LLM Best Practices

Obsidian: Essential Plugins

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Overview

Obsidian ships with a capable core feature set. Community plugins extend it, but the marginal value of each additional plugin decreases quickly and the maintenance burden grows. This page covers the five plugins that pay for themselves in a publish-ready vault. Install only what is listed here until you have a concrete need that none of them satisfy. Avoid plugins that rewrite file content on save; they produce diffs you did not author and can corrupt frontmatter.

Templater: inject frontmatter and structure on creation

Templater replaces the built-in Templates plugin for any vault that needs date expressions, file context, or JavaScript logic in templates. See obsidian-templates for the full template authoring guide.

Key settings after install:

  • Set “Template folder location” to _templates/.
  • Enable “Trigger Templater on new file creation.”
  • Configure “Folder Templates” to map each content folder to its template.
  • Bind “Create new note from template” to a hotkey (Cmd+Shift+N works well).

The folder template mapping is the highest-value feature: new notes get the correct frontmatter stub automatically, without any manual invocation.

Dataview: query the vault by frontmatter

Dataview turns frontmatter fields into a queryable database. Use it to generate dynamic MOC sections, audit drafts, and surface notes that need updates.

Inline query in a note:

TABLE last_updated, status
FROM "backend"
WHERE status = "draft"
SORT last_updated ASC

This renders a table of all draft notes in the backend folder, sorted by last-updated date. Replace "backend" with any folder path or leave it out to query the entire vault.

Use Dataview for auditing, not for navigation. MOC pages with explicit wikilinks are easier to maintain and publish to Quartz without requiring the plugin at render time. Dataview queries are an Obsidian-only feature; they appear as code blocks in the published HTML unless you pre-render them.

Tag Wrangler: rename and merge tags vault-wide

Tag Wrangler adds a right-click menu to the Tags panel that lets you rename a tag across all notes, merge two tags, and create sub-tag hierarchies. Without it, renaming a tag requires a manual find-and-replace across every file.

After a bulk import or a tag audit (see obsidian-vault-structure), use Tag Wrangler to consolidate synonyms (pine, pine-script, pinescript all become pine-script) before they propagate further.

Pandoc Plugin: export to Word, PDF, and EPUB

The Pandoc Plugin adds an Obsidian command that pipes the active note through pandoc for export. Useful for sharing content with collaborators who do not use Obsidian.

Prerequisites:

# macOS
brew install pandoc
# Ubuntu / Debian
apt install pandoc

In plugin settings, set the pandoc path to the binary (find it with which pandoc). Configure a default output folder for exports so they do not land in the vault root.

Pandoc resolves wikilinks as-is. Before exporting a note that contains wikilinks, consider whether the recipient needs the linked content or just the current note. For full vault exports, use obsidian-export instead (see obsidian-publishing-to-quartz).

Latex Suite: fast math notation in markdown

Latex Suite adds snippet-based auto-expansion for LaTeX math notation. Useful for technical and quantitative notes.

Example snippets from the default config:

  • Type mk to wrap selection in $...$ (inline math).
  • Type dm to insert a $$...$$ display math block.
  • Type frac inside a math block to expand to \frac{}{} with cursor in the numerator.

For pine-script notes that document formulas (ATR, Keltner bands, position sizing), Latex Suite reduces the friction of writing $\text{ATR}_{14} \times 2.0$ from scratch. The snippets are configurable in the plugin settings; replace the defaults with the abbreviations you use most.

Plugins to avoid

  • Auto-note mover: moves files based on frontmatter. Useful in theory but triggers file-system events that can confuse git and break wikilinks if not renamed through Obsidian.
  • Obsidian AI plugins (general-purpose): rewrite note content automatically. They produce diffs you did not author and can corrupt frontmatter on write.
  • Customizable sidebars / Hider: cosmetic. Not worth the update maintenance overhead.

Evaluate any additional plugin against two criteria: does it solve a concrete problem you have today, and does it write to note files on save? If yes to the second, skip it.

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