technical-obsidian-template

Base template for creating a vault for technical/scientific notes. It includes specific formatting, and specific use cases, as well as examples for Temaples, and dataviews:

Install

• Download Obsidian
• Clone the repository git clone https://github.com/kobbled/technical-obsidian-template
• Open the technical-template folder in obsidian as a new vault.
• Enable Community plugins

Homepage

Features

Periodic (Daily) Notes

Full periodic notes system with Daily, Weekly, and Monthly templates.

• Daily: Date-based naming (YYYY-MM-DD), linked to week/month notes
• Weekly: Aggregates daily data with embedded section transclusions (![[{{day}}#Quick Notes]])
• Monthly: Dashboard view with heatmaps and task summaries
• Navigation buttons between days/weeks/months
• Plugins: Periodic Notes, Calendar

Task/Habit Tracking

Comprehensive habit tracking system in Daily Template with 18+ trackable activities:

• Exercise: weights, cardio
• Music: guitar, piano, singing, recording
• Art: drawing, 3D modelling
• Maker: coding, electronics, 3D printing, modding
• Reading: books, articles
• Media: video games, movies/TV, TTRPGs

Features:

• Toggle switches for each habit (Meta Bind)
• Conditional time sliders appear when habit is toggled on (JS Engine + Meta Bind)
• Productivity and mood tracking (0-10 progress bars)
• Weekly aggregation tables showing habit completion per day

Heatmap Tracking

GitHub-style activity heatmaps in Monthly Template using Heatmap Calendar plugin.

• Separate heatmaps for: Exercise, Music, Art, Reading, Maker categories
• DataviewJS queries filter daily notes by month and habit flags
• Custom styling via heatmap_custom_styling.css
• Visual year-at-a-glance progress tracking

Habit Tracking Dashboard

The Home page includes at-a-glance habit summaries and year-long self-tracking heatmaps powered by three widgets in Widgets/.

Habits Last 7 Days (Widgets/Habits Last 7 Days.md) Displays two collapsible panels side-by-side on the Home page:

• Status Table — Dataview table of the last 7 daily notes with per-category emoji indicators (Exercise, Music, Reading, Maker, Art, Entertainment)
• Progress Bars — Rolling 7-day completion counts shown as HTML progress bars against weekly targets

Category	Habits Included	Weekly Target
Exercise	weights, cardio	4
Music	guitar, piano, singing, recording	3
Reading	book_reading, article_reading	3
Art	modelling, drawing	2
Coding	coding	3
Maker	electronics, printing	2
Entertain	moviestv, videogames	4

Productivity Heatmap (Widgets/Productivity.md) Year-long GitHub-style heatmap (green gradient) showing daily productivity scores (0-10 scale). Each cell links back to its daily note for hover preview.

Mood Heatmap (Widgets/Mood.md) Year-long heatmap (yellow gradient) showing daily mood scores (0-10 scale). Same pattern as the Productivity widget.

How to use:

1. Open or create a daily note using the New Daily Note button on the Home page
2. Toggle habits on/off and set time spent using the sliders that appear
3. Rate your productivity and mood using the 0-10 progress bars at the top of the daily note
4. Return to Home.md — the Habit Tracking section updates automatically with the last 7 days, and the Self section shows your year-long productivity and mood trends

Customizing targets: Edit the target numbers in Widgets/Habits Last 7 Days.md inside the progress(filternLastCount(...), TARGET) calls to match your own goals.

Post-it Notes

Sticky note styling for embedded content via stickies.css.

• 5 color variants: yellow, green, purple, cyan, orange
• Handwriting fonts (Rage, Segoe Print)
• Hover shake animation
• Applied via cssClass: .stickies, .stickies-2 through .stickies-5

Image Styling & Tools

Multiple image manipulation and display options:

• Centering: .centerImg class or alt="center"
• Shapes: URL hash #circle or #round for circular images
• Galleries: [!callout|gallery] or cssClass: image-gallery (MCL Gallery Cards)
• Float/Aside: Alt text keywords for positioning
• Zoom: Click-to-zoom via Image Toolkit plugin
• Carousel: Pure CSS slideshows via carousel.css
• Banners: Top-of-note images via Banners plugin
• Processing: Image Converter for resize/compress/convert

Media Library Databases Using Bases

Obsidian Bases plugin for database-style views of media collections. See bases-databases.md for full documentation.

14 Active Databases:

Category	Databases	Source Folder
Movies	4 (All, Watchlist, Ranking, Recent)	libraries/movies
TV Shows	1	libraries/tv
Books	1	libraries/books
Video Games	7 (All, Playing, On-Hold, Backlog, Rankings, PC Installed, Steam)	libraries/video-games
Board/TTRPG	2	libraries/games

Features:

• Card layouts via bases-cards.css with property packing technique
• Image overlays with positioned pills and tags
• Status indicators (watched/played/owned)
• View-level filters for status-based views (status == ["[[playing]]"])
• Dual views: Cards (visual) and Table (data) per database
• Poster images from external APIs (OMDb, Google Books, IGDB, BGG)

Collections Management with Bases

Extended Bases usage for non-media collections:

• Software/Apps catalog
• Subscriptions tracking
• Beer collection

API-Powered Media Entry

QuickAdd macros with custom scripts fetch metadata from external APIs:

• Books: Google Books API → title, authors, ISBN, cover, page count
• Movies/TV: OMDb API → cast, director, ratings, poster, plot
• Video Games: IGDB API (Twitch OAuth) → genres, platforms, cover art, developer
• Automatic template population with fetched data
• User prompts for personal ratings and status

Zotero Paper Import

Academic reference management via Zotero Integration plugin.

• Paper Template with Nunjucks/Jinja2 syntax
• Imports: title, authors, DOI, citekey, abstract, annotations
• Status/priority extraction from Zotero "extra" field
• Linked to Zotero desktop application

Grocery List Manager

Complete grocery workflow:

• Grocery List Template with categorized sections (Produce, Meat, Dairy, etc.)
• Archive button triggers QuickAdd command
• archiveGroceryList.js Templater script copies to dated backup
• Archive stored in Personal/Cooking/Groceries Archive/

Cooklang Recipes Integration

Recipe format support via Cooklang plugin.

• Cooklang syntax for ingredients and steps
• Recipe Template for manual entry
• Stored in Personal/Cooking/recipes/

Software Catalog System

Comprehensive tracking of installed software:

• Desktop apps (Apps Template) with 18 type categories
• Mobile apps (Phone Apps Template) with OS tracking
• Usage frequency scale (0-4)
• Installation status

Subscription Tracker

Financial tracking for recurring costs:

• Categories: Computer, Phone, Internet, Social, Media, Home, Car, Courses
• Fields: cost, renewal date, termination date, payment term, account charged
• Active/inactive status

External Cloud Folder Linking

File protocol links to local/cloud storage via utility scripts:

• getCurrFolder.js - Calculate parent folder paths
• getRelFileLink.js - Generate file:// links with URL encoding
• Supports relative paths from current note location

Obsidian Web Clipper AI Imports

6 web clipper configurations for automated note creation:

Untappd Beer Clipper

• Trigger: untappd.com/b/
• Captures: brewery, ABV, IBU, style, rating, label image
• Path: Personal/Food & Drink/Beer

BoardGameGeek Clipper

• Trigger: boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/*
• Captures: publisher, year, rating, description, image
• Path: Personal/Media/libraries/games

Medium Article Clipper

• Trigger: medium.com/, *.medium.com/
• Captures: full article content, author, published date, reading time
• Path: Clippings/Medium

Adafruit Product Clipper

• Trigger: adafruit.com/
• Captures: price, product ID, image
• AI prompts: category classification, product description
• Path: Spaces/kobbled/Electronics/Products

Realtor.ca Listing Clipper

• Trigger: realtor.ca/real-estate/
• Captures: price, sqft, year built, beds/baths, MLS#, address, photos
• Path: personal/Home/buying/listings

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Visual Customization

Workspace Backgrounds

workspace-background.css provides:

• Background images for workspace, notes, and file explorer
• Multiple presets (Tokyo, Mountain, Forest, etc.)
• Custom URL support for light/dark modes
• Blur, brightness, saturation controls
• Style Settings integration for easy configuration

Canvas Decorations

canvas-candy.css (by TfTHacker) adds:

• Colored headers and footers on canvas cards
• Vertical labels (left/right sides)
• Shape effects: circle, parallelogram
• Rotation (8 angles)
• Border styles: dotted, dashed, double, drop shadow
• Transparent/gradient card effects

Multi-Column Layouts

MCL (Modular CSS Layout) snippets enable:

• [!multi-column] callout for flexbox columns
• Float callouts with size options
• List columns, grids, and cards via cssClass or tags
• Wide page views beyond readable line length

Multi-Select Suggester

Custom Templater user script (multiSuggester.js) extends single-select to multi-select:

• Keeps modal open for multiple selections
• Returns array when user presses Escape
• Used in Apps, Phone Apps, Table Top Game templates for OS/platform selection

Conditional UI Components

JS Engine + Meta Bind integration in Daily Template:

• Time tracking sliders only appear when corresponding habit is toggled on
• Reduces visual clutter
• Reactive updates via mb.listenToMetadata()