Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Core Plugins.

If you use Obsidian as part of your workflow at NZRT, you’ve probably noticed that it comes with a set of built-in plugins right out of the box. These are called core plugins, and they’re maintained by the Obsidian team themselves. You can turn any of them on or off for your vault by going into Settings and then selecting Core plugins. So let’s walk through what’s available and what each one does.

Starting with the ones that are switched on by default. Backlinks gives you a panel showing every note in your vault that links to the note you’re currently reading, including any mentions that aren’t formally linked yet. Bookmarks lets you star notes, folders, searches, and even specific headings so you can get back to them quickly. Canvas is Obsidian’s infinite whiteboard — you can arrange notes, cards, and images spatially, which is great for visualising how ideas connect. Command palette, which you open with Control and P, lets you run any Obsidian command just by typing part of its name. File recovery runs automatic snapshots of your vault every five minutes, so if you accidentally delete something, you can get it back. Files gives you the standard file explorer sidebar. Graph view lets you see a visual map of how all your notes connect to each other. Outgoing links shows you all the wikilinks inside your current note, including ones that don’t resolve to an existing file yet. Outline gives you a heading navigator for whatever note you have open. Page preview lets you hover over a wikilink while holding Control to peek at the target note without actually navigating away. Properties view is a global panel that lets you browse all the frontmatter keys used across your entire vault. Quick switcher, opened with Control and O, lets you jump to any note by typing part of its name. Search, which you open with Control, Shift, and F, gives you full-text search across your vault with operator support. Tags view shows you all your tags with note counts beside them, and you can click a tag to search by it. And finally, Word count displays word and character counts in the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

Now for the plugins that are off by default but available to enable. Audio recorder lets you record audio directly into a note. Daily notes automatically creates a dated note for each day and gives you a quick shortcut to open today’s. Format converter helps you migrate Markdown-style links over to Obsidian’s wikilink format. Note composer lets you merge notes together or extract a selection into a brand new note. Random note opens a random note from your vault, which is handy if you use spaced repetition for review. Slash commands let you type a forward slash inside the editor to trigger commands inline without leaving your keyboard. Slides turns a note into a slideshow presentation. Templates lets you insert template files into your current note. Unique note creator generates notes with unique ID-based filenames rather than regular titles. And Workspaces lets you save and restore your entire pane and tab layout as named configurations, so you can switch between different working setups easily.

A few of these plugins have settings worth knowing about. For Daily notes, you’ll want to set a folder, a template file, and your preferred date format — the standard here is four-digit year, two-digit month, two-digit day. For File recovery, you can adjust how often snapshots are taken and how long they’re kept. To actually access your snapshots, go to Settings, then File recovery, then View snapshots. For Templates, you set the folder path where your template files live, and you can insert a template using Control and T, or through the Command palette.

For Search, there’s a set of operators that make your queries much more powerful. You can search for notes that carry a specific tag by typing the tag name with a hash symbol. You can narrow results to a specific folder by typing the folder path. You can search by filename. You can match a specific frontmatter field by putting the field name and value inside square brackets. And you can even run a regular expression search by wrapping your pattern in forward slashes.

That covers everything in the Core plugins reference for Obsidian. Whether you’re just getting started with your vault or looking to tighten up your workflow, knowing which of these tools are available — and which ones you need to switch on — is a solid place to start.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.