Boardwalk

A lean, modern kanban board plugin for Obsidian — drag-and-drop task boards in plain Markdown, with first-class per-card move history.

Boardwalk reads and writes the same Markdown board format as the Kanban plugin by mgmeyers, which it uses as its feature reference (with gratitude). Boards are plain Markdown files: ## headings are lanes, - [ ] list items are cards. Your data is never locked in — every board opens in either plugin, or in any text editor.

Why another kanban plugin

The original Kanban plugin is excellent but effectively unmaintained since mid-2024. Boardwalk is a from-scratch reimplementation of the subset that matters most to its author, plus the features the original never shipped:

• Move history — every card records which lanes it has lived in and when (optionally with time of day), stored as a hidden comment block in the Markdown itself, ready for later analysis
• Multi-select — Ctrl/Cmd-click several cards and drag them together
• Edits save on blur — no lost edits when focus leaves a card
• Undo/redo on the board — Ctrl/Cmd+Z / Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z, plus pane-header buttons
• Tri-state checkboxes, important-card marking, per-tag colors, due-date chips with a picker, drag-to-reorder lanes, an archive browser, search (Ctrl/Cmd+F), and safe handling of files changed externally (sync)

→ User guide — how to use everything below, with shortcuts.

Features

Boards

• Lanes drag-reorder by their header, collapse to a narrow strip (chevron in the lane header, stored compatibly with the original plugin's list-collapse setting)
• A lane renamed (double-click its title) to end in (N) — e.g. Doing (3) — gets a work-in-progress limit; the count turns red when exceeded. Visual signal only, nothing is blocked
• A lane can be flagged Complete from its menu ("Mark cards complete on entry"): cards moved into it are checked automatically. Moving a card out never un-checks it — the checkbox is otherwise yours
• The archive keeps finished cards out of view without deleting them: toolbar archive icon → browse, restore to any lane, or delete

Cards

• Click a card to edit; edits commit when focus leaves. Escape cancels
• Clicking the checkbox cycles unchecked → in progress (- [/]) → checked, rendered with your theme's own task-checkbox styling
• Ctrl/Cmd+! (hovered card or the whole selection), or the context menu, toggles #important — red edge, red pill
• Due dates: @{YYYY-MM-DD} on the card renders as a relative chip (overdue red, today orange); set or change it from the context menu or by clicking the chip
• Internal links open on click (Ctrl/Cmd-click for a new tab) and show the Page Preview popover on hover
• Every card touched by Boardwalk gets a stable block ID (^abc123), so cards are linkable: context menu → "Copy link to card"

Move history

Boardwalk appends a ledger to the board file recording, per card, when it entered each lane:

%% boardwalk-history:
abc123: 2026-08-20 Backlog | 2026-08-24 09:15 Doing
%%

Plain ISO dates in an Obsidian comment — invisible in reading view, harmless to other tools. "Include time in move history" (on by default) adds HH:mm. Entries are healed if a card is found in a different lane than the ledger claims (e.g. after a raw-Markdown edit).

Caveat: the original Kanban plugin rebuilds board files on save and silently drops the ledger. Boardwalk therefore mirrors every board's history into its own plugin data as a backup; if a board's ledger goes missing while a backup exists, Boardwalk offers a one-click restore banner — it never silently rewrites your file.

Install

Install from Obsidian's Community plugins browser (search "Boardwalk" or "kanban"), or from the directory listing. Alternatives:

• BRAT: add this repository in BRAT
• Manual: copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/boardwalk/ and enable the plugin

Files with kanban-plugin frontmatter open as boards automatically; the view toggles back to raw Markdown from the pane menu or the "Toggle board / markdown view" command.

Desktop only for now (mobile later — the original plugin reads the same files in the meantime).

Building from source

npm install
npm run build   # typecheck + bundle → main.js
npm test        # parser round-trip and ops tests

The parse⇄serialize round-trip tests are the safety net: a board written by the original plugin re-saves byte-identical.

License

GPL-3.0 (see LICENSE). Boardwalk is an independent, from-scratch reimplementation that is file-format-compatible with obsidian-kanban © mgmeyers (GPL-3.0), which served as the feature reference.