Building a USEFUL Dashboard in Obsidian

A ready-to-use “home dashboard” can be built inside an Obsidian vault by installing a community CSS snippet (“dashboard plus plus”) and pairing it with DataViewJS queries for live lists and vault stats. The payoff is a single page—typically named “home”—that stays organized and automatically updates as notes change, without requiring users to write CSS from scratch.

Setup starts in Obsidian’s Settings under Appearance, where CSS Snippets can be enabled by pointing Obsidian to its Snippets folder inside the vault’s .obsidian directory. The required file, dashboard.css, is pulled from the dashboard plus plus project repository and copied into that Snippets folder. A key practical detail: a recent DataView update caused CSS conflicts, so the snippet’s dashboard.css was updated quickly to stay compatible.

With the CSS snippet installed, a new page (the “home” page) is created and given a YAML header that applies the dashboard CSS class. At first, preview mode shows little because the page has no content yet. The next step is pasting the dashboard plus plus markdown template from the repository into the page, which provides the structure: a header plus nested lists that render as the dashboard layout.

To improve readability and spacing, the walkthrough adjusts editor behavior. It turns off “readable line length” for the dashboard look, but avoids breaking line wrapping across the entire vault by adding a second CSS snippet (dashboard-ReadableLineLength.css). Enabling that snippet restores the desired white-margin dashboard formatting while keeping the editor’s readable line length setting on.

Once the dashboard renders, the most valuable part is the built-in query system. The template includes sections for “recent file updates,” “favorites,” and “vault info” counters. These lists are driven by DataViewJS, which requires DataView installed plus JavaScript query permissions enabled in DataView settings (both JavaScript queries and inline JavaScript queries). After refreshing the home page, the dashboard populates with live results.

The “recent file updates” query returns the last four edited notes by default, with configurable parameters: the number of results (e.g., 10 instead of 4), filters like folder name (e.g., “movies”), and tag-based selection (e.g., “weekly review”). The “favorites” query pulls notes tagged “favorite,” making frequently used pages one click away. Vault statistics queries count pages globally and within specific paths such as “family/recipes.” The template can be extended by copying a counter query and changing the parameters—for example, counting “weekly journal entries” under a “Journal/weekly” structure.

Finally, the dashboard can be enhanced with two automation plugins. The banners plugin adds a customizable image banner to the page using a local image downloaded from Unsplash, with banner height adjustable (the walkthrough uses 500). The homepage plugin then forces Obsidian to open directly on the “home” page, with optional DataView query support enabled and a hotkey assigned (Command H, then H) to jump to the dashboard from anywhere in the vault.