18 Obsidian plugins for writing

In the past three years, on my quest to have a complete setup for writing, editing and organising, I tested the most interesting Obsidian plugins.

I looked for stable plugins, can be used with an extensive number of notes and do not slow down your vault.

These 18 plugins are tested in my vault of over 47k items and are simple enough to work without breaks from one update to another. Disclaimer: This doesn’t mean that at some point, or with some update, they will not break.

I organised them in four categories, mixing core and community plugins.

Plugins for visual changes

In this category, we have two community plugins: the Colored Tag Wrangler and the Smart Typography. With the first one, you can assign custom colours to tags. It’s useful to create custom tags to show progress (like todo, toedit) and have them pop out in the notes.
The second plugin, Smart Typography, is a nice little plugin. It converts quotes to curly quotes, dashes to em dashes and en dashes, and periods to ellipses. Furthermore, it can create fractions and French quotes.

Editing plugins

With these plugins, you can work directly on your text. Harper, created by the Automattic team, is a grammar and spell-checking tool. Works offline, it’s fast and open-source.
The Update Time community plugin just updates the front matter when a note is created and when it is modified. Comes in handy when you want to keep this information up to date automatically.
With List Callouts, you can create a callout in a list. Just type a custom character at the beginning of a list item, and that’s it.
The core plugin, Outline, will show a table of contents for the active note. You can navigate in the file with the headings. And, the nice thing: if you rearrange the headings in the Outline view, the same thing will happen in the note.
The last plugin for this category is the core one, Footnotes View. It will show a list of footnotes from the active file.

Plugins for analytics

These four plugins are best to give you statistics about your notes, and writing. With File Info Panel, you can easily access the created and modified date of the file, size, total numbers of characters, words, sentences, and an estimate of total number of pages.
Reading Time, a community plugin, is creating an estimated reading time based on a custom reading speed, which you can control.
The core plugin, Word count, offers a total number of words and characters of the active file.
The community plugin, Readability score, calculates the readability of the text. It’s based on the Flesch–Kincaid readability tests.
With the Writing Goals plugin, you can set dynamic writing goals for notes or folders. It’s similar to the goals feature of Ulysses.

Organisational plugins

These core plugins will aid you in keeping everything nice and organised.
With Backlinks, you can see links from other files to the active one. Great for connecting ideas across your notes.
Canvas lets you organise your notes visually, to create mind maps, diagrams, or to research. You can embed notes, images, PDFs, videos, and audio files.
Files is a simple, but necessary plugin: you can navigate through your files and folders.
The Files Recovery plugin does what the name says: creates snapshots of your edits. You can edit the time between snapshots and for how long those snapshots will be kept. Of course, there is also a recovery function from them.
These three core plugins work at their maximum potential if they are all active: Templates, Properties View, and Bases.

The Properties View will show all your metadata of your files in the sidebar. It’s a necessary plugin to organise and edit notes' properties.
The Templates plugin helps you create and insert templates in new notes. It’s easy to make it happen: create a note, decide its structure and metadata, and put it in the Templates folder (you can set it up in the plugin’s settings), and that’s it. The templates are available to use via a hotkey or via the Command Palette.
The newest core plugin, Bases, is a new way to work with the vault. It offers a database view-like for all your notes. You can sort and filter them based on properties, you can embed them in other notes, and you can edit the properties directly in the view. You can have a table with the published articles, or with the last read books. For now, the Table and the Card views are available. More views are on the roadmap, as the core team is actively working on this.

In the end

With nearly 2500 plugins in the Obsidian marketplace is hard to keep track of everything that is created, abandoned or tested. Not to mention the ones that are not ending up in the marketplace, but are used by people via the BRAT plugin, the community plugin for beta repositories.

I know the list is not an exhaustive one, as I deliberately didn’t mention plugins that are a bit complicated to set up, that depend on other plugins, or need more time to fiddle with.

I wanted plugins that can help you write more, better, and make you more aware of your progress.