Simple Meeting Sidebar

Mac + mobile. Macs read Apple Calendar and publish a vault snapshot. iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows and Linux read that synced snapshot. Requires Obsidian 1.8.7 or newer.

A simpler, more minimal meetings plugin. There is no setup beyond allowing your Mac's Calendar access and picking which calendars you would like included.

Simple Meeting Sidebar shows today's Apple Calendar events in the right sidebar and as inline meetings in daily notes. With one click, you can add an event to your daily note as a task or create a meeting note.

Getting started

1. Install and enable Simple Meeting Sidebar from Obsidian’s Community plugins. Version 0.8.0 is a stable release; BRAT is not required.
2. Allow Calendar access when macOS asks. The plugin only reads events and never writes to Apple Calendar.
3. Open the plugin settings and choose which Apple calendars to include.

On desktop, the plugin adds its view to the right sidebar on first launch. Mobile opens it only when you ask. If you close it, run Simple Meeting Sidebar: Toggle meetings sidebar to bring it back. Drag the small pill at the top to reposition the view, or click it to refresh today's meetings.

Mobile and multiple Macs

Every Mac publishes after a successful calendar refresh. There is no publisher toggle. Use the same Apple Calendar accounts on your Macs; enabled calendars remain in the normal synced plugin settings. A newer fetch wins, based on its start time. Devices remember the newest valid snapshot they have received and reject older deliveries. Keep device clocks set automatically.

1. Update the plugin on your Mac and phone, then refresh meetings on the Mac.
2. Sync Meetings/_calendar/events.json as an ordinary vault file. The path is fixed, independent of your meeting-note folder and settings profile.
3. With Obsidian Sync, enable Sync all other types on each device and ensure Meetings/_calendar is not excluded. Obsidian's sync settings explain the device-specific options.
4. Enable Inline meetings if wanted. Mobile uses the same Obsidian editor extension and reading-mode footer, with a single-line time and title above three separated, visible 44px touch controls. Long titles truncate to keep banners compact.
5. Open Toggle meetings sidebar when you want the list. The plugin never opens the mobile sidebar automatically. Reload synced meetings reads the file already received on the phone; it does not ask a Mac to refresh.

Mobile shows an update time and distinguishes an empty day from missing data. Saved meetings remain available when old, but banners appear only after a valid snapshot read, with complete coverage of the phone's current day, matching calendar selection, and a fetch less than one hour old. Invalid, missing, conflicting or older files suppress banners while keeping the last valid sidebar data. The Mac refresh schedule stays unchanged, so a daily schedule gives a limited mobile banner window; choose hourly refresh if you want more frequent updates while a Mac is open. A fresh snapshot still cannot detect a cancellation that has not reached Apple Calendar or vault sync yet.

Mobile reads on startup, snapshot changes, and app resume. It does not poll or contact Apple Calendar. One local timer updates the date at midnight, reveals tomorrow’s meetings at 5pm local time, and removes expired banners. Banners disappear at their scheduled start time; the sidebar keeps the meeting until it is dismissed or used. Freshness labels and reload controls appear only on mobile.

Dismissals sync between devices through small vault records. Notes and daily-note tasks sync normally. New meeting notes carry a simple-meeting-event property, so other devices can recognise them after syncing, including title changes and separate recurring occurrences. Tasks contain only the title and optional time, without a tracking comment. Existing task comments from beta builds are still recognised to avoid duplicates. Apple's external calendar identifier is used when available; calendars without a stable external identifier cannot guarantee matching across Macs.

Simultaneous offline edits cannot be locked across devices. If multiple synced note files have the same event ID, creating the meeting again offers a chooser and leaves every note intact. Duplicate task lines left by a sync conflict are not deleted automatically. Existing task titles are recognised with or without a time prefix, including completed tasks. Renaming an unmarked task can prevent title matching. Moving a meeting to a different start time creates a new occurrence identity.

Use

• Hover over an event and click • to add - [ ] Event title under the Tasks heading in today's daily note.
• Click × to hide a meeting from the sidebar and the daily-note banners.
• Click •• to create and open a note in Meetings. By default, the meeting note is also linked from today's daily note.
• Run Simple Meeting Sidebar: Refresh today's meetings for an immediate refresh.
• Run Simple Meeting Sidebar: Toggle meetings sidebar to show or hide the sidebar.
• Run Simple Meeting Sidebar: Add next meeting as task or Create next meeting note to handle the next event from anywhere.
• Run Simple Meeting Sidebar: Today's calendar events to open a floating window with today's and yesterday's events.

Task creation and manual refresh are quiet. Automatic refresh shows a native Obsidian notice only when meetings are added or updated. Errors that need your attention still appear.

After an action succeeds, the event stays hidden across devices, refreshes, and restarts. Existing tasks and meeting notes are still remembered.

Inline meetings

Turn on Inline meetings in settings to show upcoming meetings below today's and tomorrow's daily notes in editing and reading modes. Each note shows only its own day's meetings. Tomorrow’s meetings appear in tomorrow’s note from 5pm local time. Tomorrow's banner buttons add tasks and meeting references to tomorrow's note. This is off by default. The plugin follows your Daily Notes or Periodic Notes folder and date format.

Each compact banner shows a lighter local meeting time on the left, the title, and line icons to add a task, create a meeting note, or dismiss the notification. On a mouse, the extra actions appear when you move over the controls; they also appear on keyboard focus and stay visible on touch devices. Dismissing a banner leaves its sidebar row available. A sidebar dismissal or successful task/note action hides the meeting in both places. Dismissals sync through small records in Meetings/_calendar/dismissals/. They remain hidden after manual refreshes and restarts, and simultaneous offline dismissals can sync without replacing one another. Update all devices to 0.8.0 to share these features.

The banners sit immediately above Influx's footer, also work without Influx, and never change your daily note's text. Only three banners appear at once, with a muted + X more count underneath. Handling a meeting fills its slot from the queue with a short fade, keeping the other banners in place. When the queue is empty, closing a banner keeps its space until its fade finishes. Influx's optional top-of-page placement stays at the top. Notifications reuse the existing event cache; there is no extra calendar polling.

Only show inline meetings when the right sidebar is hidden is on by default on desktop. Opening the right sidebar fades banners out; closing it brings back only untouched, upcoming meetings. This setting has no effect on mobile.

Neutral inline meetings is on by default. Backgrounds, text, borders, rounded corners, and subtle shadows follow the active theme in light and dark mode. Existing color preferences are saved. Rows have an 8px gap using Obsidian’s spacing scale, enforced with row margins so editor and theme display rules cannot remove it. Banners fade in place. Reduced motion uses a gentle fade without movement, and keyboard dismissal is immediate. CSS snippets can override --wcm-notification-radius or --wcm-notification-shadow (use none for a flat surface).

When there is no queued replacement, the remaining banners settle into place over 200ms after a pointer dismissal. On phones, time and title share one line above a full-width action strip with separators. Narrow desktop panes can still wrap titles. Refresh feedback uses the sidebar handle: three gentle pulses for a pointer refresh, or a steady highlight for keyboard refresh and reduced motion. No loading label or empty status space is added above meetings. Apple Calendar access still requires macOS.

Settings

• Include or exclude individual Apple calendars.
• Show only events containing Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams links. Existing Google Meet filter preferences carry over. Refresh after upgrading to detect Zoom and Teams in already-cached events.
• Enable inline meetings below daily notes.
• Ignore all-day events, on by default, and optionally ignore repeating events, off by default. Refresh on your Mac after upgrading to identify recurring events in synced snapshots.
• Optionally include meeting time in newly created tasks, such as - [ ] 10:30am Meeting with John. All-day tasks always use just the title. Existing tasks stay unchanged.
• Choose the meeting-note and people folders.
• Decide whether meeting notes are linked from today's daily note.
• Ignore selected people when linking guests to #Person notes.
• Refresh manually, hourly, every 6 or 12 hours, daily, or weekly.

Person matching

Only Markdown notes inside People with the exact tag #Person are indexed. Matching checks Apple Calendar guest names, then the event title, then the note title and optional aliases.

Advanced URI integration

With Advanced URI installed, commands can be triggered with a URL such as:

obsidian://adv-uri?vault=YourVault&commandid=simple-meeting-sidebar%3Arefresh-todays-meetings

Privacy and permissions

Simple Meeting Sidebar accesses Apple Calendar data outside your vault, including event titles, times, locations, calendar names, and guest names. It checks event URLs, locations, and notes for Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams links; URLs and notes are not returned by the helper or saved by the plugin. Calendar data is processed locally on your Mac. Selected calendars are saved to Meetings/_calendar/events.json, which your vault sync service can transfer to your other devices. The snapshot contains yesterday, today, and the next seven days. Cached data is saved in device-local vault storage, separately from synced plugin settings. Dismissal records containing the event identity and dismissal type are saved in Meetings/_calendar/dismissals/ for vault sync. The plugin does not use network services, collect telemetry, or write to Apple Calendar.

Apple Calendar helper

Obsidian cannot read Apple Calendar directly, so the plugin includes a small native helper whose complete source is in helper/CalendarHelper.swift. The release build embeds a universal Apple Silicon and Intel copy in main.js. The plugin checks the installed copy once per load and replaces it when the bundled helper changes. When needed, it writes that copy to its own .obsidian/plugins/simple-meeting-sidebar/bin folder, marks it executable, and launches it directly. It does not use a shell or run user-provided commands.

The helper has three jobs:

• Ask macOS for Calendar permission and report a clear error if access is denied.
• List the names of available Apple calendars for the plugin settings.
• Read occurrences from yesterday through the next seven days, returning only local and external event identifiers, title, start and end times, all-day and recurring status, calendar name, optional location, optional attendee names, and whether a supported meeting link was found.

The helper cannot create, edit, accept, decline, or delete calendar events. It cannot read files in your vault, make network requests, or run in the background without Obsidian. On macOS 14 and later, Apple labels the required EventKit permission as full Calendar access even though this helper only performs the read operations listed above. Some calendar providers may omit locations or attendee display names, so those details are not guaranteed to appear.

Development

Requirements: Node.js 22 or newer. Rebuilding the native helper also requires macOS and Xcode Command Line Tools.

npm install
npm run check

npm run check lints, type-checks, bundles the reviewed helper, creates the release folder, and runs the TypeScript regressions, editor/reading-mode DOM regression, and helper self-tests. If CalendarHelper.swift changes, run npm run build:helper first to rebuild and ad-hoc sign the universal helper that release builds embed.