Genkan

Genkan

Genkan (玄関) is the entryway of a Japanese home: the place you step in. This plugin is the entryway to your vault, a dashboard homepage for Obsidian that works on desktop, iPhone and iPad.

• Clock, greeting and date, with 12 or 24 hour time
• Search your whole vault from the homepage (press / to focus it)
• Favourites: one-click chips for the notes you open most
• Tasks and seven quick notes (like Tot) that sync with the rest of your vault
• Calendar that opens (or creates) your daily notes
• Web clips from the Obsidian Web Clipper and your recent notes
• Quick links to commands, notes or web pages
• Ring notes: an optional card for voice notes from a Pebble Index ring
• A photo of the day and a daily quote (both optional)

It reads and writes your vault directly through Obsidian's own API. There is no server, no account and no API key required.

Screenshots

Dark and light themes (the dashboard follows Obsidian's theme by default):

On a phone it becomes a single column with tasks and the quick notes first:

The quick notes card, in light and dark: seven notes, one per colored dot, with formatting as you type and a footer of counts and the last-saved time.

The screenshots use sample data.

Install

With BRAT: install the BRAT plugin, choose "Add beta plugin", and enter kenroy/genkan.

Manually:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Put them in <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/genkan/ (create the folder).
3. In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins, reload, and turn on Genkan.

Open it from the home icon in the ribbon, or run Genkan: Open homepage from the command palette. Turn on Open on startup in the settings to make it your landing page.

On iPhone and iPad the plugins folder is hidden. The easy route is to install on a computer and let Obsidian Sync carry the plugin across (Settings → Sync → installed community plugins).

Using Genkan

Favourites

Click + Add and pick a note, click the star in any note's header, right-click inside a note, or run Genkan: Add or remove current note from homepage favourites. Click the × on a chip to remove it. Favourites are plain [[wikilinks]] in Favourites.md, so Obsidian keeps them correct when you rename a note, and you can reorder them by editing the file.

Tasks and the quick note

Tasks are a checklist in Tasks.md, written like - [ ] Buy milk ➕ 2026-10-10 ^id (compatible with the Tasks plugin). There are seven quick notes, shown as colored dots across the top of the card. The open one is filled and numbered, and a small center dot marks a note that has something in it. The first is Quick Note.md, and the rest are Quick Note 2.md to Quick Note 7.md, created when you first type in them. Click a dot, use the arrow keys on the dots, or press Cmd/Ctrl+1 to 7 while the note has focus to switch. The footer shows the lines, words and characters in the open note and when it was last saved. Each device remembers which note you had open. Because they are normal notes, they sync with the rest of your vault, and changes made on another device appear live. You can edit them by hand; tasks typed without an id get one automatically.

The quick note is a small rich-text editor: the toolbar (and Cmd/Ctrl+B, I, U, K and Shift+X) makes text bold, italic, underlined or struck through, turns lines into headings, bullets or numbered lists, and adds links, and you see the styling as you type. Type --- and press Enter for a horizontal line. The file is still plain markdown: **bold**, *italic*, ~~strike~~, [links](url), # headings, - and 1. lists, --- rules, and <u>underline</u> (markdown has no underline). Anything else in the note is kept as typed. If a note holds something the editor could not write back unchanged, it opens as plain text with a short notice instead, so nothing is ever altered behind your back.

By default these live in genkan/data/. Change the Data folder setting to put them elsewhere.

Collapsing cards

Click the − beside Ring notes, Web clips or Recent notes to fold a card down to its title (the count stays visible), and the + to open it again. Each device remembers what you collapsed.

Calendar and daily notes

Click a day to open that day's note, creating it if it does not exist. Genkan uses your Daily Notes or Periodic Notes settings for the folder, date format and template, or the Daily notes folder setting if you set one. A dot marks days that have a note.

Quick links

Edit them in settings, one per line: icon | label | action, where the action is command:<command id>, open:<note path>, daily, random or an https:// address.

Ring notes (Pebble Index)

Turn on Pebble ring notes, then set Where does the ring save notes? to match the Obsidian setting in the Pebble app:

Newest first. Click an entry to open it. The card updates live as the ring saves notes, and Max ring notes sets how many are shown.

Languages and regions

Genkan is available in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese. By default it follows Obsidian's own language setting (Settings → General → Language); the Language setting in Genkan overrides it. Other Obsidian languages fall back to English.

• Dates, times, number formatting and the first day of the week follow your device's region as well, so a French device set to Canada gets Canadian French formats. The 12/24-hour clock and the first day of the week can be set explicitly.
• English spelling follows the region: American on US devices ("favorites"), British elsewhere ("favourites"). The Spelling setting overrides it.
• Daily quotes: the Quote source setting chooses between ZenQuotes (English only), the Echoes API (quotes in your language) and a bundled list in each language that works offline. Existing English installs keep ZenQuotes; other languages start on the bundled list.
• The bundled quotes and proverbs were also written with AI assistance, from memory, so attributions should be checked.
• The translations were written with AI assistance and have not been reviewed by native speakers. Corrections are welcome as issues or pull requests: the text lives in src/i18n.js, keyed by the English wording.

Network use and privacy

Genkan does not collect analytics or telemetry, does not require an account, shows no ads, does not download or run code, and never reads files outside your vault. The contents of your notes are never sent anywhere. The only network requests are below, and each can be turned off.

Notes:

• The Unsplash key is optional. It is stored in this plugin's settings file (.obsidian/plugins/genkan/data.json) in your vault. If you use Obsidian Sync with plugin settings, the key syncs with it, so keep your vault private.
• Quotes from ZenQuotes are credited in the interface, as their free API requires: "Inspirational quotes provided by ZenQuotes API". Echoes quotes are credited the same way. The bundled quotes make no request. If a request fails, a bundled quote is shown.
• To search, list recent notes, offer the favourites picker and match daily notes, Genkan reads the list of note names and paths in your vault through Obsidian's API. It reads a note's contents only for search snippets, ring notes and web clips, and none of it leaves your device.
• Today's photo and quote are cached in the plugin's own settings file, not in browser storage.
• Links you click (photographer credits, the ZenQuotes and Echoes links, any https:// quick link) open in your browser.

Settings

Settings → Genkan: your name, open on startup, appearance (follows Obsidian's light or dark theme by default), clock format and clock font (your Obsidian theme's interface, text or monospace font, the system serif, or the name of any font installed on the device; it never downloads fonts), Web Clipper, daily notes and data folders, how many clips and recent notes to show, the Pebble ring options, photo of the day and Unsplash key, daily quote, site icons, and quick links.

Development

The repo has no dependencies besides Python 3 for the build step.

python3 build.py

• main.template.js: the plugin source
• src/icons.js, src/quotes.js, src/i18n.js: the icon, built-in quote and translation data
• src/base.css and styles.extra.css: the styles. build.py scopes src/base.css under .hp-root, adds styles.extra.css, and writes styles.css
• main.js and styles.css are generated; edit the sources above instead

To release, set version in manifest.json (and add it to versions.json), run the build, commit and push, then push a tag that matches the version exactly (for example git tag 0.1.5 && git push origin 0.1.5, with no "v"). The Release workflow in .github/workflows/ rebuilds main.js and styles.css, checks they match what is committed, attests their provenance, and publishes the release with main.js, manifest.json and styles.css attached. To verify a downloaded file: gh attestation verify main.js --repo kenroy/genkan.

Credits and licence

Genkan is released under the MIT licence.

Quotes by ZenQuotes and the Echoes API. Photos from Unsplash and Picsum Photos. Site icons from Google's favicon service.

Genkan is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Obsidian, Pebble or Core Devices. "Pebble" and "Pebble Index" belong to their owners and are used only to describe compatibility.