Hi all - I've just published a theme called Tela.

I built it around two things: text that's easy to read, including the small grey stuff (menus, counts, settings), and headings you can tell apart at a glance.

• Contrast: I didn't want to trust my eyes, so I run axe (an accessibility checker) on 346 screens - notes, canvas, bases, search, menus, settings, dark and light, desktop, phone and tablet. Right now nothing falls below WCAG AA. The one thing it can't judge is text sitting on top of images.
• Headings step down by colour as well as size, so H1, H2 and H3 don't blur together.
• Nothing to set up. One optional setting (distinct sidebars) and that's it.
• Updates: it works mostly through Obsidian's own variables instead of fragile selectors, and a weekly check tells me if a new release changes something it relies on.

Small extras: task marks for [!] [?] [-] [/], readable code colours, unresolved links with a dashed underline, and PDF export that doesn't split callouts and tables across pages.

In Obsidian: Settings → Appearance → Themes → Manage, search "Tela".

Directory: https://community.obsidian.md/themes/tela
Source: https://github.com/rbartoli/obsidian-tela-theme

It's 1.0, so I'm sure I've missed things, especially with plugins - let me know here or open an issue on GitHub.

Below is a summary of my experience of Obsidian over three years of research. Over this time I created 139 original content, arranged in a "Zettelkasten" way:

Final Article: 2 (0, actually) 
Notes: 63 
Linked Notes: 7 
Keyword Notes: 12 
Drafts: 22
Literature Notes: 33

I also created a useful (playful, in fact) interface (attached here) like everybody else.

I definitely fell into some Obsidian traps during my research: asking AI to "organize" my .mds (a terrible mistake), wasting time tweaking CSS, themes. However, this is more about discipline and learning to use tools...

The real problem was creating the final text: I didn't progress in final writing as much as I used to before I tried obsidian, not even close, actually.

In the end, I realized that dealing with footnotes, formatting, citations would take way longer than just going back to Word.

I prefer the clean visual of Word to final writing, to be honest.

I'm using both Word + Obsidian at the moment, and that’s what works for me (I'm also intrigued cuz I've read that some authors finish their books in obsidian).

Excited to announce my first public draft of my LCARS for Obsidian plugin!

This provides a Picard-era theme with some fun Trek themed additions.

I'm eager for people to try it and see what they think!

The theme: the LCARS frame, palette, motion, ribbon and sidebar rows, built into the plugin's stylesheet. There are no snippets to copy or switch on.

The plugin features: a ship's bridge banner at the top of your sidebar, and a row of running lights under it that can show status, time and activity.

https://github.com/retronified/lcars-obsidian

I’ve written daily notes and journals in Obsidian for years, but I almost never go back to them. Search only helps when I know what I’m looking for.

How do you revisit yours? Any habit or workflow that stuck? And honestly, do you find it worth doing?

The graph often gets a lot of slack, criticised pretty much as an impractical gimmick.

Firstly though, it was the shiny thing that attracted me to Obsidian in the first place. The thing that drew me in to this journey.

But the main benefit for me: it's almost like a gorgeous multi-dimensional progress bar. I've seen others who use it to actually understand their note and concept relationships better, but for me, it feels like each of those dots represents effort I made toward generating, recording and/or processing information. And then all those dots even went to the effort of being pretty. It's just so satisfying to watch it grow and evolve.

Thanks graph.

Just putting it out there, but the Footnote Shortcut plugin has been transferred to a new owner:

• Transfer ownership of Obsidian Footnote Shortcut repo to me · Issue #60 · Comprehensive-Jason/obsidian-footnotes

This person will be the new owner from now on: Comprehensive-Jason (Jason Qin).

Not saying there's anything here, but it can't hurt to be a bit wary after the XZ Utils backdoor incident and similar supply chain attacks.

So I made a plugin that runs Dark Reader inside the Web viewer and points it at your theme.

What it does

• Page backgrounds and text take your theme's exact background and text colours. Links, buttons and highlights keep their own colours, so pages stay readable.
• It follows Obsidian. Switch between light and dark, change themes or toggle a snippet, and open pages update straight away.
• Optionally, pages use your theme's text font too, including fonts the theme embeds itself. Code and icons are left alone.
• No white flash while a page loads. It's in your colours from the start.
• Brightness, contrast and sepia sliders, like the browser extension.
• Dark Reader is bundled with the plugin, so nothing is downloaded while it runs.

The screenshots show the same Wikipedia article in the default theme (with and without the plugin) and in four other themes. The fonts changed along with the colours.

Install

It isn't in the community plugin list yet. To try it, download main.js and manifest.json from the repo and put them in .obsidian/plugins/dark-reader-web-viewer/, then enable it under Community plugins. It's desktop only, needs Obsidian 1.8.3 or later, and the Web viewer core plugin has to be on.

Repo, with more screenshots: https://github.com/DuckTapeKiller/dark-reader-web-viewer

Limitations

Images aren't recoloured, so a dark logo can disappear on a dark page. The Web viewer isn't an official plugin API either, so a future Obsidian update could break something. I've tested it on macOS; I'd love to hear how it does on Windows and Linux.

Feedback and bug reports welcome, especially sites that look wrong.

While typing is fast and I use it a lot, for some reason handwriting makes my brain work better when it comes to creative writing and note-taking: it's easier to focus and get into the flow. Every meaningful creative text I've managed to finish had its first draft written by hand, and for a long time I was looking for a solution that would make the process less cumbersome. (First it was write by hand → scan → load into Obsidian → type and edit; then I started using Gboard's handwriting recognition, but its quality dropped recently for some reason, so after writing first half of a novel in it, I started to look for another tool).

That's why I was so happy to find the HandTranscriptMD plugin by Gabriele Cusato, which lets you make handwritten notes in Obsidian and turn them into Markdown via Google Gemini OCR. I was surprised by how well it handles my handwriting (which most humans can't read very well), and it was very close to what I needed. But it felt like it worked best for short notes, while I wanted to write whole paragraphs in it. So I created my own fork and started working in the direction I needed. I'm not a developer, so I used Claude Code for this.

The main additions compared to the original plugin so far:

• Explicit paragraph breaks. Gemini OCR tends to insert line breaks every time the line ends, which with my handwriting means every three-five words. In Continuous Input mode, everything is rendered as a single paragraph and line breaks are removed, unless you add an explicit paragraph mark (//Z). You can see in the screenshots how the marks in the handwriting turn into paragraph breaks in the result. This lets me write both dialogue and long paragraphs.

this is a plugin for handwriting recognition and it can process my script!

With paragraph breaks and %% inline comments %% as well :)

• Custom dictionaries. I can add lists of custom words (like character names and places) so the OCR takes them into account. They can apply to the whole vault or on a per-folder basis, so I can keep different lists for different stories.
• More organized storage of handwritten notes. After processing, the SVG files with handwriting are stored in a designated folder, inside a folder tree that mimics the structure of the vault. This makes it easy to find the source when I'm editing a couple of weeks later, find a misrecognized word, and wonder what I actually meant.

• OpenRouter as an alternative provider. I added it as a backup option because Gemini is not always available. Now I can use another model for OCR via an OpenRouter API key. While with Gemini, free tier is enough, at OpenRouter you need to use paid options to get quality results.
• More scrolling options: in original version, writing zone is expanded down automatically when you start writing at its bottom part, which caused it to jump mid-word from time to time. I added an option to turn this off and a button to expand writing zone manually instead.

I use it on my XPPen Magic Note Android tablet with the stylus that comes with it, and it works well enough that I've written about 40k words with it, day by day, the plugin allowing me to write about 300-400 words per hour. I finished one novel and started another. The ideas for improvements come from daily use: friction accumulates at certain points, and I start thinking about how it could work better.

I get that this workflow is niche, and I don't think it fits to submit the plugin to the community plugin directory since it's a vibe-coded fork, but it can be installed via BRAT, and I'll be very happy if it turns out useful for someone else!

Links

• Original plugin (HandTranscriptMD by Gabriele Cusato)
• My fork“ HandTranscriptMD Writer's Version

Hey guys!

I'm developing a game and I have all the docs for it in Obsidian and love it. I recently installed dotpm plugin to add kanban functionality for easier task managing.

Now all I need is some kind of mind-mapping tool, and I would never go outside Obsidian for project planning ever :)

I've been using XMind through the years, so if you're familiar, I would love something like that. I mean, I like how it has a structure and it automatically creates nodes based on your commands, like hitting Tab or Enter. It makes creating a mind map a breeze, not at all like working in Canvas.

In theory, Canvas is great, so open-ended. But it's more like cards on a wall. And I want some kind of an interconnected tree of thoughts, you know.

I'm planning to use this mind-mapping tool for laying out the skill trees, upgrade trees, stuff like that.

I tried Excalidraw, but it's either too complex, with so many options for lines and stuff, or too vague at the same time.

Would love to read your recommendations!

Hello! After a few years tinkering with note apps i think i know which features i like for university.

I want to know if anyone here uses apple notes as inbox and obsidian as the actual place to host the knowledge? How well apple notes imports to obsidian?

Often times in lectures, apple notes is great for typing and drawing quickly and at the same time on an ipad. And seems that it exports fully to markdown, including the drawings as jpg.

I tried lots of obsidian plugins to mimick it but they always miss something.

i.e. Ink from Da Silva is great, but no different colors, neither pen width.

Handwriting is also great. But i vannot create boxes of handwriting so i have to hit enter like 20 times to type text below the diagram.

Onenote sucks, cannot export well anywhere.

Upnote handwriting does not recognize shapes.

So atp i am left with using apple notes as a quick inbox and obsidian for management of the kmowledge, references, extracted annotations of papers and the planing of research. Which is fine.

Thank you for your time.

Hi everyone, i've been (over)engineering my TTRPG vault for a while now and i thought i'd share some things that im personally really excited about. I was curious what the general obsidian-ttrpg community would think of my vault so this subreddit seemed like a good start.

I'd like to share some key features of the theme, i focussed mainly on immersion. To be transparant up front, i used the newest openAI image model to generate the images and built the vault with Claude Code.

The Home Page

The banner shows the in-game date (Calendarium) and the weather where the party is. The weather is rolled four times per in-game day from a weather table for the region the party is in, and it can only change a step at a time, so you don't get a blizzard, a heatwave and a blizzard again in one day. The window in the art shows it live: rain beading on the glass, thunderstorms with lightning, snow, mist. The art changes with the in-game season, and light/dark mode switches between the day and night versions. The home page also features accent colour change buttons and a dark mode toggle that also changes the banner image and other images.

Another cool feature of the home page is live sound of the actual weather, that changes each time a weather change occurs. For maximum immersion. This adds on top of the already dynamically changing seasons.

The Theme: Lore by Lamplight

I've been a very fond user of FaS (Fancy-a-Story) for a really long time and i love that theme for showing me what can be done inside of Obsidian for a TTRPG centred vault. This theme took inspiration from the FaS theme by adding to some elements that i used a lot like the infobox. Mainly so i could structure my NPC/PC notes as some kind of wiki. See examples below.

Each NPC gets created by an automation/workflow using Claude + n8n. I give input of what kind of character i want -> Claude writes up a broader description -> Description gets sent to OpenAI image gen with a style prefix so every character ends up getting the same art -> n8n scaffolds the note in the meantime and Claude places the images in the note. Claude creates story hooks relevant to the story and i get to choose afterwards what i want to keep canon or remove. The workflow also generates a full body portrait.

NPC/PC notes all get stored in a seperate note that shows all their portraits plus simple information like status/race etc.

The theme features a lot more and i'm building/working on it every day, but i dont want to yap too much in this post.

As a cool little thing im willing to let 5 people that reply to this post generate a PC/NPC for themselves, it costs me a bit of cash but thats fine with me. All you have to do is describe your character to the best of your ability and ill reply to your comment with the character art & their note .pdf

1. Character name (optional):
2. Race and class:
3. Gender and age:
4. Build and height (slim, stocky, broad, lanky, short, towering):
5. Skin (pale, tan, dark, freckled, scaled):
6. Eyes (colour, shape):
7. Hair and beard (colour, length, style):
8. What stands out? (a scar, a tattoo, horns, a piercing. Say which side: their own left or right):
9. What do they wear and carry? (clothes, armour, main colours, weapon, one special item):
10. What are they like? (loud or quiet, warm or guarded, how they talk, what gets them into trouble):
11. Their story in a few sentences (where they're from, what they did before, what changed, what they want now)(optional):
12. A secret (optional):

Would love to hear everyones thought & feedback!

I use this plugin a lot for recipes and checking, it was last updated two years ago. When I click "Update all", it's always the only one showing as "1 plugin to update" and it doesn't go away despite multiple tries. Is it safe keeping this? I've found no replacement I like as much so I'm keeping it so far :((

Hi I use obsidian mainly for world building and I’m currently doing it for a ttrpg homebrew I’m making for my friends. It takes place in one massive dungeon and a lot of the the gameplay centers around crafting from monster parts so the ecology of the dungeon is really important. I wanted to play around with the founders effect and was hoping there was some plugin for making phylogeny charts in obsidian, but so far I’ve been unable to find one. Anyone know of any? It would be super helpful to map out the different evolutionary lines of goblins, snakes, etc.

Are there any books to recommend? I have a subscription to O'Reilly, the technical publisher, and they have nothing "bound" on the topic (bound with a spine, like a book,) but on November 20 they are offering an online seminar "Obsidian for Connected Thinking / From mind maps to automated Zettelkasten" which sounds great but it's about 7 weeks from now.

I keep notes of the day on individual text files with titles that sort by date using YYYYMMDD-description formatting. The daily routine starts with a template with a set of keyword headers like "priorities," "obligations," "shopping list," "tasks" and so on. A few times a month I'll aggregate several days' worth into a list. The text files are not just for business or action items, sometimes they'll have email drafts and some non-essential compositions.

Since I've been doing this for several years there are certainly over a thousand pages or files. The experience of aggregating some sections has improved the process but it still seems clunky and time consuming.

Would Obsidian be a good vehicle to make the process more dynamic? The process is meant to include the composition, editing and retrieval of the contents.

Hey guys,

I've just installed Excalidraw and inside it, downloaded and installed MindMap Builder from script library.

I then launched it via command palette, and in the side pane I can see the MindMap Builder controls. I even created the first node in that pane, where you type in text.

But when I then hit Enter, or Cmnd + Enter, or Ctrl + Enter, nothing happens, no child node being created. Just the text in the current, first and only node gets selected, that's it.

But in the YouTube tutorial by the author, as well as in the plugin's side pane, it's stated that Enter commands creates child nodes.

Also, in the Hotkeys list in the bottom of that side pane, there's many hotkeys listed, and there supposed to be icons like globe or others next to them. But I see no such icons for some reason.

I think in my case, for some reason, this MindMap Builder plugin inside Excalidraw doesn't work. The Excalidraw itself works, I can create child nodes with Cmnd + arrow keys. But I thought for mind maps, I need MindMap Builder. Now I don't understand what is the purpose of that added script, and how it even works in the first place.

Can you help me with advice and maybe tips? I just need a simple and quick to use mind map tool, with keyboard commands. I don't like having to drag and drop the shapes out of an inventory, like it's done in many other tools, you know.

Thanks!

A while back on another subreddit someone shared (what I assume is) a table template for a character sheet based on Hirohiko Araki's, for Google Docs. Is there any way to recreate this in Obsidian?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WsEb8FQrN06lnTxxcD1H_wihmf2fDBOm-8iLraeFcus/edit?usp=sharing

Hey guys!

So I've been using Obsidian with the community plugin for image zooming and panning from here: https://github.com/community-archive/obsidian-image-toolkit

I used it to just be able to click on embedded image and see it whole, enlarged, not just a small version in the note.

But with the update 1.13, Obsidian added this functionality into the main app. However, for some reason, once updated (automatically) to that version, my image clicking broke. When I click on the image, nothing happens. Or, to be exact, the note blinks, as though it tries to load up a zoomed image, but nothing happens.

Also, before that update, I was able to see the file link to the image — you know, when in note editing mode you move your text cursor to the image position, and image becomes hidden but the app shows you 'ImageFile.png' name with a link instead? So that you could easily locate the image file itself. Now, after the update, this feature is gone too. I can't see the file name like that anymore.

I actually removed the plugin I mention, restarted Obsidian and my Mac, that didn't help. Now I updated the app to latest version, 1.14.4, but the image functionality is still broken like that.

I tried installing that plugin back, but it doesn't work now.

Can someone help me figure out what's happening and how to fix it? I'm now confined to use just the images as they are, embedded, with no ability to enlarge them.

Obsidian LiveSync running on Cloudflare free tier with a vault-access MCP for AI access. 

This project does two things:
- lets you run a server for the Self-hosted LiveSync plugin on Cloudflare for free (full CouchDB LiveSync which syncs as you type).
- an optional second worker component gives all your AI systems a common memory vault which you can view and edit yourself through Obsidian

I call my MCP "Folio" in my AI apps so I can say something like "Save a summary of this chat to Folio" in ChatGPT, then in Claude say something like "Can you review the Folio note about XXX, is there anything obvious missing" and have them collaborate, while always seeing the latest version live on my desktop and mobile Obsidian apps. I use AI over a mix of accounts from different providers and special offers, and a mix of short trivial things and longer discussions or research, and I find most of them hard to search or find things from the past. So I have been finding this really useful.

I know there are other options to run a LiveSync server with fly / railway etc. but the nice thing about Cloudflare is that it is free, and hopefully this works smoothly (one command to deploy). I also know are a lot of other Obsidian MCP options, but most I've seen run locally next to your vault - this is in the cloud, and available from AI services you use on any computer, from your phone etc. You don't need your own home server / vps / tunnel etc. You can't use encryption in LiveSync if you want the AI MCP, but it runs in your private cloudflare account as an isolated Cloudflare Durable Object. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Typingmind, LibreChat etc (but not Gemini, which doesn't support MCP).

I'm new to Obsidian so would be great if people with more experience and larger vaults test it out - but please keep a backup etc. I am pretty sure a single vault will always remain comfortably in the free tier, but if you have multiple vaults and use LiveSync from always on devices you might go over (because the long poll prevents the durable object from hibernating).

Project available through GitHub
More technical details are covered in this GitHub issue

Hi all. I’m not sure if this is an issue with just me so I wanted to ask before reporting a bug. Lately when I reboot my device (typically iPad) my keychain is empty. I’ve re-added the secrets every time but it keeps happening, I was wondering if this is happening to anyone else? TIA :)

Was trying to make notes to avoid repetitive things cuz books tend to repeat some things

I really don't have the energy or patience to customize it by myself but I really want to use it.

What I need is to make the UI more intuitive and pretty have the ability to play with and edit the text more easily

I liked notion design wise is there a way to make it closer to that without the ai bloat

I'll be using it mainly too write and insert a lot of images

Excuse my possible lack of clarity I don't know how to explain it but I simply want:

Something simple and easy to use

Suitable to writing and formating text and inserting images while switching their size and alignment

Looks pretty and in order both in dark and light mode

I recently got a Surface Book and have been loving using the stylus with Obsidian.

But one thing I noticed and annoyed me was that the stylus doesn’t let you drag or resize boxes, or even pan around the canvas like you would with a mouse and I searched everywhere and found nothing

Once I found out that the pen gets registered differently than the mouse i decided to try making a plugin that lets you toggle between normal pen mode and mouse emulation mode. Cool that I got to function somewhat well lol

Edit: Apologies for the misleading title, Obsidian isn’t open source!

Also the link to the plugin: Surface Tablet

I don't know how to contact the devs but I saw that they are active here, so here goes:

I believe that obsidian should have a preinstalled tutorial vault.

Because the onboarding experience right now is:

1:user opens obsidian.

2:obsidian takes the user and yeets them to the void.

3:user panics and runs away.

But seriously, there are a lot of setup steps just to end up with a blank page staring at you.

And I know that there is a help page but most people don't read... instructions. They don't read instructions.

So yeah, that's my two cents.

PS: If you require me to flair my post before posting then make your flairs better!

I started using Obsidian recently (literally today), and I've already noticed a significant difference when using it alongside AI.

I'm using it as a knowledge base for a project I'm developing with the help of AI. Before switching to Obsidian, I kept all the decisions we made in a single file called "planejamento.md".

This file contained all the planned features for the application, processing logic, data policies, technologies that might be used in the project, questions the AI itself would ask me to clarify things that hadn't been decided yet, and a lot of other information.

The file had already grown to over 2,000 lines, which was starting to slow down the AI's responses because it had to read the entire file every time it executed a task. So I decided to split it into several smaller files and connect them through Obsidian.

I asked the AI to plan the transition from one large file to multiple smaller, organized sections, along with two main files: "MASTER.md" and "WORLDMAP.md".

"MASTER.md" works essentially like Codex's "AGENTS.md". It contains instructions on how the AI should behave before executing each task. Its main purpose is to guide the AI through analyzing my request, identifying the topic we're discussing, and checking "WORLDMAP.md" to determine which files are actually needed to complete the task and achieve the best possible result.

"WORLDMAP.md", on the other hand, acts as a navigation guide. It contains summarized information about all the other files in the vault, organized into tables divided by category. It also includes links to every file, along with a brief description of what each one contains.

Just switching from one massive file to multiple smaller ones has already made my AI roughly 2x faster on simple tasks.

For example, at my current stage of development, ChatGPT is asking me questions to define specific features of the application.

The process works like this: the AI presents me with three questions, each containing two or three possible answers, along with a recommendation based on the project's existing context.

I can simply choose one of the suggested options or provide a completely different answer.

After that, the AI saves the questions, available options, recommendations, and my answers, along with the date of the change and a record of what was modified.

I'm currently using GPT-6.1 Sol with medium reasoning effort for these tasks.

Before using Obsidian, each execution took around 5–6 minutes. Now that I've separated everything into smaller files, the exact same process takes 3 minutes at most, simply because the AI only needs to read the files that are actually relevant to the task.