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💡 The Big Idea: A Roundup of the Best Obsidian Writing Plugins Available

Obsidian is so much more than just a notes app. It's actually a pretty incredible writing app.

Whether you are a blogger, novelist, or just someone who wants to write to clarify your thoughts on a topic, Obsidian's plugin architecture gives you the ability to craft your ideal writing environment.

Here is a list of my favorite community plugins to help transform Obsidian from a standard text editor into the ultimate writing app.

Reading Time

The Word Count core plugin has been updated to show word and character counts for selected text. But it can also be helpful to know about how long something will take to read.

That's where the Reading Time plugin comes in.

This simple plugin adds an estimated reading time for the selected note to the Status Bar.

I use this plugin when writing video scripts for my YouTube videos to estimate how long a video will be when I'm done with it.

Typewriter Mode

The Typewriter Mode plugin consolidates a couple of other essential plugins into one. First, it adds a typewriter scrolling mode that keeps the current line at a fixed position on the screen. You can choose whether you want to highlight the current line, and you can also choose a number of lines to display above or below the active line.

The second thing this plugin does is add a mode to help you focus on the words that you're writing. You can dim unfocused paragraphs or sentences, and you can also launch a fullscreen focus mode that hides the sidebars and eliminates the visual clutter on screen so you can focus on the words.

This plugin is great when you need to eliminate distractions and focus on your writing.

Ghosty Posty

This year, I made the switch from WordPress to Ghost as my publishing platform. And while there are a couple of plugins that allow you to publish to your Ghost-powered website, Ghosty Posty by Matt Birchler is the best one of the bunch.

I love this plugin because it supports all of the standard Ghost features like tags, featured posts, and visibility levels, plus it can automatically upload images that are included in your post.

The only downside is that it's not in the community plugins directory, so you have to install it via BRAT.

Kanban

The Kanban plugin turns a Markdown note into a Kanban board. And since you can link to other notes in your card titles, the Kanban plugin is a great way to manage your active writing projects.

With the note titles linked, you can simply ⌘-click on the note to open it in a new tab and start writing. The columns make it easy to see your project statuses, and you visually see your projects move from left to right as they get completed.

I've got a whole system I built for this inside of LifeHQ, my epic done-for-you Obsidian vault. But if you want to see how I put it together, check out this YouTube video:

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Even if you don't go that far with it, though, this is a great plugin for tracking progress on your writing projects.

LanguageTool

Using Grammarly inside of Obsidian is...not great.

I wish Obsidian had an official Grammarly plugin (impossible since they discontinued their SDK). But since it doesn't, the next best thing is the LanguageTool plugin, which gives you a built-in native spelling and grammar checker.

Note that the LanguageTool, plugin is a form of the LanguageTool Integration plugin that is currently in maintenance mode. This one has fewer downloads, but has some additional features and fixes.

I don't think it's quite as good as Grammarly, but it's better than copying and pasting the text somewhere else. Just be aware that if you are using the Obsidian 1.9.x beta you may have issues with text replacements via the tooltip feature.

Soundscapes

The Soundscapes plugin is technically not a writing plugin, but one that I use frequently when writing. This plugin adds a music player to the status bar that you can use to play LoFi beats, nature sounds, ambiance, and much more. Technically, this plugin lets you choose between different YouTube playlists, but the result is an audio player that can provide focus music to help you keep cranking out the words during your next focused writing session.

What I like about this plugin is that there are plenty of options for music without words, which is key for focused writing. And since all my writing happens inside of Obsidian, it's nice to be able to toggle this on or off right from the Status Bar.

Keep the Rhythm

I've mentioned this one a lot recently, but with good reason. It's one of the best plugins for writers I've ever come across.

In fact, Keep the Rhythm just might be my new favorite plugin. I actually did a whole YouTube video on it if you want to see it in action:

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This plugin helps you build momentum by helping you to show up and write every day. The heatmap helps you see your writing progress over time and creates motivation to not break the chain.

If you need some help doing the actual writing, this plugin is for you.

Sentence Rhythm

One of the best things you can do as a writer to keep your writing interesting is to vary your sentence length. For example, this one is short. See what I mean?

When all your sentences sound roughly the same, it can be very boring for the reader. The Sentence Rhythm plugin helps you avoid that by using different colors to highlight sentence rhythm, which helps your writing avoid sounding bland and boring.

If you are writing with the intention of publishing your words somewhere, this plugin can help you make it easier to read.

Readability Score

I have a bad habit of using big words when I write. With the Readability Score plugin, I can check the readability of the current note using the Flesch Reading Ease (FRE) scale.

A score somewhere in the 100-90 range is ideal, indicating a 5th-grade reading level. But as you can see in the screenshot below, I tend to skew a bit higher than that.

It's been said that Reader's Digest has a score of 65, so that's about what I shoot for. Being able to see my score can help me course correct when I get a little too nerdy or academic with my writing.

Writing Goals

If you are working on a bigger writing project, you'll probably want something like the Writing Goals plugin to help you keep track of word counts across your notes. With this plugin, you can track not just a target number of words per file but also per folder.

This is handy if you're working on something like a book project because you can set a goal for the folder and create individual notes for the different chapters. All of your writing progress can be rolled up and displayed visually in either the File Explorer or the right sidebar.

😎 Something Cool: TaskForge

Big shoutout to Library-member LaRosa for turning me onto TaskForge, a native task management app that integrates with the excellent Obsidian Tasks plugin to give you full task management capabilities on macOS, iOS, and soon, Android.

This app addresses one of the biggest tradeoffs that come with managing tasks in Obsidian by giving you system-level notifications for your tasks! It seems like the perfect complement to my Obsidian-based task management workflow, and I happily paid the $29.99 one-time in-app purchase to unlock the Premium version on all platforms.

I'll report back after I've had some time to put it through its paces, but at first glance, this app looks like it's exactly what the doctor ordered. If you are using Obsidian Tasks for task and project management, you'll want to give this a look.

📚 Book Notes: From Strength to Strength

​From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks is an interesting book.

The subtitle ("Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life") makes it sound like a book about navigating a mid-life crisis, which, admittedly, is not an exciting topic to me. As a result, while I actually own two copies of this book, I've been putting off reading this one for quite a while.

After reading this one for an upcoming episode of Bookworm, I don't think I was wrong about the premise 😂 But it's also a great book that I'm very glad that I've read.

The truth is, transitions are hard. And this powerful book can help you navigate them in a way that you actually thrive.

Whether you are going through a tough transition right now or not, this is one that belongs in your library. You may not need it right now, but chances are you will someday.

If you want to download my mind map book notes for this incredible book, click here.

— Mike