Transcription
There are over 2,000 community plugins available for Obsidian. Some of them are simple feature enhancements, and others completely change the way that you interact with Obsidian. But which ones should you use? I've tried dozens of plugins and I found some real gems that I want to share with you, including one that everybody should install regardless of whether you want any plugins in your vault or not.
Before you go [clears throat] installing a whole bunch of plugins into your vault, there are a few pitfalls you should be aware of. Number one is having too many plugins and introducing complexity into your setup. One of the strengths of Obsidian is that it is a very simple program. When you start adding a bunch of plugins, you kind of negate that simplicity and make it more complicated than it needs to be.
A second is the support or development of a plug-in might end. That happens because a lot of these developers are doing this for free and eventually sometimes they just stop supporting a plugin for various reasons. When that happens, when Obsidian then updates to a new version, you might be left with a broken plugin that does not work anymore. And so, the more you rely on a long list of plugins, the more you expose yourself to that risk that your vault may break in the future.
The third is that many of these plugins will also clutter your notes with code or other syntax that is not markdown. And so, it's not human readable when you pull it out of your vault and maybe open it as a text file. And then you're really dependent on having access to that plugin to be able to read those notes.
So, if you know those things and you still want to install plugins, how do you avoid those those pitfalls? Uh, well, it's by having fewer plugins and picking the right kind. So, I'm going to share with you today a handful of plugins that keep your vault simple and easy to use. The way I pick these plugins are three things. Number one, they are unobtrusive plugins. They sit in the background. You don't really even notice that they're there except when you need to use their features. And that's the second criteria is that they really greatly improve the quality of life and the convenience of using Obsidian without adding more complexity. They are helpful for making your experience using the program easier without really changing the fundamental concept behind Obsidian and what it's doing.
So let's dive into the list. So our first plugin is something called Sort and Permute Lines. This plugin is super simple but adds an amazing function to Obsidian. Let's take a look at it. Obsidian is a great place to just dump information and brainstorm. And I like to make a lot of lists. So, this plug-in allows you to sort lists alphabetically and with other ways with a simple command. So, this is super easy. First example we'll look at is a list here. I've jotted down some books I want to read. Let's say I want to alphabetize this list because I'm a super nerd. All I need to do is open up the command pallet. Control P. And then I am going to type sort. And then you see all of these different uh sort options. You can even shuffle the lines randomly, which is kind of cool. You can reverse them, but I'm just going to sort alphabetically here. And boom, it is now alphabetical. With regular Obsidian without this plugin, you would have to manually rearrange these with cut and paste or something like that. And that's kind of annoying. So that's one example. But it can also sort headings. So here's an example of a note I have with some, you know, financial metrics that I wanted to remember how to calculate. And so let's say I wanted to sort these headings alphabetically. I could do that. If I highlight the section that I want to sort and then do the same thing and then you can actually see sort headings as an option. If I do that, boom. We have just put the alphabetical sort. Now it doesn't tell you that it's alphabetical, but that is the default for the headings. But super simple plugin. You don't even know it's there, but when you need to use it, it's a really useful feature to be able to quickly sort lists and headings uh without really any headache. So, it's an awesome plugin.
So, the second plugin we're going to look at is called Settings Search, and it does exactly what the plug-in title implies. It adds a search to your settings menu, which is amazing when you're trying to configure things. Once you have this plugin installed, it adds a search box to the top of your settings area. And you can literally look for any setting, including all of your plug-in settings. And this makes it really easy to configure things on the fly without having to remember which menu was that. Let's say I don't remember how to fix my, you know, attachments folder. I can just search attachments and any any setting that has attachments related to it, it will pull up here and I can say, "Oh, there it is." I can quickly update that without having to remember which item in the sidebar it's under. So, this is such a game changer. Uh, definitely check out the search settings plugin.
The third plugin we're going to look at is called Recent Files. And it's amazing to me that this plugin is not a native feature to Obsidian because it is so useful and so fundamental to a workflow. And I'll show you what it does. It literally just adds a panel. It shows you your most recently opened files. So, you can drag it to any spot in your workspace. And I like to put it in the bottom left of my folder pane. So, I have my folders here. And as I open files, you're going to see that it's going to put a list in of my most recent files. And it just continuously goes. This is super awesome. You can quickly jump between files and it makes navigating so easy, especially if you end up like forget, you know, what you were working on last, you can very easily jump back to it. So, super simple feature and one that I really wouldn't live without now that I've been using Obsidian for a while. So, definitely check out Recent Files.
So, the next few plugins are absolute game changers. But, you know what else would be a great game changer is if you're getting value out of this video if you could smash the like button, subscribe to the channel because that supports me and helps me put out more content for you to help you stay focused and organized.
The next plugin we're going to look at is called Tag Wrangler. And this is amazing if you use tags. So, let me show you what it does. What this plug-in allows you to do is to manage tags in bulk. So, let's look over here at my tags pane. You can see here that I have two notes. One is tagged goal and the other is tagged goals. Well, that could be a problem. What if I needed them to be the same tag and make my tag structure more consistent? Well, in vanilla Obsidian, I would have to go and open every single note that has these tags and rename the tag to what I want it to be. With this plugin, let's say I wanted to change goals to goal and merge the two tags together. I can do that really easily. I can right click on goals and now I have the option to rename goals. So, not only can I rename it to whatever I want, I can just change the name completely. If I name it the same as another tag like this, if I change goals to goal, if I hit continue, it's going to say, "Hey, wait a minute. We're going to merge these tags together." And you can undo it, but it is helpful if that's what you're trying to do. So, I'm going to say continue. And bam, goals now became goal. And all of the notes that have those two tags would then be tagged with the same tag. This is huge. It is much easier than going and opening every single note and renaming it or rearranging. So definitely an amazing plugin for managing tags and again it's something that you don't even really notice is there until you need it and then it really saves you a lot of time and headaches.
So this next plugin we're going to look at. This is super helpful uh if you like to put images into your notes. So in this case I'm going to show you first what happens without the plugin. Let's say I found an image on the web that I want to save in my notes and I'm going to paste it here. So, if I do that, it pastes it in and then it gets this generic title on the note that says pasted image and then it's like the date and the time and a bunch of numbers. Um, that's fine if you only have a few images, but when you start to build up your vault and you have all kinds of images and they all have this, you know, generic nomenclature, it's hard to find. This plugin completely changes that. And the plugin is called paste image rename. And it does exactly what it says. When you paste an image in, it's going to prompt you to rename the image all in one fell swoop. I'm going to do the same paste. And then it's going to say, do you want to rename this image? And by default, you're going to notice that the new name matches the title of the note that you're in. So, you could just leave it like that. Or if you have multiple images in the note, you can give more of a descriptor, and that makes it so much easier to find your files later. Especially with attachments and images, they'll be named something that is logical and makes it easier to find the files later on uh instead of a bunch of generic numbers that you might not remember what they mean.
The last plugin we're going to talk about is so powerful. I think everybody should have it in their Obsidian vault regardless of whether you have any other plugins installed. And the reason is because most of us are using Obsidian to store information either as a reference system or a second brain. And not only do we need to put information in there and organize it easily, we got to get it out and find that information later. Now, Obsidian does have a very simple and powerful search feature built in, but it's not integrated into the navigation and the interface quite as smoothly as it could be. The default navigation in Obsidian is the quick switcher, which you open by pressing control O and it brings this up. Now, one of the issues with this quick switcher is you'd think that, hey, if I type something in here, it's going to search my vault. And that's partially true. It does search, but let's say I wanted to find one of those financial terms in my previous note. If I want to say I'm going to look for internal rate of return, well, hey, there's an issue. It's not coming up. And I know it's in my notes, right? I know that information is in there, but I can't get it through this method because it's not the title of the note. The quick switcher by default is just looking at the titles. Now, I could use search. Search would find this, but it's not built into the n the native navigation. This plugin fixes that. And this plugin is called Omnisarch, and it is amazing. You can see how many downloads it has. And this basically merges the quick switcher and the search function beautifully. It is completely keyboard controllable, making it super accessible and easy. So, we're going to enable this and I'm going to show you just how awesome this is. In order to do this, we do have to do a little bit of configuration. And all we have to do is change a couple hotkeys. So, we're going to go to hotkeys and we're going to search for omniarch. And you'll see that there's two options, infile and vault search. I recommend that you map the hotkey to vault search. And I'll show you why in just a second. We're going to use the default quick switcher hotkey control O for vault search. Now you'll see it turns red. There's a conflict. Really easy way to fix this. We literally click on it and then bang, we have we can see both things that use that hotkey. And we're going to take the quick switcher and we're going to turn off that hotkey because we want to use omnisarch instead. And I'll show you why this is so much better. Oo. There's my omnisarch. You can see it looks exactly like the quick switcher uh but it behaves very differently. If I do the same search, internal rate of return, now you can see it's searching the content of my notes, the text, the headings, and even though I didn't name this note internal rate of return, I can find that formula and that information right in there. But it doesn't end there. Remember I said that you're going to map the hotkey to vault search instead of file search. Well, here's the thing. You can switch to file search. Now, let's say we open up that file. And I'm pretty sure I put something in here about restricted assets. So, I can open up the quick switcher and you'll notice if I tab, I can switch to the infile search. Then I can type the restrictions on. Oh, there it is. Restrictions on assets. Boom. And now it jumps me to the heading inside that file. So, with your keyboard, you can very quickly jump between searching your entire vault and just the file you have in front of you. That is such a game-changing function that you just need to have in Obsidian. It's it's so powerful and useful. There are even other functions in here. One of the cool ones is that you can actually put in a link to a file using the search modal. Let me show you that. Let's say I wanted to link to that that note where I had the NATO alphabet. Has nothing to do with this note, but just as an example, I'm going to hit alt enter and that is going to insert a link to that file right where my cursor is. You see how amazing that is? You don't have to now rely on knowing the title of the note to put links into your notes. This is such a cool tool. That's why I saved it for last because it really is the best one. If you have only one plugin in your vault, it should be this one, Omnisarch. It's amazing.
So, there you have it. Six simple plugins for your vault that are unobtrusive. They make Obsidian easier to use and enhance the features, but don't add complexity. I'm going to link to all of those plugins in the description. Make sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already because we've got more coming for you.