Obsidian CardBoard Plugin

An Obsidian plugin to make working with tasks a pleasure (hopefully anyway).

• Keep your tasks wherever you like in your vault.
• View them on kanban style boards.
• Use regular tasks and subtasks.
• Two board types supported:
  • Date based (with daily/periodic notes support).
  • Tag based (use #tags to define your boards).

New

• Per-board filtering using file, path, and tag filters.
• Front matter tag support.

Installation

Please install via the regular Community Plugins setting tab within Obsidian.

If you want to keep up to date with any Beta releases then add it to the v.handy obsidian42 BRAT plugin.

Use

When installed, you can launch the plugin:

• using the icon in the app ribbon (see below), or
• using the Command Pallete command (which allows you to open a specific board).

If you have no boards defined, you should get a dialog asking you to add a new board. There are 2 types of board:

• Date based: looks like the main screenshot above.
• Tag based: uses tags to define the columns (you need to include tags on your tasks or in front matter for this to work).

Name and configure your boards and you are good to go.

Cards

Any task in your vault can appear as a card in a column on a board. In order to do this, it must:

• Be in a markdown file.
• Not be indented.
• Have the format: - [ ] Task title.

What appears on the card depends on what your task looks like:

• Anything that is indented under a task will appear in the body of the task.
  • Indented tasks will appear as subtasks (all subtasks are grouped together).
  • Indented text will appear as notes.
• #tags in front matter or on the line of the task (or any subtasks) will appear at the top of the card.
• Due date (if given) will appear at the bottom of the card.

So, if you had the following in one of your markdown files:

- [ ] run erands @due(2021-10-30)
  - [x] do shopping #town
  - [ ] wash car #home/outside
  - [ ] cook dinner #home/kitchen

  perhaps I should look up some [[example_tasks/recipes|recipes]] first

  - [ ] do something with a long title that will truncate when displayed
  - [ ] go to bed

It will look something like this on a card on your board:

Marking a task as complete

If you mark an item as complete on the board it will be marked as completed in the markdown (and vice-versa). If you mark as complete on the board, a completion timestamp is appended to the task:

- [x] Task title @completed(2021-10-30T13:57:48)

If you have subtasks and the parent task is tagged as an autocomplete task then the main task will be marked as complete when you tick off the final subtask:

- [ ] Task title @autocomplete(true)
  - [ ] Do this first
  - [ ] Do this next
  - [ ] Finally do this and you are done

Deleting a task

You can delete a task using the trash icon on the card. This will not actually delete the task from your vault, it simply surrounds it with markdown <del> tags:

<del>- [x] Task title</del>

Editing tasks (and hover preview)

Click on the edit icon to open the file containing the task. Cmd (or Ctrl on windows) hover over the icon for the normal Obsidian hover preview.

Column ordering

The current behaviour for the different columns is:

• Completed: has the most recently completed at the top (assuming they were marked as complete using the checkbox on the board).
• Future, Today, Tags: these are sorted by due date and then alphabetically within this.
• other columns are sorted alphabetically.

I am not convinced that this is the best strategy so this may well change in a future release.

Customising Tags

If you like to apply custom styles to your tags, this is now possible (thank you @darthmachina). Tags have a class that reflects the tag name. So if you have a tag #foo/bar you will be able to style it with your favorite color for foo/bars (which just has to be HotPink) using:

.cm-s-obsidian card-board-card-tag.tag-foo-bar > span.cm-hashtag {
  background-color: HotPink;
  color: DimGrey;
}

Date boards

You will get the best out of these if you are using the (core) Daily Notes or the (community) Periodic Notes plugins, as any tasks you place on a daily note will be assigned to the day of the note.

You can also assign a date to any task using the format:

- [ ] My task @due(2021-10-31)

Overdue tasks

These will appear in the Today column above any any tasks that are actually due today.

The idea being that it will get steadily more annoying to see what you were planning to do today if you have a lot of incomplete tasks from previous days, (hopefully) encouraging you to do something about them; like do them or move them to a future date if you want to schedule them later.

Tag boards

If you give your tasks tags, you can use these to set up a tag-board. So if you have the tags #project1/backlog, #project1/triaged, project1/blocked, #project1/doing, you can define a board that shows tasks tagged with these in separate columns:

Subtags

If you specify a tag with a trailing / then the column will contain all subtags of the tag.

Front Matter Tags

If you want to give all the tasks on a page the same tag, you can put it in the page front matter:

---
tags: [ project1 ]
---

# Project 1

- [ ] this task will automatically have a project1 tag

Board Filters

You can filter what appears on each board in the board settings. There are 3 types of filter:

• file: will only include tasks from the chosen files.
• path: will only include tasks from files in the chosen paths.
• tag: will only include tasks with the chosen tags (including front matter tags).

You can use multiple filters of each type:

• If you have multiple file and path filters then only tasks from the chosen files or paths will be shown.
• If you use multiple tag filters then tasks with any of the chosen tags will be included.
• If you use file/path filters as well as tag filters then only tasks from the chosen files or paths which also have any of the chosen tags will be shown.

Settings

Plugin settings are accessible from the plugin view itself, via the settings icon above the board to the left of the tabs. You can:

• Create new boards (using the + icon next to BOARDS).
• Configure your boards.
• Delete any boards you no longer need.

Limitations

• Might not work that great on large vaults (as it parses all markdown files at startup).
• Might not be great on mobile (see previous, plus I haven't made the interface mobile friendly - yet).

Alternatives

If the way that this works isn't for for you, there are plenty of other fabulous plugins you can use for task management in Obsidian. Kanban, Checklist, and Tasks are the most popular. There are others too, see the list on the wonderful roundup site.

Contributing

How this will work is still evolving, but I am accepting pull requests, so if you would like to help out then you are welcome. Please see the contributing doc for more info and guidance on how to get a dev environment set up and running.

• Bugs/suggestions/feature requests - github issues.
• What's being worked on and up next? - CardBoard Dev
• Questions/discussions - github discussions