Every single Obsidian plugin I use (Obsidian tour 2023)

Obsidian’s plugin ecosystem has exploded—so much that one vault can end up with dozens of add-ons—yet the practical challenge is choosing what to keep enabled. In a 2023 tour of a personal “main vault,” Nicole van der Hoeven inventories 49 installed plugins (with many disabled), using the list as a real-world guide to how people balance power, niche utility, and performance risk.

The tour starts with plugins that reshape core writing workflows. Admonition extends Obsidian callouts by letting users define custom callout types. Advanced Slides turns Markdown into Reveal.js-based presentations with better control over themes and templates, and it’s treated as the default way to present because it keeps slides in plain-text, note-like form. Advanced Tables fixes Markdown’s clunky table syntax by enabling a faster “enter and tab” workflow that auto-formats columns and alignment.

From there, the list leans heavily into TTRPG and content production. Banners provides Notion-style cover images, mainly for tabletop roleplaying. Better Word Count highlights text and reports word totals, which is used both for tracking spell text and for meeting strict abstract requirements (e.g., 150-word calls for papers). Fantasy Calendar becomes a personal and work content calendar with color coding, while Fantasy Statblocks generates monster and NPC stat blocks. Initiative Tracker and Kanban support tabletop session management and project planning, with a hybrid approach because Projects doesn’t yet fully match Kanban’s drag-and-drop experience.

Several plugins target “quality of life” and precision. List Callouts creates callout-like styling inside lists where normal callouts don’t fit. Copy button for code blocks adds one-click copying of code. Editor Syntax Highlight brings IDE-style coloring to code blocks (and even frontmatter), making multi-code-note documents easier to scan. Show Current File Path adds breadcrumb-style folder context so templates don’t silently misplace notes.

The inventory also shows how privacy and reliability shape what stays enabled. ChatGPT MD and Text Generator are kept disabled in the main vault due to concerns about sending information to third-party servers; the workflow shifts to test vaults and manual inspection of network requests. Buttons is described as “hit or miss”: it works in some contexts (like Kickstarter-backed project buttons) but becomes flaky elsewhere, so templates replace it for session creation.

For data and automation, Dataview remains a top tool for querying note metadata, while Dice Roller adds randomness for tabletop play and for selecting notes from tables. Periodic Notes structures recurring review cycles (daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly) and supports multiple sets for personal vs. work. QuickAdd accelerates repetitive note creation through macros. Readwise Official syncs highlights into Obsidian on a schedule, and Settings Search helps users find where a setting lives across core and community plugins.

Finally, the tour includes experimentation and “installed but not enabled” tools. Postgres, SQL for Obsidian is kept off while it’s tested for pushing metadata into a database for visualization (e.g., with Grafana). Omnivore is monitored as a Readwise alternative but limited integrations keep it from replacing existing workflows. Etherpad is described as functional but not as robust as Google Docs, requiring a separately hosted Etherpad instance. The list ends with Vault Changelog, which generates a changelog page of recently edited notes.

The overall takeaway is less about collecting plugins and more about curating an ecosystem: enable what improves daily writing, keep niche or unstable tools off by default, and treat performance and privacy as first-class constraints.