i have used obsidian for a couple years but it has taken some time to hone in on plugins and customizations. I’d like to share my current setup in the hopes it might make someone else’s life a little easier if they want something similar.

First off, my plugins are hanging around 44:

1: Style Settings v1.0.9

2: Minimal Theme Settings v8.1.1

3: Advanced Tables v0.22.1

4: Kanban v2.0.51

5: Iconize v2.14.7

6: Editing Toolbar v2.4.16

7: Outliner v4.8.1

8: Calendar v1.5.10

9: Mind Map v1.1.0

10: Tag Wrangler v0.6.1

11: Homepage v4.0.7

12: [make.md](http://make.md) v1.0.6

13: Importer v1.6.19

14: Emoji Toolbar v0.4.1

15: Advanced URI v1.44.3

16: Better Word Count v0.10.1

17: Highlightr v1.2.2

18: Image Converter v1.2.24

19: Dataview v0.5.67

20: Metadata Menu v0.8.7

21: Quick Switcher++ v4.6.3

22: Meta Bind v1.3.2

23: Book Search v0.7.5

24: Find orphaned files and broken links v1.10.1

25: Auto Link Title v1.5.5

26: QuickAdd v1.11.5

27: Omnisearch v1.25.2

28: Templater v2.9.1

29: Regex Find/Replace v1.2.0

30: Tab Switcher v1.4.0

31: Custom Frames v2.5.0

32: Self-hosted LiveSync v0.24.8

33: Natural Language Dates v0.6.2

34: Notebook Navigator v1.5.4

35: Buttons v0.9.13

36: Easy Typing v5.5.11

37: Image in Editor v2.2.6

38: Linter v1.28.0

39: Paste URL into selection v1.7.0

40: Smart Connections v3.0.80

41: Zotero Integration v3.2.1

42: Citations v0.4.5

43: Pandoc Reference List v2.0.25

44: Enhancing Export v1.10.10

Thats much more than i am comfortable with, but it is an ongoing struggle to whittle it down while keeping the features i want/need.

Generally speaking, my vault is a quick note repository, a personal wiki, a source of documentation for my homelab, a journal, and a repository of notes on topics of interest. In order to get the graph view to look the way i wanted it to, with a sort of default “file tree” format, i have created index files (all starting with “+”) generated from a template in every single folder in the vault. this file automatically generates links to all files within that folder, as well as any child index files from child folders within the parent folder. That allows me to view and navigate the vault in a “file explorer” kind of way.

https://pastebin.com/iAcqf7MP

That works very well, however the dataview only regenerates links when it has been manually opened. that is fine for daily operations, but occassionally i need to reset the template and links for all index files, so i created a set of buttons to do this for the whole vault.

https://pastebin.com/4hZFCEZG

Having a solid dashboard was important to me and i went the way of establishing a canvas because it seems to allow for the most aesthetic layout. a rendered version of the canvas can be found below, but it has some simple widgets generated using dataviewjs. An uptime monitor for my home server, some quick links to frequently visited addresses as well as a daily note, weather, xkcd & top news rss feeds, recent notes, “quick access” (unfiled/active) notes, a randomized quote from the vault, and a widget for access to omnisearch. the background is rendered differently depending on the time of day, and a couple buttons exist to rebuild index links. these are almost all dataviewjs cards which id be happy to share if someone is interested.

since i play around with a homelab pretty frequently, i have began experimenting with the smart connections/smart chat plugin linked to a device in my homelab running several models but primarily llama-3.1-8b-instruct-Q4_K_M. its a meager gaming laptop, so thats about the maximum local LLM i can run.

ive never been impressed with the todo list strategies used in obsidian, so i selfhost vikunja (very similar to todoist) and keep that instance open in the right-hand panel. I would love to see a better adaptation of todoist-style list management in obsidian. i used to pay for it but even at the relatively low price id rather have a feature set like that on my own hardware.

my vault is synced across devices with the “self-hosted livesync” plugin and relies on a dockerized couchdb instance on my home server cluster. its evolving by the minute but im pretty happy with its functionality right now.