Former graphic designer, current computer-toucher. I like cheese, robots, Javascript, cooking, photography, computers, and ... too much other stuff. I live in the apple orchards outside of Rochester, NY, and you can find me on Mastodon, Bluesky, and GitHub.

Minimum Viable Obsidian Plugin

Published on by Brian Boucheron

I made an Obsidian plugin last week. It’s called Draft Indicator and all it does is stick a little ✎ pencil icon next to any file that is marked as draft.

A screenshot of an Obsidian window, with two files listed in the file explorer panel. One filename, called
A screenshot of an Obsidian vault. There is a tiny pencil.

I thought this would be a fairly trivial bit of code to write – and it was – but when I first cloned Obsidian’s sample plugin template I was overwhelmed. It’s full of ESLint and esbuild and TypeScript config files, and there are build scripts and dev servers and on and on.

I just wanted to write a little blob of JavaScript.

So I ripped a lot of stuff out. And I wrote my plugin in 42 lines of plain JavaScript, and it works fine and makes me happy.

I took what I learned from this process and made obsidian-simple-sample-plugin, a template that implements the same API examples as the official sample plugin, but stripped down to plain JavaScript. If you have an idea for an Obsidian plugin but were intimidated by TypeScript and its associated tooling, maybe check it out.