9 Obsidian plugins for your vault management

In Candide: or, Optimism, published in 1759, Voltaire said that "we must cultivate our garden." By taking action and overcoming life’s hardships one can stay optimistic and thrive.

The same can be said about your digital notes system or garden. You'll need to tend to it, add new references, nurture them, and eliminate what is not good or not working.

Thanks to Obsidian’s plugin’s ecosystem you can automate, and speed up a few processes. Here are the plugins I have used to organize and edit my vault.

Alias Management plugin

This plugin is helpful to find duplicated notes based on aliases. You can set it up to ignore capitalization, exclude notes or aliases, and open the notes side-by-side for easier file comparison.

Linter plugin

With the Linter plugin, you can edit your notes Properties, headings, and footnotes. 

Also, you can edit the content of the notes, like removing blank spaces, editing the quote style, format lists, and more. I’ve used it to add Properties templates to notes and to delete deprecated Properties fields.

Filename Linter Plugin

This plugin is perfect when you need to quickly edit filenames because of invalid characters, such as pipes, colons, and brackets. It is easy to use and set up.

Auto Note Mover

This plugin is used daily. Auto Note Mover can move files to a folder based on rules you set with the help of tags. For example, it can move a note with the tag “news” into the folder “News”. You decide what tags will trigger the rule. If you are an Omnivore user, you can have the same tags as in Auto Note Mover, and the rules will be triggered when you sync items from Omnivore to your vault.

You can get inspired by my process of how I use Omnivore and Obsidian. This article is a good starting point for setting the plugin to work with Omnivore.

Multi Properties plugin

It is a useful plugin when you need to edit the Properties of a note. You can select the notes based on the folder, on search, or a selection in File Explorer. You can add new Properties lines and values for them. At the same time, you can delete Properties lines.

Find orphaned files (files with no backlinks) and broken links

This plugin will find notes without backlinks, broken links, and notes without tags. After you run it from the Command Palette it will generate a file with the links of all problematic notes.

Archiver

If you are using daily notes to keep track of your tasks, the Archiver plugin can archive the completed tasks, and move them at the end of the note, or in a dedicated file. It has a few settings to organize the archived items more nicely, like adding the date, creating headings, and workflow rules.

Rollover Daily Todos

Another useful plugin for when you have daily notes is Rollover Daily Todos. This one will move any unfinished tasks from today’s note to tomorrow's note.

Update modified date

With this plugin, you can automatically update the modification date of a note. For this change to happen you’ll need a field in your note’s frontmatter. The plugin will wait 10 seconds after your last note edits and then will update the modified date. You can exclude folders if you don’t need the modification date information, and you can have a history of all edits made on a specific note.

Conclusion

Having a knowledge garden comes with the responsibility to maintain and nurture it. Some see these activities as chores, as wasted time. I don't. Working with your notes and having their information updated provides an opportunity to uncover new connections and remember previous entries. Maybe connections won't appear the first or second time, but our minds will register the information.