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blacksmithgu
obsidian-dataview
TypeScript2021–2025
blacksmithgu / obsidian-dataview

obsidian-dataview

A data index and query language over Markdown files, for https://obsidian.md/.

18Distinct people
19Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
9.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A data index and query language over Markdown files, for https://obsidian.md/.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year19 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2021-07-12 07:09:41 UTC to 2025-08-20 18:08:49 UTC.

024682021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20212022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202

What Hacker News says

8 sources
You can achieve a lot of this with Obsidian and some plugins, like obsidian-dataview and Templater. Might have some missing bits still, but if you're comfortable writing JavaScript (or not, honestly) it's very simple to make your own plugin to fix that, it sounds like a pretty minimal plugin after you have dataview. https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-sample-plugin
In Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software
Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/ And for managing generating more easily exportable formats for things that need stuff like CSV/Spreadsheets: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview For structured entry of text ("forms") so that you can reliably track stuff using DataView, I recommend the Note From Templates plugin: https://github.com/mo-seph/obsidian-note-from-template Simple, no servers, (unless you want sync, and you can use theirs or your own)
In What do you use for knowledge management?
Happy to share some of what's been working for me. Some of this is stuff I'm actively using, some of it hasn't quite made it into the "day to day use" yet, but I've been experimenting with. (Random personal advice: Never let your note taking tools feel like using them is work, that's the first step towards not keeping notes!) - For fans of "outline workflows" Outliner is excellent. A whole bunch of outline/indented text movement and manipulation commands: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner - For easily refactoring notes that are getting too large you want to have Note Refactor. It gives you tools to easily take blocks of text and quickly cut them out into new notes. Its not magic out of the box, but its a powerful tool you can use when building workflows with other plugins. https://github.com/lynchjames/note-refactor-obsidian -
Read the rest
Local images is another good one, working with online content can get messy when you copy notes and then want to be able to work any where you have Obsidian synched. I've got it on my Laptop, two desktops, phone and tablet... I want to carry as much of my related content with me so having an easy way to convert remote images to local copies is a big productivity boost when making notes about content from the internet. https://github.com/aleksey-rezvov/obsidian-local-images - For analysing the content for some useful stats there's: https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis but this is for a relatively specific sort of analysis. - More general and flexible analysis and graph visualisations are available from the combination of https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain , https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview and https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin ... in short query your notes and note metadata like its a database, build reports and data visualisations, and then excalibrain is a whole thing built on top of that power. - Dynamic embeds of outside content are available from https://github.com/dhamaniasad/obsidian-rich-links and https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed depending on the style and use you like. While there is a built in functionality to preview the links to other notes when you hover over them https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Page+preview which has a demo here https://youtu.be/dmnVml_jbsQ?t=222 - And a real force multiplier is adding https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands to your setup. It lets you run scripts and prompt for information and really invest time in procedural automation without having to build your own javascript plugins. So you can setup your system so that when you use the refactor to cut out a new note, the automations will trigger, ask you to give the note a new heading, tags, and you have a little script that checks last modified time of the folder tree of text files, and looks at the folder of the last modified time and asks you in that popup if you want to move the new note to the folder the note you cut it from is located in. Or anything else you can imagine using outside automation and scripting tools on your plain text markdown files. These are just a start and if you haven't already browsed the plugins at https://obsidian.md/plugins I wholeheartedly recommend it, people are adding new cool things pretty often and other plugins add new functionality that makes them worth checking out if they were previously not something that you found interesting. I do a read through of the plugin list probably at least once every month or two just to see what's new, and more often if I'm experimenting with changes to my workflow.
In Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
@luxpir mentioned Obsidian in another comment [1] and it might be what you are looking for, in particular with a community plugin called Obsidian Dataview [2]. Dataview uses JavaScript as a query language and can query the Obsidian "vault" and create different views. Another tool to look at is Logseq [3], which is essentially an outliner (supports both MarkDown and Org syntax), but supports a rather simplistic TODO management system. The benefit here is exactly what you describe—as you work in Logseq, you can create Todos, thereby connecting the task to the related source and any context that surrounds the todo. Furthermore, Logseq also allows for queries [4], allowing you to query your "knowledge graph", which you can embed in other pages. Both Obsidian and Logseq store your files locally, so they can be easily version-controlled (In fac
Read the rest
In Plaintext Productivity
In the past year I've been on a journey of note-taking / personal knowledgebase: - Trillium Notes [0] - Joplin [1] - others I can't remember - Obsidian [2] - Emacs/org-mode - Logseq [3] - and now back to Obsidian again Logseq was really promising in concept - pulls a lot of cool concepts in from the others and supports org files. But I found it to be incredibly slow and laggy with my existing mixed org/markdown files. Unusably so, so I ditched it quickly. Obsidian has come a long way from where it was a year ago in terms of community plugins. There's some crazy stuff you can do with plugins like obsidian-dataview [4], obsidian-itinerary [5], quickadd [6], obsidian-Kanban [7]. It's no Emacs in terms of customizability, but it's pretty damned close. And Obsidian doesn't have the random freezes and random "oops I accidentally
Read the rest
deleted a huge chunk of nested notes" that org-mode constantly exposed me to. I'm loving Obsidian (again). As long as you don't mind JavaScript for plugins and closed source core app, it's a super-powerful and performant option worth checking out. The biggest thing Obsidian lacks right now that SuperNotes 2 seems to offer is good sharing / collaboration between people - for me, I just want to be able to have shared notes with my partner, but sharing with a team would be great, too. I'm not the target audience for SuperNotes 2, but it is good to continue to see competition in this space - the innovation it drives is exciting. - [0] https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/ - [1] https://joplinapp.org/ - [2] https://obsidian.md/ - [3] https://logseq.com/ - [4] https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview/ - [5] https://github.com/coddingtonbear/obsidian-itinerary - [6] https://github.com/chhoumann/quickadd - [7] https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban
In Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/) + a few plugins (enable on the "Community plugins" page in settings): - Advanced Tables (handful of features including sort col while in edit mode): https://github.com/tgrosinger/advanced-tables-obsidian - Sortable (Wikipedia-like col sort for view mode): https://github.com/alexandru-dinu/obsidian-sortable/issues - Outliner: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner - Auto Link Title: https://github.com/zolrath/obsidian-auto-link-title For even more fun: - DataView: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview
In Zim – A Desktop Wiki

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