Simple Kanban

A lightweight Kanban board plugin for Obsidian. Organize your notes as cards in customizable columns based on frontmatter status. Drag and drop to update your files instantly.

Features

• Status-based columns — Cards are organized by a frontmatter property (default: status)
• Drag & drop — Move cards between columns; the plugin updates the frontmatter automatically
• Customizable columns — Add, remove, reorder, and color your columns
• Recursive folder scan — Monitors a folder and all its subfolders for .md files
• Custom properties on cards — Display assignee, priority, due date, or any frontmatter field
• Column visibility — Show columns always, only when they have cards, or hide them completely
• Case sensitivity — Optional case-sensitive or case-insensitive status matching
• Special columns — NO_STATUS for files without status, NOT_DECLARED_STATUS for unknown statuses

Installation

From Obsidian Community Plugins

1. Open Obsidian Settings → Community plugins → Browse
2. Search for Simple Kanban
3. Install and enable the plugin

Manual Installation

1. Download the latest release from the releases page
2. Extract the plugin folder into your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Simple Kanban in Settings → Community plugins

Quick Start

1. Create a folder for your activities (e.g. Activities)
2. Create a note in that folder with frontmatter:

---
status: todo
---
# My Task Title

Task description...

3. Open the plugin via the ribbon icon (grid) or command palette: "Open Simple Kanban"
4. Drag cards between columns to update their status

Configuration

Required Settings

Setting	Description	Default
Activities folder	Folder path containing your activity notes (scanned recursively)	Activities
Status property	Frontmatter property used for status (e.g. status, state, phase)	status

Optional Settings

Setting	Description
Case sensitive	When enabled, todo and Todo are different columns
Visible properties on cards	Comma-separated property names to show on cards (e.g. assignee, priority, due)
Show property labels	Toggle between "Assignee: John" vs "John" on cards

Column Configuration

• Add/remove columns — Define your workflow (e.g. Todo, Doing, Done)
• Reorder — Drag by the ⋮⋮ handle to change column order
• Colors — Set a color for each column (used for border accent)
• Visibility — Always show, hide when empty, or always hide
• Default value — When case-insensitive, choose which value to write (e.g. todo vs Todo)

Reserved columns (locked):

• NO_STATUS — Files with empty or missing status
• NOT_DECLARED_STATUS — Files with a status not defined in your config

Example Frontmatter

---
status: doing
assignee: John
priority: high
due: 2025-02-20
---

# Implement user login

With "Visible properties on cards" set to assignee, priority, due, the card will display those values below the title.

Usage Tips

• Click a card — Opens the note in the editor
• Refresh — Use the refresh button in the header if the board doesn't update automatically
• Ribbon icon — Quick access via the ribbon (grid icon)
• Command palette — Search for "Open Simple Kanban"

Support

For bugs, feature requests, or questions, please open an issue on GitHub.

License

MIT

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Author: Denis Alves