Ninja Board

Ninja Board is an Obsidian plugin that shows your notes as five boards: Today, Week, Projects, Backlog & Waiting, and a Guide. It is for people who keep tasks, projects and appointments as plain notes and want to see and plan them the way a good app would.

Drag a card to another column, and the note changes with it.

Drop a task on a day in the Week strip to plan it.

What it does

• Adds five views to Bases, Obsidian's core plugin for views over notes. Bases picks the notes, and Ninja Board draws them.
• In a view you can tick a task, set its state, drag a card to another column, plan a task for a day or a week, set a deadline, arrange a board, and open the note behind anything.
• It keeps no data of its own and uses no network. Every change is one small edit to one note, so a view always matches your vault. Even a board's order is saved in its dashboard note.

It works with any vault laid out like the sample vault: notes with a type in their frontmatter, task lines in the Tasks plugin's Dataview format, and the dashboard notes in 01 Dashboard/. The full note format is in Database.

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.10.2 or newer. Ninja Board uses the Bases view API, which arrived in 1.10.0. Ninja Board is tested on desktop. It is not marked desktop-only, but the phone app has not been tried.
• The Bases core plugin, turned on. Without it, Ninja Board shows a Notice and adds no views.
• The Tasks community plugin, set up as in Set up Tasks.

Install

Ninja Board is not in Obsidian's community plugin browser yet. Install it by hand or with BRAT.

By hand:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Put them in <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/ninja-board/.
3. Reload Obsidian, then turn on Ninja Board under Settings → Community plugins.

With BRAT:

1. Install BRAT from the community plugin browser.
2. In BRAT's settings, choose Add beta plugin and enter https://github.com/AlexSendula/ninja-board.
3. Turn on Ninja Board under Settings → Community plugins.

For a new vault, Second Brain Setup installs Ninja Board, Tasks (already set up) and the dashboard notes for you.

Set up Tasks

Do this once, in Obsidian's settings:

1. Under Tasks → Task Format, choose Dataview.
2. Under Tasks → Task Statuses, add a custom status: symbol w, name Waiting, next status symbol x, status type ON_HOLD.
3. Leave Set done date on every completed task on. It is on by default.

The Guide's Setup tile checks this for you. The user guide says what it checks. The Guide reads whether Tasks is on, and Tasks' saved settings, to check the setup, and nothing else.

Add the dashboards

Each view lives in a dashboard note. Copy the five notes from sample-vault/01 Dashboard/ into a 01 Dashboard/ folder in your vault. Each one holds a single base block, like Today's:

filters:
  and:
    - '!file.inFolder("10 Archive")'
    - 'file.ext == "md"'
views:
  - type: ninja-board-today
    name: Today

The others use ninja-board-week, ninja-board-projects, ninja-board-backlog and ninja-board-guide. To open on Today, set it under Settings → Files and links → Default file to open.

Try the sample vault

sample-vault/ is a small vault with the dashboards and invented notes. Copy its contents into an empty folder, open that folder as a vault, then install Tasks and Ninja Board as above.

Use it

• Tick a task: click its circle, or press Space.
• Plan, set a deadline or change a state: right-click a row or card (long-press on touch, or Shift+F10) to open its card.
• Move a task or project: drag it to another column, or onto a day of the Week strip to plan it.
• Arrange a board: drag a card within its column, or press Alt+↑ and Alt+↓.
• Open the note: click the title, or press Enter.
• Undo: Cmd/Ctrl+Z in a view, or the command Undo the last change.

The user guide covers each view, planning a week, the cards, repeats and the exact edits Ninja Board makes. If something doesn't show, see Troubleshooting.

Screenshots

_Week

Today	Projects
Planning a task	Guide

Update

Replace the three files with the ones from the new release, then reload Obsidian. BRAT can do this for you.

Developing

You need Node 24 or newer. From this folder:

npm install
npm run build

npm run build writes main.js. With manifest.json and styles.css, that is the whole plugin. Reload Obsidian after each new build.

• npm test runs the tests.
• npm run lint checks the code with ESLint and Obsidian's review rules. It must report nothing.
• npm run typecheck checks the types.
• npm run dev rebuilds main.js on every change.
• npm run preview shows the real views on the sample vault, at http://localhost:8766/preview/.
• npm run sandbox (macOS only) builds and copies the plugin into the vault named by BRAIN_VAULT (by default ~/Documents/Obsidian Vault). The vault must already have a .obsidian folder, or the script stops. npm run sandbox -- --yes also moves that vault's notes to the Trash and copies in the sample vault.

Releases are built by pushing a tag equal to the manifest's version, for example 1.0.1. The release workflow then lints, tests, builds and attests the three files.

More in the developer guide.

Part of Second Brain

• Second Brain: the framework, with its design and research
• Ninja Board: the Obsidian plugin that shows the vault as boards
• Second Brain Setup: sets up a vault from one sentence to your agent

Licence

MIT, Copyright (c) 2026 AlexSendula. See LICENSE.