There’s a lot of noise around community plugins in Obsidian. And why shouldn’t there be? They’re the essence of the software, bringing near-unlimited flexibility to build your perfect system from.

By comparison, core plugins are neglected. People sometimes don’t realise the power and capability built in to Obsidian. Optimising your core plugin settings can save you time and help you create more impactful work.

This article’s going to run through the core plugins that play significant roles in my workflows.

I’ll explain the settings I use, as well as giving a few select plugins that are available from the community specifically available to improve the function of or substitute for core plugins.

Let’s get started…

Linked thinking is an integral part of Obsidian’s offering as a note-taking app — it has an entire graph plugin to view these links between notes (we’ll get to it later). There aren’t many settings related to the backlinks core plugin, because it’s quite a simple feature.

However, you can choose where to view backlinks in your vault. I have a tab in the right sidebar that shows the backlinks of the active document. There’s also an option that adds backlinks to the bottom of the document in the editor. There is no difference between what’s shown here and what’s shown in the sidebar, so the option you choose is based on your preference only.

Bookmarks

This is the newest core plugin in Obsidian, built to replace starred files. You can bookmark notes, headings, searches, blocks and tabs. These bookmarks appear in a sidebar tab where you can rename them, edit them and organise them into folders.

A use of bookmarks that I’ve implemented in my vault uses the Grappling Hook plugin by pseudometa. This plugin allows you to cycle through your bookmarks with a hotkey, which is useful when you work with a core set of notes that you always need quick access to.

Canvas

This is another one of Obsidian’s newer offerings, and a very exciting one at that. This core plugin creates a canvas upon which you can place cards, notes and attachments, as well as images and web embeds.

There are tools to draw visual links between the different elements on your canvas, as well as organise them into colour-coded groups.

I don’t have a large use for canvas in my vault, but there’s plenty of potential with a tool as freeform as this — I’ve seen examples including building family trees, trees of evolution and mind mapping.

Command palette

This is an extremely functional core plugin. Many actions in Obsidian are built around having commands that you execute to perform specific functions.

Although I advocate assigning many of the useful commands that you use regularly to hotkeys, you can’t do this with all the commands that you want to use.

This is where the command palette comes in — you enter the text in the command, the plugin searches the commands found from all plugins in your vault, and displays the one most like your search query. If the right one’s selected, you just press Enter and the command is executed.

As well as being able to search for commands, you can pin commands to the top of the list of search results for easy access when searching for them.

Daily notes

Just a quick point about daily notes. I don’t use them. I know that it’s a very popular feature within Obsidian though. The plugins Periodic Notes and Calendar were all I needed when I was considering using the feature.

I don’t have a use for daily notes aside from journaling, and I prefer to do this with a pen and paper.

Graph view

One of the more unique features of Obsidian. I talked about backlinks earlier — the graph view is just a visual way of displaying these backlinks. Notes are represented as dots in the graph, and lines are drawn between the notes that contain links with each other, creating a web of notes.

There are some ways to customise the graph view:

  • Choose what to view — from tags, attachments, existing files only and orphaned files (those with no links to others)
  • Group different sections of the graph, by path, tag, file, line and section. You can add colours to these sections, allowing you to distinguish them in the graph view
  • Display settings — you can choose to have arrows on the links, showing the direction in which the note link occurs
  • Forces — you can change how the actual graph interface behaves — are the notes experiencing high or low repel force and centre force?

There’s also a little button that progressively adds notes to the graph view in the order with which you added them to your vault. It’s a nice little animation to watch when you want to procrastinate.

Outline

A small feature, this displays an outline of your active note in the sidebar. Useful for navigation and organisation if you’re working on a longer piece of writing that has many sections.

Quick Switcher

This is how you jump form one note to the other quickly. You enter some words from the title or folder of the file that you’re searching for, and the quick switcher throws back at you the options it’s likely to be.

You can customise the quick switcher’s options, telling it whether to show just existing notes, attachments or all file types.

Omnisearch is a community plugin that I use — it’s basically a better version of the quick switcher. You can specify file extensions to search, show file excerpts in the options, show previous query results and highlight the matching words and results.

This is a search engine for all of your notes — more full-featured than the quick switcher.

This core plugin creates a pane in the sidebar where you can scour your notes for certain elements that you add into the search field. You can customise the search using the same elements that you can group the graph view by — path, tag, file, line and section.

I use the search feature when I’m looking for content in my vault to do with a specific topic in my university notes. It quickly suggests all the relevant files for me to overview.

Sync

I succumbed to subscribing to Obsidian sync when I bought my iPhone a month or so ago. Before this, I used Syncthing, which functioned near flawlessly between my Android and laptop, but seeing as it doesn’t work well on iOS devices, I decided to change to Obsidian sync. Sync is a very fast and secure solution for synchronising your files between devices.

Within the sync core plugin, you can decide what folders and settings are synced to your remote vault. You can also decide by file type what is shared. You can sync hotkeys, plugin lists and settings as well as main settings and appearance settings.

There are methods for recovering deleted files, and a setting version history, making this the most granular, accurate and customisable way to synchronise your Obsidian vault.

Tags

An additional way to add a layer of organisation to your notes. I use tags to connect topics between what I’m writing. You simply use tags by adding them inline in a document with a hashtag, or in the ’tags’ property in the YAML metadata of a file.

The community plugin Tag Wrangler is almost a necessity when working with tags in Obsidian. It allows you to, in it’s own words, ‘rename, merge, toggle and search tags from the tag pane’.

Templates

The last core plugin I’m going to talk about is the templates core plugin. This was a very useful plugin in my workflow before I started using the community plugin that overshadows it — Templater.

The core plugin Templates lets you specify a folder that contains notes acting as templates. In the command palette it gives you the option to insert a template into the current note, insert the date into the current note, or insert the time into the current note.

It uses MomentJS format syntax, so you can add some variables into your notes, but this function is much extended by Templater, one of the best Obsidian plugins for power users. It uses a large number of internal functions to allow you to specify near any variable in your template, from document tags, to cursor position.

If you use templating functions in Obsidian, this is one plugin you should install because of the increased functionality.

So there you have the most relevant core plugins in Obsidian. They form the basis of most functions in the app, as well as a lot of community plugins. Learning how they work and customising them to increase the effectiveness of your workflows is one of the best things you can do.

Thanks for reading, I hope I provided practical information and value!