There’s a particular kind of madness that hits Obsidian users around the third week of setup. You’ve installed a dozen plugins, then another dozen, and somehow your vault has become a Frankenstein system that does everything except the thing you actually sat down to do: think clearly.

I’ve been through that phase — installing over 40 plugins, testing each one, watching some break my workflow while others saved it. What I found on the other side wasn’t a giant list, but a small, carefully curated one. To avoid clutter, I now recommend that you start simple and resist the temptation to use plugins until you’ve mastered the core basics of Markdown and linking.

So, if you’re serious about building a vault that actually works for you, these six plugins are the only ones you need to start with.

Templater

Automate your note creation

Obsidian ships with a built-in template system, and it’s fine in the same way that a Swiss Army knife is fine when what you really want is a proper chef’s knife. That’s how the Templater plugin is in this case. It swaps Obsidian’s basic setup for something far more flexible and expressive.

At its most accessible level, Templater lets you build reusable note structures and automatically populate them with values such as the current date, the day of the week, or a file’s title. Start a new meeting note, and your header, date stamp, and agenda section are already there. When you lean into Templater’s JavaScript support, you can write logic directly into your templates, such as conditionals, loops, and prompts that ask you for input before the note opens, which means your templates can respond to context rather than just paste static content.

A useful entry point is to create a template folder in your vault, point Templater to it in settings, and assign your most-used template to a hotkey. Within a week, you’ll wonder how you ever opened a blank note on purpose.

Calendar

Time-anchored daily note navigation

Deceptively simple, relentlessly useful. The Calendar plugin adds a small monthly calendar to Obsidian’s right sidebar, and each date on it is a clickable link to that day’s daily note. That’s the whole pitch, and it turns out that’s enough to change how you move through your vault entirely.

Rather than hunting through the file explorer for yesterday’s notes or last Tuesday’s meeting log, you click the date. The calendar also provides a visual indicator showing which days have notes attached, so you can see at a glance where your record-keeping has been consistent and where it’s gone quiet. For anyone using Obsidian as a personal knowledge system or journaling practice, that visual accountability is quite motivating.

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Calendar pairs especially well with Templater. When you click a date and your daily note auto-populates with a structure you’ve already designed, the friction of starting your day in Obsidian drops close to zero.

Dangerous Mode

This is not a drill, but it might save your draft

This one earns its name. Dangerous Mode is a focused writing plugin that borrows its core mechanic from a web app called Most Dangerous Writing App, which one of my editors covered a while back: start a timed session, and if you stop typing for more than a few seconds, everything you’ve written during that session is deleted. Permanently. No trash folder, no undo.

The psychological effect is that the moment the red glow begins creeping around the edges of your screen, your fingers find the keyboard again. It creates a useful kind of pressure, not the crushing kind, but the generative kind that gets words onto the page when your brain would rather negotiate with itself.

A few important details worth knowing: the plugin only operates on the active note, so your broader vault is never at risk. It disables copy, paste, and the context menu during a session to prevent workarounds. And sessions are manually triggered, which means you’re always opting in. I find it best suited for drafting, brainstorming, or breaking through creative blocks, rather than for notes that require careful research or editing.

Importer

Your Evernote graveyard deserves a proper migration

The biggest barrier between most people and a fully committed Obsidian workflow is the pile of notes they’ve already accumulated elsewhere. Evernote notebooks, OneNote pages, Apple Notes, Google Keep, Notion databases, Roam Research graphs — years of knowledge sitting in formats that don’t talk to each other.

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The Importer plugin is Obsidian’s official answer to that problem. It’s a community plugin backed by Obsidian, and it handles migration from all major platforms, converting everything into plain Markdown files that live locally in your vault. For Apple Notes on Mac and Microsoft OneNote, the plugin connects directly to your account, eliminating the need for manual export. For Evernote, you export your notebooks as .enex files first, then hand them to Importer, which takes it from there.

The process isn’t flawless; a small percentage of notes may fail, depending on their formatting complexity. But for the vast majority of migrations, it works cleanly and preserves attachments, links, and folder structure as faithfully as the source format allows. And if you’re coming specifically from OneNote, there’s also the option of using OneNote MD Exporter as an alternative path.

Dataview

SQL for people who never wanted to learn SQL

If Obsidian is a database, the Dataview plugin is the query language. It lets you write structured queries directly inside your notes and display the results as live, auto-updating tables, lists, or task views, pulling data from any note in your vault based on metadata you define in YAML frontmatter or inline fields.

The practical applications are wide. You can build a reading list that auto-populates whenever you tag a note with status: reading or use it to make sense of highlights and bookmarks from around the web. You can also use it for planning, as the plugin can create an Obsidian template that organizes your entire life by automatically pulling daily logs into weekly reviews. Whether you want to turn your Obsidian notes into charts to track habits or simply surface all open tasks by due date, the data is already in your notes; Dataview just makes it visible in organized ways.

Dataview supports four output formats: table, list, task, and calendar. It also offers a JavaScript variant, DataviewJS, for users who want to write custom rendering logic.

Pane Relief

Tab chaos, meet its match

As your vault grows, so does the tendency to work across multiple notes simultaneously. You can have a source note open on one side, a synthesis note on the other, a reference document somewhere behind both. Obsidian’s native pane management handles this adequately, but the Pane Relief plugin handles it elegantly.

The plugin brings browser-style navigation to Obsidian’s tab system: persistent per-tab history that survives restarts, back and forward arrows that show counts and preview destinations on hover, and keyboard shortcuts for moving between tabs or repositioning them without touching the mouse. It also introduces a simple sliding pane mode that makes your workspace horizontally scrollable with fixed-width panes, which is particularly transformative on smaller screens where a traditional split layout would feel cramped.

One standout feature is Focus Lock, which prevents sidebar elements such as search boxes, file explorers, and tag panels from stealing your cursor focus while you’re typing. It’s a small fix for an irritating problem, and once you’ve used it, working without it feels noticeably rougher.

OS

Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, iPadOS

Developer

Dynalist Inc.

Pricing model

Free

Initial release

March 30, 2020

You don’t need 40 plugins. You just needed to read this first

None of these six plugins is glamorous in the way that AI integrations or graph visualizations tend to be. They don’t make for impressive screenshots. But they solve real, daily friction points like the blank page, the buried note, the scattered workspace, and the years of notes stuck in the wrong app. A vault built on these six is a vault you’ll actually return to.