CleanView

Turn the notes you already have into live dashboards: tasks, tables, countdowns and charts that update as you type. Build them from a dialog instead of a query language. Nothing leaves your device.

It reads the task syntax you already use — both the Tasks plugin's emoji shorthand and Dataview's inline fields — so it drops into an existing vault without rewriting anything.

New here? Read the guide — a click-by-click walkthrough, no YAML required to get started. What follows below is the technical reference.

view: tasks
title: Due today
filter:
  done: false
  due: { to: today }
sort: [priority desc, due asc]

How it works

Four design choices account for most of its behaviour:

1. It reuses Obsidian's metadataCache rather than building a second index of its own. Frontmatter, tags and checkbox state are already parsed and in memory, so CleanView reads that structure instead of parsing markdown again.
2. It only reads files that actually contain tasks. The cache reports which files have checkboxes before anything is read from disk. A vault of 5000 notes where 200 contain tasks performs 200 reads, not 5000.
3. Editing costs no I/O. metadataCache.on("changed") passes the new file contents as an argument, so re-indexing an edited note reads nothing.
4. Nothing is interpreted per row. Filters and sorts compile to closures once, when the block loads, instead of being walked as configuration for every task on every refresh.

npm test measures the query layer on 20 000 synthetic tasks:

Operation	Time
Parse all 20 000 tasks (full re-index)	~30 ms
Filter + sort (one dashboard refresh)	~1.9 ms

A frame is 16 ms, so a block can be redrawn several times per frame.

These are CleanView's own figures on its own benchmark, measured in Node rather than inside Obsidian. They are not a comparison against any other plugin — no such comparison has been run — and your vault will differ. Run npm test yourself to see the numbers on your machine.

On top of that, a block only re-renders when a change is relevant to it: a block scoped with from: School ignores edits under Projects/, and blocks scrolled out of view are marked stale and catch up when they scroll back in.

Safety

• No network access. No telemetry, no update check, no CDN.
• No eval. Block configuration is data, not code, including the dynamic date and counter placeholders — so nothing in a note can execute.
• No dependencies. package.json contains build tooling only; nothing from npm ends up in main.js. The charts are hand-written SVG.
• No Node APIs, so it runs on iOS and Android.
• Writes only when you click. The single write operation is toggling a checkbox, and it verifies the target line still matches what was indexed before changing anything.

What it reads

CleanView enumerates every markdown file in the vault. That is inherent to what it does — a dashboard asking "show me all overdue tasks" has to consider every note that could contain one. Concretely:

• It lists all markdown files and reads their cached metadata (frontmatter, tags, checkbox positions), which Obsidian has already parsed.
• It reads file contents only for files the cache reports as containing checkboxes, because task text is not held in the metadata cache.
• Nothing read is stored anywhere outside memory, and nothing leaves the device.

Release assets carry GitHub build provenance attestations, so you can verify main.js was built by CI from this repository rather than uploaded by hand.

Requirements

Obsidian 1.13.0 or later. Older versions can install release 0.1.7, which Obsidian selects automatically via versions.json.

Installation

Not yet in the community plugin browser. To install manually, copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from a release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/cleanview/, then enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Getting started

Run CleanView: New dashboard block from the command palette, pick from the dropdowns, press Insert. To change a block later, hover it and click the pencil — the same dialog reopens with your settings loaded. To add a task with a due date, run CleanView: Add task.

That covers it for most uses. GUIDE.md walks through all of this with concrete examples, plus a tour of every block type and what each one is for.

Block reference

Every block starts with ```cleanview and contains YAML.

Common keys

Key	Meaning
view	tasks, table, stat, chart, countdown, text
title	Heading above the block
source	tasks (default) or files
from	Restrict to folders: from: School or from: [School, Projects]
filter	See below
sort	[priority desc, due asc]
group	file, folder, due, priority, status, tags
limit	Maximum rows

Filters

A bare value means equality. An object means operators.

filter:
  done: false                        # equals
  due: { to: today }                 # on or before today
  due: { from: today, to: today+7d } # range
  due: overdue                       # keyword: overdue, today, week, none, future
  tags: { has: [school, exam] }      # has at least one
  text: { matches: chapter }         # contains
  status: { not: "-" }               # not equal

Operators: is/eq, not/ne, before/lt, after/gt, from/gte/min, to/lte/max, has/in, matches/contains, exists.

Date expressions: today, tomorrow, yesterday, 2026-11-21, today+7d, today-2w, today+1m.

Task fields

text, done, status, priority, due, scheduled, start, created, completedOn, recurrence, tags, path, file, folder, line.

Both metadata dialects are read, so you do not have to pick one:

- [ ] Read chapter 5 📅 2026-09-15 ⏫ 🔁 every week   # Tasks plugin
- [ ] Read chapter 5 [due:: 2026-09-15] [priority:: high]   # Dataview

Note fields

name, path, folder, tags, size, tasks, openTasks, mtime, ctime. Anything else is looked up in frontmatter, so status: reading filters on the note's own status key. Frontmatter dates work whether Obsidian parsed them into a Date or left them as a string.

Views

view: stat
title: Open tasks
filter: { done: false }
value: count          # count, sum:field, avg:field, min:field, max:field, distinct:field
goal: 20              # optional progress bar

view: chart
type: bar             # bar, line, donut
by: folder
value: count
filter: { done: false }

view: countdown
filter: { type: goal }
date: due             # optional; auto-detected from common key names
sort: [due asc]

view: table
source: files
columns:
  - { field: name, label: Note, link: true }
  - { field: page, label: Progress, format: progress, max: totalPages }
sort: [mtime desc]
limit: 12

Column formats: auto, text, number, date, relative, relative-ms, bool, tags, progress, markdown.

view: text
format: "{date} · week {week} · {open} open tasks"

Placeholders: {date}, {date:iso}, {weekday}, {week}, {year}, {open}, {tasks}, {notes}.

Chart colours

Chart chrome — surface, gridlines, text — is inherited from your Obsidian theme through its CSS variables, so charts look native under any theme.

Series colours are not inherited. They are a fixed palette validated for colour-vision deficiency against both a light and a dark surface. A theme author has never checked their accent colours for that, and a chart whose categories cannot be told apart is worse than one that ignores the theme. Every chart also carries a Show values toggle, since three of the light-mode series colours sit below 3:1 contrast against the surface.

Dates and numbers are formatted with Intl using the runtime locale, so they follow the reader's language without the plugin shipping translations.

Development

npm install
npm run dev      # esbuild in watch mode
npm run build    # type-check + minified build
npm test         # 58 assertions plus a performance measurement, in plain Node
npm run preview  # chart and countdown harness at http://localhost:4599

preview/ renders every chart type and the countdown cards, in light and dark, in an ordinary browser without starting Obsidian. The chart layer deliberately uses only standard DOM APIs so that what you see there is the same code that runs in the plugin; the view layer needs a small shim for Obsidian's element helpers, which lives in preview/obsidian-shim.ts and is never bundled.

Everything under src/core and src/query is free of Obsidian runtime dependencies — types only — which is what lets npm test run in Node.

Licence

MIT