Simple Meeting Sidebar

Simple Meeting Sidebar

macOS only. Simple Meeting Sidebar uses Apple Calendar and does not run on Windows, Linux, iPhone, iPad, or Android.

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. 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.
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.

The plugin adds its view to the right sidebar on first launch. 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.

Use

• Hover over an event and click • to add - [ ] Event title under the Tasks heading in today's daily note.
• 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.

After an action succeeds, the event stays hidden until the next manual refresh. Existing tasks and meeting notes are still remembered.

Settings

• Include or exclude individual Apple calendars.
• Show only events containing a meet.google.com link.
• 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 only for the text meet.google.com; URLs and notes are not returned by the helper or saved by the plugin. Calendar data is processed locally on your Mac and cached only in the plugin's settings. 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. When needed, the plugin 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 and today, returning only the event identifier, title, start and end times, all-day status, calendar name, optional location, optional attendee names, and whether a Google Meet 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 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.