The First 3 Community Plugins I Recommend to New Obsidian Users
Let me level all of your expectations right now.... these are not fun or exciting plugin recommendations, rather, they are practical 💼. There are plenty of other posts and YouTube videos covering all of the fancy and powerful plugins you can use to make your 🌈dream Obsidian experience.
However, I think we sometimes underestimate the value of quality plugins that are:
- Unobtrusive
- Increase Efficiency
- Translate to native Markdown
These are the three plugins I would recommend to everyone as the perfect place to start with Obsidian.
🔗 Paste Url Into Selection
Writing markdown style hyperlinks is tedious: [some link](https://www.somewhere.com).
This plugin let's you highlight some text with your cursor, then paste the content on your 📋 clipboard into that text, automatically creating a Markdown link. Check out the demo to see what I mean.
📆 Natural Language Dates
Say you are documenting a task that needs to happen next Tuesday, or journaling about something that happened last Friday and you want to enter the date for that day, would you know it? Maybe, but equal chance you might have to crack open a calendar and check, or do some mental ➗ math to figure it out.
Natural Language Dates plugin let's you insert a date semantically. You can literally type @Today or @next Friday and the plugin will auto-replace that text with the correct date.
It works for a variety of date descriptions and even supports inserting the date as a 🔗link which is handy for those who keep Periodic, Daily, or Calendar Notes and would like to create backlinks to those notes.
😄 Emoji Shortcodes
If you've developed the habit of inserting emojis in other applications using shortcode syntax :smile: then this plugin is for you.
Emoji Shortcodes brings that simple experience to Obsidian.
Further Reading
If you're thinking of trying out some of these plugins, you might also be interested in how I document my obsidian setup to help you keep track of what plugins you're using and why.