I use Obsidian for several specialised functions that the base version of the app doesn’t support very well. These include sending flashcards to Anki for revision as well as creating book notes and academic scripts that I then have to export to PDF format. Because of this, I use a selection of plugins that help me achieve these different functions. This article is about my three favourites that I use for the above functions. These plugins play a central role in my productivity, increasing the efficiency with which I work and create output.
There’s the chance I’ll have to replace these plugins if they don’t continue development, but at the moment I don’t see them leaving my vault configuration because of these functions that they provide. A lot of the plugins that I list here have replacements that you can use, so you have to look around for what suits your own use case and system — this is to showcase the plugins and their place in my workflow.
1. Citations
This plugin plays an important role in the work that I do for university. It reads a BibTeX file that the Better BibTeX Zotero plugin repeatedly exports from my Zotero library. The file contains all the metadata about the academic resources that I am referencing for my research. The plugin allows me to choose one of these sources and insert it as a markdown citation into the script that I’m writing, saving time and space by using citekeys. When I come to render the document as a PDF at the point of submission, the citekey inserts a perfectly formatted in-text citation and bibliography entry into the PDF.
It can also create literature notes from the highlights that you’ve made of the PDFs you’ve been reading. You have to extract these annotations in Zotero first, but then the plugin uses a template that you’ve defined to create a literature note that you can search for in the same modal that you use to insert citations. This works well for using the next plugin to make AI summaries of the literature notes. You end up with a concise roundup of everything that you find important in a certain source.
Like I mentioned before, there are other plugins that serve a similar purpose to Citations; you have to find the one that serves the use case that you have. I find that this is Citations and I do recommend this plugin if you have academic writing to manage.
2. QuickAdd
This is a plugin that I’ve talked about a lot recently in my Obsidian writing. It’s pivotal when inserting templates and other content into notes in my vault. You could use many different plugins in combination to serve the same purpose, but QuickAdd unites all these functions into one plugin that can combine them together to make macros for more complex automations in your vault. This makes it irreplaceable amongst community plugins.
This is only strengthened by QuickAdd’s recent AI update. There’s quite a few plugins that have integrated OpenAI’s API to create a service like ChatGPT in Obsidian. AI Assistant in QuickAdd goes beyond that to allow chains of AI commands stored in templates, allowing you to perform more complex functions. An example of this is a workflow I use that builds a summary of the input content and then turns the facts into flashcards that are the format required to export them to Anki for spaced repetition learning.
3. Readwise Official
This plugin connects to your information in Readwise and exports it into a folder in your vault. Readwise is an online service that aggregates your highlighted content from across the internet, including services such as Kindle, Instapaper and Twitter. This is very powerful because of how it allows you to read and consume on different platforms and collect everything in one central location.
You can use the highlights to make literature notes and evergreen notes in your vault. If you have a project that involves idea generation as well, you can link these highlight notes to the project files, creating a web of thinking that overcomes the problem of consuming content on separate contained platforms.
Readwise comes with a cost, albeit a very cheap one, so I appreciate some people aren’t interested in using this tool. There’s quite a high return on investment when purchasing Readwise though, so it’s something I recommend for those who do a lot of reading on the internet.
For those who don’t want to spend, there are alternative ways to export your highlights from various platforms, it’s more time consuming, so you have to weigh up the pros and cons of having to spend more time doing this.
Some honourable mentions
Pandoc/Shell Commands — These plugins allows for the running of commands related to rendering of academic work from within Obsidian. This saves time because of how you would have to perform this by typing a command into the terminal every time you wanted to replicate an action. It’s also quite a specialised function so there aren’t many plugins that provide it.
I used the Pandoc Plugin because it was simple to setup and automate the export to different formats but lately I’ve had to work with Quarto files because of the need to include R plots in my lab reports. Fort this, I installed Shell Commands to render the .qmd files from within Obsidian. This plugin provides a lot more customisation, but both are quite unintuitive to use if you don’t have experience with using the command line.
Editor Syntax Highlight — This is one of those plugins that makes life easier without much compromise — it highlights the syntax of whatever code you might be using in your vault, allowing for better understanding. This can include R, like for the plots I described earlier, but also LaTeX and Obsidian-specific code such as Dataview syntax. It’s a plugin that fades into the background and does its job very well without any maintenance — the hallmark of a productive tool.
Dataview — A cliche plugin to use in a list such as this one, but there is no other plugin that provides such value as Dataview does. It allows you to query your notes and display lists and tables dependent upon the content of the YAML or inline metadata values. The uses of this range from displaying all lecture notes for a specific module in one list, to custom JS that takes a YouTube video transcript and feeds it into QuickAdd to give an AI-generated summary of the content.
Conclusion
These are the plugins that are the most functional and useful in my vault — they allow me to be productive and also give me the chance to explore my ideas and creativity. Don’t feel you have to use the same plugins in your vault — use whatever is conducive to creating your best work in the least time possible.