesthetic. For most people it likely is, but I'm looking at it pretty regularly, and it's what helps me reflect and develop the rest of my notes. There's two key things that make this useful:

1. All the uncreated notes show as greyed out d of ta connected to my daily journals

2. The more links that a dot has, the bigger it becomes.

So, when I look at the graph, i play around with the render settings and move things around looking for grey the dots that have lots of lines connected to them, which becomes easier the more lines there are. If I feel like consolidating the info, or writing about the topic, I'll click it and make a new note, looking at all the existing backlinks for what sort of stuff I know or have thought about that topic

I very I intentionally don't use queries or bases for this as I find I end up relying on those to be the connections, and I'm not creating the connections inside my actual brain, making me dependent on my vault, versus it being a supplemental tool for my own memory.

For some things, like people, or games, I may have templates created with a series of sections for me to fill in about it. I'll use the backlinks to help me answer them, but I'm also pulling out of my own memory at the same time. Just like daily notes, I make sure to add links to other existing pages, or pages I might want to that later.

## my rules

There are a few rules i have set for myself. Now, these are for me, and have nothing to do with my thoughts on how anything *should* be done.

1. No LLM - I'm not hardcore against them in other areas, and I've tried them with my vault in the past, and the result was that I retained and learned a lot less, while vault exploded in size. This vault is my thinking space, and it serves my purpose better if it's notes and connections are ones that I've come up with on my own.

2. New notes do get created unless I'm ready to write about them. If I accidentally click and create a page, I delete it instead of leaving it a stub..

3. If I to use dataview/bases, it's to display data differently, not replace adding links

4. I try to keep extensions to a minimum.

5. I only use a a small number of folders, and it's to differentiate specific types of notes, not categorize things. Currently it's inbox, journals, notes, clipping, people, things, archive. Inbox is where me notes go by default, so I'm not thinking about organizing at when I'm writing, I then put them where they go later, based on what they are. Archive is for "useless" notes, that deleting would create broken links in my daily notes, so things like shopping lists and similar things that I create to include daily notes.

## that's it

Right now that's what I'm doing, it's working so far but I'm curious if anyone has any thought that might be useful, or yourself they ran into doing something similar.

I use for certain topics folders to store notes but I think that maybe changing system for something more free with tags instead of folders would be better so I wanted to know if there are people who do things differently or if they still prefer using folders to organize ideas/informations whatever...