03 – Plugins | NZRT NETWORK

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

If you’ve been using Obsidian for a while, you’ve probably noticed that the core app is intentionally minimal. That’s by design. The real power comes from community plugins, and that’s exactly what we’re covering today.

Community plugins extend Obsidian beyond its built-in functionality. You install them directly from inside the app, through Settings, then Community plugins, then Browse. Before you can do that though, you need to turn off something called Restricted mode. Once that’s off, you can search for any plugin, hit Install, and then Enable. That’s the standard flow and it takes about thirty seconds.

If you ever need to install a plugin manually — maybe you’re working offline or testing a custom build — you can do it by copying the plugin folder directly into the dot-obsidian plugins directory inside your vault. The folder needs to contain at least two files: one called main dot js, which is the actual plugin code, and one called manifest dot json, which tells Obsidian what the plugin is. There’s also an optional styles dot css file if the plugin has its own visual styling.

One thing worth flagging before we go further: community plugins run real code on your machine. That’s what makes them powerful, but it also means you should only install plugins from sources you trust. It’s good practice to glance at the plugin’s GitHub repository before installing — just to get a sense of who made it and how actively it’s maintained.

Now let’s talk about the plugins themselves. The wiki lists nine plugins considered essential for a well-run vault.

First is Dataview. This one lets you treat your vault like a database. You can write queries that pull information from your notes and display it as dynamic tables, lists, or calendars, all driven by the frontmatter fields in your notes. The key thing about Dataview results is that they’re live — they update automatically as your vault content changes.

Next is Templater. Think of this as a much more powerful version of Obsidian’s built-in templates. It supports JavaScript scripting, date functions, and the ability to pull in file metadata. So you can do things like automatically stamp a note with today’s date or insert the folder name as a tag when you create a new file.

Then there’s Calendar, which adds a monthly calendar widget to your sidebar so you can navigate your daily notes visually by clicking on dates.

Obsidian Git is a huge one for anyone who wants version control. It automatically commits and pushes your vault to a Git repository on a schedule you define. Great for backup and for teams.

Excalidraw brings full drawing and diagramming capabilities right inside Obsidian — no need to switch to a separate tool.

Kanban lets you create kanban boards inside ordinary markdown files, which is a neat trick if you’re managing projects in your vault.

Tasks is your task management layer — it adds support for due dates, recurring tasks, and queries that let you pull task lists from across your entire vault into one view.

QuickAdd is designed for speed. It lets you capture quick entries, run macros, or append content to specific notes without breaking your flow.

And finally there’s Linter, which auto-formats your notes every time you save. It keeps your frontmatter consistent, cleans up spacing, and enforces a consistent markdown style across the vault.

Let’s talk about those code examples in the wiki. The first one is a Dataview query. In plain terms, it’s asking Obsidian to build a table showing two pieces of information — a status field and a date — for every note inside the Wiki folder that has been tagged as a reference type. The results come back sorted from newest to oldest. You’d drop this query into any note and Dataview renders the table for you automatically.

The second Dataview example is simpler. It produces a list of all notes tagged with the word project where the status is currently set to active. Again, this updates live as things change.

The Templater example shows what a template file might look like when you create a new note. It automatically fills in the creation date in a year-month-day format, tags the note with the name of the folder it lives in, and uses the file’s title as the main heading. All of that happens the moment you apply the template — no manual typing required.

When it comes to keeping your plugins up to date, you go back to Settings, then Community plugins, and your installed plugins are listed there with Update and Uninstall options. If you want Obsidian to check for updates automatically every time it starts, there’s a toggle for that called Check for updates on startup.

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

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.

I.T in Charity