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Cover image for Notekeeper: a Google Keep wall for your Obsidian vault
Philemon Chiro
Philemon Chiro

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Notekeeper: a Google Keep wall for your Obsidian vault

Notekeeper is a free, open-source Obsidian plugin that turns your vault into a sticky-note wall. Pin the notes you want to see. Color-code by project, mood, or whatever you sort by. Capture quick thoughts in one input. Click any sticky to read or edit the whole note inline.

The wall

The default view is a curated wall of sticky notes. Each card sits at a slight rotation, like real Post-its. Notes you pin float to the top with a 3D pushpin and lift when you hover. You choose which notes go on the wall — it's a curated surface, not a dump of every file in your vault.

Pick from eight backgrounds (cork, slate, blueprint, chalkboard, paper, linen, graph, whiteboard) or a Theme (auto) setting that adapts to your light/dark mode.

If you'd rather see everything at once, switch to the dense card grid — a Pinterest-style masonry of every note in your vault, sorted by modified, created, or title. Three densities (comfortable, compact, list view) let you trade breathing room for information density.

Capture

The capture box is a direct steal from Keep. One box. Title, body, optional pin, optional color, all before save. Auto-saves when it loses focus (there's a Save button too if you like buttons). Press Enter for a newline, like a real note app.

Capture box expanded with title, body, pin and color buttons, and a primary Save action

In wall mode, new notes go straight onto the wall. In grid mode, they land at the top by modified time.

The preview modal

Click any sticky and the modal opens, painted in the note's color. Markdown is fully rendered. Wikilinks are live. Embedded notes embed. Code is highlighted. Callouts work. Tap an inline checkbox and the source file updates.

Note preview modal on a colored note showing live markdown rendering and inline action buttons

From the modal you can pin, change color, archive, or open the note in a tab.

The bits that grow on you

A handful of things I think you'll actually use day-to-day:

  • Smart search — combine free text with tag:foo pinned:true color:#5c2b29 path:inbox is:archived. The active filter shows as a chip at the top; click the × to clear it.
  • Multi-select bulk actions — shift-click or cmd-click to select multiple cards, then bulk pin, color, archive, or delete from a floating action bar.
  • Image thumbnails on cards — the first attached image surfaces at the top of each card.
  • Backlinks badge — see incoming-link count at a glance.
  • Inline edit — click the pencil to edit a card without opening the full note.
  • Right-click context menu — rename, copy link, copy embed, open in new pane, delete.
  • Drag pinned cards to reorder them.
  • Keyboard navigation — arrow keys, Enter, e (edit), p (pin), a (archive), x (select), / (focus search).
  • Lazy infinite scroll — fast on vaults with thousands of notes.
  • Theme-adaptive everything — every colored surface flips cleanly between light and dark.

Why this exists

I've used Obsidian for years and always wanted a "look around the vault" view that wasn't the file explorer. Keep solved that for me a long time ago: open it, see everything, scan. Putting that on top of an actual knowledge base — markdown rendering, wikilinks, tags, backlinks, embeds — turns out to be meaningfully different from Keep itself. Sticky notes are nice. Sticky notes that are also live markdown files with backlinks are useful.

Notekeeper stores pin / color / archive state in its own data.json, keyed by file path, not in your notes' YAML. That means toggling a color doesn't touch your file, doesn't bump its modified time, and doesn't show up as a phantom diff in your git history. If you've already authored notes with explicit pinned: or color: frontmatter, those are still read as fallbacks, so nothing breaks.

Try it

MIT-licensed. Lives in the new Obsidian community directory. The in-app store should be browse-installable on the next directory sync; until then, the manual install is one minute:

  1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
  2. Drop them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/notekeeper/.
  3. Open Obsidian → Settings → Community plugins → enable Notekeeper.

That's it. The card view opens from the ribbon icon or the command palette.

Source, issues, contributions, stars-if-you-like-it:
github.com/PhilemonChiro/obsidian-notekeeper

If you try it, tell me what feels missing — second month of public iteration, lots still to add.

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