Hearth

Hearth — a home screen for Obsidian

Hearth turns your Obsidian vault into a welcoming front page. A fast fuzzy search bar, quick file-type filters, and a freely arrangeable grid of live widgets — notes, tasks, kanban boards, calendars, web pages, stats, clocks and launchers — on desktop and mobile.

Think of it as a new-tab dashboard, start page and command launcher in one.

• 🔍 Search everything — fuzzy, full-text, tags, frontmatter and commands
• 🧩 25+ card types — embeds, tasks, calendars, Dataview, Git, Jira, and more
• 🎛️ Free-form layout — drag, resize and snap cards anywhere
• 🪟 Frosted glass — per-card opacity, blur, color and corner radius
• 🗂️ Multiple dashboards — switch with a click or a hotkey
• 📱 Mobile mode — collapses to a search-only launcher

Screenshots

Disclaimer

This plugin was created using AI.

All PR are tested in testing vault by human before merging, and all releases are beta tested in testing vault by human before promoting to stable.

Quick start

1. Install Hearth from Obsidian's community plugin browser — or drop main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/hearth/ and enable it.
2. Hearth opens on startup and replaces empty new tabs (both toggleable in Settings → Hearth).
3. Open it any time from the ribbon home icon or the Open home dashboard command.
4. Hit Arrange (top-right) to add, move, resize and configure cards right on the board.

Setup wizard

On a fresh install Hearth offers to build your first dashboard for you. It asks a handful of questions — a title, a look, what you use your vault for — and lays out a board from the answers rather than dropping you on a generic starter grid.

It also looks at what you already have. Every supported plugin that is installed and enabled is offered with the one thing accepting it will do:

The TaskNotes case is the one worth calling out: its field names are user-remappable and its statuses user-defined, so Hearth reads them from the plugin and copies them across. A vault that renamed due to deadline gets a Tasks card that works on its first render.

The last step previews the board — a scale drawing plus a list of every card and why it's there — before anything is written. Nothing is applied until you press Build my dashboard.

You can run it again any time from Settings → Hearth → About → Build a dashboard, or the Set up Hearth command. Run that way it always adds a new dashboard: every board you already have is left exactly as it is.

Search

The search field is keyboard-first, with four transparent modes:

• Auto-detected filters — file-type chips built from what actually lives in your vault (notes, images, video, canvas, bases, Excalidraw…). Click one to list its items; hide the ones you don't need.
• Recent files appear in an empty, focused search field.
• New note button creates a note in your default location.
• Omnisearch engine (optional) — swap the built-in engine for Omnisearch under Settings → Appearance → Search engine.
• Hide it — Settings → Appearance → Home → Show search section turns the whole section off vault-wide, and each dashboard's Search visibility can follow that default or override it to show or hide the section on that board alone.

Cards

Add cards from the Arrange toolbar; configure each one from the card itself (title, content, colors, size, opacity, blur).

Add card opens a searchable picker: type to match a card's name or its description, or browse by category (Notes & files, Planning, Vault insight, Tools, Integrations, Fun). Cards backed by a community plugin are always listed — they're marked Needs Dataview (or Datacore, or Templater, or Git) when the plugin isn't there, with a one-click jump to install it. And if the card you want doesn't exist, Request a card at the bottom of the rail opens a pre-filled GitHub issue or email.

Notes & files

• Embed — any note, image, canvas or .base file, rendered by Obsidian itself. Per-card zoom, optional in-place editing (raw or Live Preview), and a second view you can flip to with a switcher. A picture can be framed as well as embedded: fill the card and crop, fit the whole thing, stretch it, or fit the width and scroll — with the crop anchored to any of nine points, and zoom working inside the frame.
• Slideshow — pictures from your vault, rotated on a timer. Pick them one by one (each with its own caption) or point the card at a folder, with or without its subfolders. Order by name, creation or modification date, your own list order, or shuffled; choose the seconds per picture, the transition (cut, crossfade, slide or zoom) and its length, an optional slow zoom while a picture is held, and whether pictures fill the card or fit inside it. Hover for previous / pause / next.
• Daily note — always today's note, with one-click creation when missing.
• Excalidraw & canvas — edge-to-edge templates with native pan/zoom.
• Plugin view (beta) — host another plugin's side-panel view (calendar, outline, tag pane, Kanban…) inside a card, optionally pinned to one file.
• Dataview (requires Dataview) — run a DQL or DataviewJS query and render it through Dataview's own, live-updating renderers, with resizable table columns.
• Datacore (requires Datacore) — the same for Dataview's successor: write a Datacore query and get a live list of what it matches, or a full JS/JSX/TS/TSX script rendered by Datacore's own views.

Tasks

• Tasks — reads Markdown checkboxes, TaskNotes task notes, or a Kanban board note. Toggle, create and open tasks in place; scope by folder.
• Kanban board — render any source as a drag-and-drop board with custom columns and task states. Drops are written back in Kanban's own format, so the note stays editable in the Kanban plugin.
• Dates & priorities — full obsidian-tasks marks (🔺⏫🔼🔽⏬ 🔁 🛫 ⏳ 📅 ✅), relative labels ("Today", "Next Friday"), natural-language input (📅 in 3 days), and per-occurrence completion for recurring tasks.
• Sorting & filtering — smart chain (due → scheduled → priority → created) or a custom multi-rule sort, per list and per Kanban column.
• Custom task fields (opt-in) — build what a task shows from scratch: name a field, pick how it's drawn (chip, dot, text, row tint or glow), and map any frontmatter or built-in key to labels and colors. Click a value to change it.
• Quick view — click a task for a compact popover with editable metadata and description instead of jumping into the note.

Time & data

• Calendar — month, week, day and list views over the same sources, with named events in the month cells, a scrolling time grid that splits overlapping events into columns and marks the current time, and an all-day band. Follows your locale's week start and clock by default; the week start, hidden weekends, week numbers, drawn hours, hour height and much else are yours to set.
• Mini calendar — month grid or agenda, resolved from the core Daily notes plugin, with dots for existing notes, ISO week numbers and an edit heatmap. Subscribe to external ICS/iCal calendars, or use TaskNotes as a source (scheduled tasks, due dates, recurrences, timeblocks). Create a note from any event, linked back by ID.
• Vault statistics — notes, attachments, folders, tags and daily-note streak.
• Activity heatmap — a GitHub-style grid of notes edited or created per day.
• Saved search — a stored query, refreshed live.
• Jira filter — a saved Jira filter over HTTPS with bearer PAT auth, plus status / assignee / priority / type / sprint / version filtering. Exports never include the PAT.
• Weather — current conditions and a forecast from Open-Meteo, free and with no API key or account. Five styles, from a bare glyph and temperature to an edge-to-edge painted sky that follows the real conditions and the time of day (drifting clouds, rain, snow, stars, lightning). Search for a place or type coordinates, pick your units, and switch on exactly what you want to see — feels-like, high/low, humidity, wind, precipitation, UV, pressure, sunrise and sunset, an hourly strip and a daily forecast.
• Clock & greeting — digital or analogue face, custom date formats, and an optional playful greeting.
• Git (requires Git) — your vault's repository at a glance: branch, staged and changed files, unpushed commits and the recent log, with buttons that commit, sync, push, pull, stage and discard. Every one of those is the Git plugin doing the work through its own task queue, so your remote, credentials and commit-message template apply unchanged — and right-clicking a changed file offers its diff, staging and discard. Choose which sections and which buttons the card shows, and what a commit from it covers.

Launchers & utilities

• Links / launchpad — a grid of tiles opening notes, URLs or commands, each with its own column and row span, droppable anywhere on the card.
• Commands — tiles that run any command-palette command.
• New note from template (requires Templater) — the same launchpad, but each tile makes a note: pick one of your Templater templates, the folder the note goes in, and a filename pattern (Meeting {{date}}, {{prompt}} to be asked for the rest of the name), and one click creates it. The same template can feed three different folders from three different buttons — something Templater's own per-template commands can't do, since they all obey one default location. Templater does the templating: your user scripts, tp.system.prompt() dialogs and tp.file.cursor() placement behave exactly as they do from its own command. Tiles that only file something away can skip opening the note.
• Bookmarks — Obsidian's core bookmarks, with site favicons.
• Favorites and Recent files — curated and recent note grids.
• Web page — any http(s) URL in a sandboxed iframe, with optional auto-refresh.
• Text / jot-down — a quick Markdown scratch field saved with the card.
• Calculator — evaluates as you type: math, unit conversions, number bases (FF hex to decimal, 255 to hex), live currency (Frankfurter, ECB rates) and plain-language queries (20% of 150). Optional on-screen keypad.
• Pet — a pixel-art companion (cat, dog, bird, fox, frog or blob) whose mood follows your vault: content, happy or bouncing with joy as you write, slouched and bored and then curled up asleep on a quiet day. Each mood is drawn animation — blinking, head-wagging, hopping, breathing — and its eyes follow your pointer. Set a night window and a quiet small hour reads as the hour, not as neglect. No hunger, no age, nothing to lose — and clicking it earns hearts. Name it, color it, and set where every mood begins.

Everything is live: embeds and editable notes follow vault events without losing your cursor, data cards redraw on vault and metadata changes, and web cards can refresh on a timer. Cards that reach the network (Jira, calendars, weather, currency) all respect Settings → Behaviour → Disable external calls.

Layout

• Free-form drag & resize — move cards anywhere and resize from any edge or corner, with magnetic snapping to neighbours and the board.
• Edge-merging — snap two cards together and their shared border drops out, so the pair reads as one continuous tile.
• Multiple dashboards — a [1] [2] [+] switcher in the top-left. Name each board, give it an emoji or a Lucide icon, reorder by dragging, and override the global width, columns, row height, background and title icon per board. Open a board's settings either from Dashboard settings in the Arrange toolbar or by right-clicking its switcher button.
• Pinned cards — pin a card to appear on every dashboard, sharing one definition and position.
• Fit to page — lock the board to one screen or let it scroll.
• Import / export — back up or share a board's layout as JSON.

Appearance

• Background — solid color, vault image, URL, or a live weather sky: the board's backdrop becomes the painted sky the weather card's artistic style draws, spread across the whole window and following the real conditions and time of day over a place you pick. Or pin one sky — clear night, snow, thunder — and keep it whatever the weather is doing, which needs no location and never goes online. All with opacity and blur. Ships with a soft ambient default.
• Banner or full background — wear that same backdrop either way: filling the whole view, or as a banner across the top of the board — a cover image, the way one sits above a note — with the cards below it on your theme's own surface. Set the height, fade the lower edge into the page, and choose whether it lines up with the content or runs edge to edge. Each of those is its own per-board override, so one dashboard can show the vault's background as a banner while the next keeps it as a wallpaper — no picture restated either way.
• Frosted glass — card opacity and backdrop blur at three levels (global → per-dashboard → per-card). Merged cards blur as one seamless sheet.
• Card corner radius — from the default 14 px down to sharp 0 px.
• Per-card colors — an accent and a background tint for any card.
• Title, logo and compact spacing for the dashboard header.
• Lucide icons — pick any icon from the Lucide set for Hearth's tab and ribbon button and for the title beside the board's heading, searched from a picker rather than typed from memory. Each dashboard can override the title icon, so one board can show a flame and the next a rocket; leave a field empty and the Hearth crystal (or your emoji logo) stays as it was.

Mobile

• Mobile mode — an optional search-only launcher on phones and tablets; desktop is unaffected.
• Action bar — a row of buttons under the search field (New note, New drawing, Record voice, Open daily note by default), each swappable for any command.
• Keyboard-aware — the visible area tracks the on-screen keyboard.

Settings

Everything lives under Settings → Hearth, grouped by a category ribbon: Appearance, Search, Dashboard, Behaviour (startup, new tabs, where notes open, mobile, privacy), Integrations, Backup and About. Per-card settings are edited from the card itself in arrange mode.

Keyboard shortcuts

Bindable under Settings → Hotkeys:

• Open home dashboard
• Switch to dashboard 1…9
• Switch to next / previous dashboard

In the search field: ↑/↓ to move, Enter to open, Esc to dismiss.

Development

npm install      # install dependencies
npm run dev      # watch build -> main.js
npm run build    # typecheck + production build
npm run typecheck

To test in a vault, symlink or copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/hearth/.

Translations — user-facing strings live in src/locales/. English (en.ts) is the source of truth; copy it, translate the values and register the file. See src/locales/README.md.

Contributing

Hearth moves fast, so the most valuable contributions right now are bug reports, feature ideas and translations. Small, obvious fixes are always welcome; for anything larger, please open an issue first — big PRs against a fast-moving codebase tend to go stale. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Support

Hearth is free and open source. If it's earned a place on your vault's front page, you can buy me a coffee — it genuinely helps keep the updates coming.

License

MIT © ondreu · Changelog · Security