Obsidian-Templates for Zettelkasten

A repository containing templates and scripts for #Obsidian to support the #Zettelkasten method for note-taking.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking and knowledge management app from Shida Li and Erica Xu. It works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files and lets you turn a collection of plain text files into a rich network of linked thought.

More about: https://obsidian.md

Zettelkasten

Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing created by Niklas Luhmann. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.

More about: https://www.soenkeahrens.de/en/takesmartnotes

Usage

Copy templates to your Obsidian template folder location to make them available as templates within Obsidian. More about: https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Templates

Or use it as part of the Obsidian-Zettelkasten-Starter-Kit.

Six Mandatory Obsidian Plugins

Book Search - Easily creates book notes from Google Books API.
DataView - Provides a query language for filtering, sorting, and extracting data from Markdown pages.
Frontmatter Tag Suggest - Autocompletes tags in the YAML frontmatter.
Projects - Manage and visualize notes for project management. ⚡⚡⚡ No longer active since May, 2025.
Update Time on Edit - Saves the metadata of the file with the time it was updated.
Wikipedia - Gets the first section of Wikipedia and pastes it into your active note.

Eleven Optional Obsidian Plugin

Auto Link Title - Fetches the webpage to extract link titles when they're pasted, creating a markdown link with the correct title set.
Banners - Adds banner images to your notes.
Callout Manager - Creating and configuring callouts.
Charts - Easily create interactive charts for your notes.
File Explorer Note Count - Shows number of elements under all available folders within file explorer.
Homepage - Use any note, canvas, or workspace as a homepage
Paste image rename - Allows to rename the image if you want images to be named and organized clearly.
PlantUML - Renders PlantUML Diagrams in Obsidian.
Table-to-CSV-Exporter - Exports table data from reading mode into a CSV file.
Tag Wrangler - Rename, merge, toggle, and search the tag pane.
View Count - Tracks the view count for each file in your vault.

Basic Template Structure

List of Templates

You first may have a look at my note examples created from these templates: EXAMPLES.

How to Use Links

More about: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/link-notes-but-how/

How to Use Tags

More about: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/use-meta-data-but-how/

How to Use Properties

More about: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/16-obsidian-templates-for-zettelkasten-to-start-with/49098/58

How to Search Notes

More about: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/search-and-retrieve-notes-how-do-you-search-in-zettelkasten/65386

Zettelkasten Ontology

More about: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/limit-folders-how-do-you-use-zettelkasten-in-obsidian/35008/32

Zettelkasten Canvas

More about: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/12-principles-for-using-zettelkasten/51679/13

The Minimalist's Zettelkasten

The provided podcast from NotebookLM consists of excerpts from a book titled "The Minimalist’s Zettelkasten: Think Better with Less", authored by Edmund Gröpl. It is set to be independently published in early 2026.

More about: https://github.com/groepl/Take-Useful-Notes/

FAQ

Creative Commons License

Contact

Please leave feedback here in the GitHub discussions or file a new issue if you found a bug or have a feature request. You can reach me via Mastodon too: https://darmstadt.social/@groepl

Templates