lime

A personal Obsidian vault built to be one place to view and manage everything day-to-day — tasks, study, work, job applications, money, and reading.

Not a general-purpose PKM system. It was designed around one person's actual life: a CS undergraduate who is simultaneously interning, job hunting, working through learncpp and the NeetCode 150, building side projects, and logging every expense. Where a generic template would offer options, this makes a decision.

Status: M2 (Calendar) of 6 milestones. The vault runs and you can work out of it today, and the dashboard now reads your Google Calendar. Capture, and the learning/money/job-search panels are not built yet — see the roadmap.

The dashboard

00-Home/Home.md is the thing you open every morning. Three columns, everything visible at once, built from dataviewjs over plain markdown.

┌ banner ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                                          Wednesday 29 July         │
├ COLUMN 1 ─────────┬ COLUMN 2 ───────────────┬ COLUMN 3 ────────────┤
│ Recent            │ Next up                 │ (M4/M5)              │
│                   │   today + tomorrow's    │                      │
│                   │   calendar events       │                      │
│                   │ Due & overdue           │                      │
│                   │   overdue first, then   │                      │
│                   │   today, colour-coded   │                      │
│                   │ Upcoming dates          │                      │
│                   │   exams joined to       │                      │
│                   │   module notes          │                      │
└───────────────────┴─────────────────────────┴──────────────────────┘

Panels hide themselves when empty. Nothing renders a sad "no items" box — with no due tasks, the Due & overdue panel simply isn't there. That is what keeps a dense layout honest as your usage shifts. (Next up is a deliberate exception: a genuinely empty 21-day calendar window still renders a one-line message, because an empty panel would otherwise be indistinguishable from a silently broken feed — see the design spec's M2-D6.)

Tasks are ordinary - [ ] checkboxes written wherever you happen to be, with an optional 📅 2026-07-29. The dashboard sweeps the whole vault into one list. Ticking a box there rewrites that exact line in the source note — and springs back if the write doesn't land, so the dashboard never shows a completed task that is still open on disk.

The calendar panels read a Google Calendar via the ICS Calendar plugin, cached for five minutes so typing in a daily note never costs a network round-trip. See SETUP.md for connecting your own calendar.

Structure

00-Home/      dashboard + capture inbox
01-Daily/     one note per day
02-Learning/  Modules · Courses · Drills · Concepts
03-Work/      internship hub, deliberately unstructured
04-Projects/  one note per project
05-JobSearch/ Applications · Companies
06-Money/     one ledger file per month
07-Reading/   one note per book
08-Notes/     everything that doesn't fit above
09-Archive/   done, dead, abandoned

One principle throughout: one note per thing — frontmatter tracks it, the body is where you write. No note is ever the wrong kind.

Setup

Requires Obsidian 1.12.7+ and Node 24. Zero npm dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/lemonishi/Lime.git
cd Lime
npm test               # 56 tests, no install step needed
npm run install-plugins  # only if plugin versions have drifted

Then follow SETUP.md for the parts that need Obsidian's GUI — the whole thing is about ten minutes, and it ends with M1 and M2 acceptance checklists.

Drop your own image at _assets/home-banner.jpg to change the header; object-fit: cover crops anything sensibly.

Decisions worth knowing

Plugin versions are pinned, and the installer enforces it. scripts/install-plugins.mjs refuses to install any plugin whose manifest minAppVersion exceeds your app version, and npm test fails loudly if Obsidian's updater overwrites a pin. This exists because several popular plugins ship current releases that fail silently on older Obsidian — a blank settings pane, no error.

Dataview is a knowing bet. It has been unmaintained since April 2025 and powers every dashboard widget. It is acceptable because no data depends on it: every note is plain markdown with plain frontmatter, so if Dataview died tonight the dashboard breaks and not one note is lost. Rebuilding Home.md against Bases is a day's work, not a redesign.

No obsidian-columns. Three columns come from a plain CSS grid in .obsidian/snippets/lime.css. The plugin has been unmaintained since November 2024, and this avoids a second dependency for something CSS does natively — and it collapses to one column on iOS with a media query rather than JavaScript.

Dashboard logic works on mobile. _scripts/lib.js holds pure functions with no DOM, Obsidian, or Node APIs, loaded via app.vault.adapter + new Function — the one mechanism that works identically on desktop and iOS. The tests load it through that same path, so they exercise the real load rather than a mock.

Dataview → JavaScript Queries must be on. Dataview ships it off, which renders every block as a disabled-queries message with nothing in the console. This repo commits the setting turned on.

Roadmap

	Milestone	Status
M1	Foundation — skeleton, plugins, daily notes, dashboard	done
M2	Calendar — Google Calendar read-only via ICS	done
M3	Capture — QuickAdd actions, mobile toolbar	next
M4	Learning — courses, drills, spaced-repetition review panel
M5	Job search + money — applications, backlinked companies, ledger
M6	Housekeeping — needs-attention panel, Bases views, archive flow

Each milestone ends in a checkpoint: use it for a few days, then the next one gets planned against what actually annoyed you.

Design docs

The full reasoning lives in docs/superpowers/ — a design spec per milestone covering every decision and why, plus the matching implementation plans. Worth reading if you want the why rather than the what.

Privacy

This repository is public and holds only the scaffolding. Every personal folder is gitignored down to its .gitkeep: daily notes, learning, work, projects, job search, money, reading, archive, and the capture inbox never leave your machine. .gitignore documents the boundary — read it before adding a new content folder.

Header image is Steins;Gate artwork, © 5pb./Nitroplus/White Fox — included for personal use, not owned by this project. Swap in your own.