Stashpad

A capture-first, chat-style notes workspace for Obsidian. Type at the bottom and press Enter — your notes stack newest-first, nest under each other, and become an outline you can drill through. No filenames to invent, no folder to pick first: just jot it down and keep moving.

Think of it as a running conversation with yourself that quietly organizes into a tree — a scratchpad, an outliner, and a task list in one panel.

⚠️ Alpha software, honestly labeled. Stashpad does a lot and is usable daily, but it's young — keep backups of anything important.

It's designed and directed by its maintainer, but the code is written by an AI assistant rather than hand-authored or human-reviewed. The upside of that is pace: Stashpad is actively maintained and moves quickly, and bug reports are genuinely welcome and get acted on. If something breaks or feels off, open an issue — it'll be looked at.

Install

Stashpad is on the Obsidian community store. Requires Obsidian 1.13.0+ (desktop or mobile).

1. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse and search for Stashpad (or use the store page).
2. Install, then enable Stashpad.

Via BRAT (optional). You can also install through BRAT (GitHub): choose "Add beta plugin" and paste https://github.com/grub-basket/SP. BRAT lets you pin a specific version, which is handy for downgrading or grabbing a fix before it reaches the store.

Quick start

1. Open the command palette and run "Reveal or open Stashpad" (or click the ribbon icon). The first run creates a Stashpad folder.
2. Type in the composer at the bottom and press Enter to capture a note. It appears in the list above.
3. Double-click a note (or press →) to drill into it; new notes you add now nest under it. A single click just selects, so you can act on notes without moving. Press ← or the back arrow to come back out.
4. From there: search, move/clone, set colors, pin, or turn a note into a task with a due date and reminder.

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Capture-first: type and go

The heart of Stashpad is the composer pinned to the bottom of the panel. You type, you press Enter, and the note lands in the list above — no dialog, no filename to invent, no folder to choose. It's the messaging-app model applied to notes: the cost of writing something down drops to almost nothing, so you actually do it.

Shift+Enter adds newlines for a longer thought, and an optional split-on-newlines mode turns one burst into several separate notes at once. Everything you capture is an ordinary Markdown file with frontmatter — nothing proprietary, readable by the rest of Obsidian and by you in ten years.

An outliner that nests as deep as you think

Notes don't have to stay a flat feed. Double-click a note (or press →) to drill into it, and anything you capture next nests underneath — arbitrarily deep. Press ← to climb back out. Any note can become a temporary root, so you can focus a single branch and work inside it without the rest of the tree in your way. (Prefer everything in one stream? There's a flat view mode for that too.)

The result is that structure emerges from fast capture instead of being planned up front. Dump thoughts in as they come; promote, demote, and rearrange them into an outline later — or never, if the newest-first stack is all you need.

Tasks & reminders

Turn any note into a to-do with a keystroke: it gains a checkbox you can tick right in the list. Give it a due date and Stashpad will remind you when it's due — click the reminder to jump straight to the task, or snooze it. Tasks support assignees, and a dedicated tasks panel gathers everything that's open so your notes and your to-dos live in the same place instead of a separate app.

Recurring tasks are experimental. Repeat rules (daily, chosen days of the week or month, repeat-on-completion) work, but they are not thoroughly tested across time zones, missed occurrences, and multi-device sync. Don't rely on them for anything with real consequences — keep a reminder you trust for deadlines that matter. A one-off due date and reminder is the well-trodden path.

Find anything fast

Search uses Sift — all-tokens, any-order, case-insensitive matching — so "budget q3" finds "Q3 budget review" without you remembering the exact wording. Search a single Stashpad folder or every Stashpad in the vault at once, and narrow results with filters like color or completion state.

Organize without friction

When you do want to tidy up, the moves are all there: move, merge, clone, and outdent; drag-and-drop re-parenting; manual ordering; and per-note colors you can give friendly aliases (so #ffe243 becomes "boogers"). Pin the notes and folders you return to. You can even cut / copy / paste whole subtrees — attachments included — across folders, and every structural change is fully undoable, so reorganizing never feels risky.

Tiny mode

Pop Stashpad out into a small, always-on-top, opacity-adjustable window and pin it to a corner of your screen. It's built for capturing a stray thought while you're working in another app — jot it, and get back to what you were doing without losing your place.

Attachments & clean copy-out

Drop files onto the panel and they auto-import as attachments. When you want notes out of Stashpad, copy them as a checklist (tasks come across as real - [ ] / - [x] checkboxes, with color/alias carried along), as an indented outline, or as ![[embed]] links you can transclude into any regular Obsidian note.

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Also includes

Useful extras that aren't the point of Stashpad, but are there when you need them — and out of the way when you don't:

• Import / export — .stash bundles (optionally encrypted) round-trip notes + attachments between vaults.
• Encryption (beta) — lock notes or folders into encrypted .stashenc files, with archive folders, encrypted trash, and shared-key collaboration. Beta: data can be lost with or without your key. (Please read the caveat below.)
• Authorship / multiplayer — stamp notes with your name; shared vaults track contributors via a vault-wide author registry.
• Johnny.Decimal index — build a JD-style hierarchy from dotted-prefix titles.
• Open Knowledge Format (OKF) export — opt a folder in to export it as an OKF bundle (.zip / .tar.gz / .stash) — Google's vendor-neutral Markdown format for handing curated knowledge to LLMs and agents. See docs/okf-guide.md.

🔒 On encryption — read before you encrypt anything.

Save your folder password in a password manager first. "Remember on this device (keychain)" is a convenience, not a backup. An OS or keychain reset, a wiped/restored profile, a reinstall, a new machine, or an IT event can erase it at any time, without warning. If that was the only copy of your password, everything encrypted under it is permanently unreadable — by you, by us, by anyone.

A Recovery password adds a second way in, but only helps if you keep it somewhere separate from the main one — two entries in the same password manager both vanish with that manager. Do set one for shared folders: it survives a collaborator changing the main password.

The encryption was also written by an AI assistant and has not been human-audited or security-tested. Treat it as a way to deter a casual snoop, not a guarantee — don't rely on it for anything sensitive, and keep unencrypted backups. It's optional and off by default.

Because it's beta, data loss is possible with or without your key — a bug, an interrupted lock/unlock, or a sync writing the vault mid-operation can damage encrypted files even when your password is perfectly safe. Keep unencrypted backups.

Plaintext can linger elsewhere. Encryption locks a note's file on disk; it is not a "decrypted-in-RAM-only" model (unlike apps such as Standard Notes). While a note is plaintext — before you lock it, or after you unlock it — other software may keep plaintext copies Stashpad can't reach: Obsidian's File Recovery snapshots and Sync version history, other plugins' sidecar files (e.g. the Edit History plugin's .edtz), and OS backups (Time Machine, etc.). Encrypting a note does not retroactively purge those. Treat encryption as protecting a locked note going forward, not as a guarantee that no plaintext trace ever existed.

No warranty of any kind. This encryption has never been audited, so it is not proven to protect anything. Stashpad cannot recover keys or passwords, and is not liable for the loss of keys, passwords or data, for a fault in this beta encryption, or for any harm that follows if it fails to keep your data private. Keeping your own backups — and deciding what is safe to trust it with — are yours to do.

Feedback

Report anything buggy or strange on the issues tab.

Credits & thanks

Stashpad is a homage to Stashpad Notes, a lovely app discontinued in 2024. This plugin brings its chat-style, jot-it-down feeling into Obsidian. Sincere thanks to its founders, Cara and Theo, and the rest of the Stashpad team, for the original that inspired it.

Pasting a range of cells from Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice drops a clean Markdown table into your note. That conversion is adapted from the Excel to Markdown Table plugin by Ganessh Kumar R P (MIT) — including the optional ^l/^c/^r header-cell prefix for per-column alignment — with the robust quoted / multi-line cell parsing borrowed from our sibling plugin GridSense. Thanks to both.

License

MIT © grub-basket.