Chicago

An opinionated Obsidian dashboard for people with project ideas but who struggle with procrastination.

Chicago is one board with a hard cap on how many projects can be active at once, and it will not let you past that cap.

Why a limit you can't override

Chicago is built around three decisions:

Ideas rot where you can't see them. So the suspended list sits on the same screen as your active work, always, with no click to reveal it.

Too many options is the same as no options. So the active limit is enforced on the action, not drawn as a warning. Activate a fourth project with the limit at three and it fails, with a notice naming what you'd have to park first. There is no "allow anyway", because an override you can reach in one click is the same as no limit at all.

Bouncing off a project is a memory problem. So every active project carries a one-line next action: the smallest concrete thing you'd do next. If it's empty the card says so, visibly, because an active project without one is the one you're about to abandon.

Everything else is deliberately absent. No timers, no subtasks, no due dates, no streaks, no charts. Logging work is one click on a preset button; a timer needs you to remember to start and stop it, and one forgotten stop poisons the data enough to kill the habit.

What it does

• Active tray at the top of the board, capped at your WIP limit
• One-click hour logging: preset buttons, no dialog, no note prompt, with an undo on the notice for the inevitable misclick
• Next action per active project, edited inline on the card
• Staleness dot that turns amber then red as a project goes untouched, so "should I park this?" answers itself
• Ideas inbox that turns one-line jots in a note into projects, with an Add new button on the panel to jot one straight from the board, or several at once if you write several lines
• Suspended list, grouped by category, keeping full history; parking and re-activating preserves hours, next action, and last-touched exactly

Your notes are the data

One Markdown note per project in Projects/. There is no database and no plugin-owned index of your projects; the notes are the state, so you can read, edit and grep them, and they keep working if this plugin ever stops being maintained.

---
status: someday        # "active" | "someday"
category: Games        # free-text grouping, optional
hours: 12.5            # cumulative, number
next: "wire up auth"   # one-line next action
touched: 2026-08-24    # date hours were last logged
created: 2024-07-29    # date the idea was captured
---

Chicago only ever writes frontmatter, through Obsidian's own processFrontMatter, and your note body is never rewritten, reformatted or truncated. Uninstall it and you're left with a folder of plain Markdown.

A note with no frontmatter at all still shows up, as suspended. Missing or broken values fall back rather than erroring: no hours reads as 0, no touched reads as "never worked on".

The board labels the parked list Suspended, but the value stored on disk is status: someday. The stored contract is stable; the label is just a word.

Using it

Open the board from the ribbon icon or the Chicago: Open dashboard command. Chicago: Capture idea opens the same capture dialog as the panel's Add new button, from wherever you happen to be. No hotkeys are registered; bind your own if you want them.

Every action lives in the ⋮ menu on each row: Park, Activate, Delete on projects; Promote and Discard on inbox lines. Dragging a card between the tray and the suspended list does the same thing, but drag is only ever an enhancement; nothing here is reachable only by dragging.

Logging work. Click +0.5, +1 or +2 on an active card. It adds to hours, stamps touched with today's date, and re-renders that one card. The increments are configurable.

Setting a next action. Click the next line on any active card and type. Enter or clicking away commits, Escape cancels. One line only; anything longer belongs in the note body.

Triaging the inbox. Paste one-line ideas into Inbox.md as - like this whenever you capture them elsewhere. Promote turns a line into a project note and removes exactly that line; Discard just removes it. The file is re-read immediately before every write, so edits you made in another pane survive.

Settings

A hand-edited or corrupted data.json won't crash the plugin; each field falls back to its default on its own.

Installing

Chicago is not in the community plugin directory yet. To install it by hand:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release
2. Put all three in <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/chicago/
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Chicago under Settings → Community plugins

Building from source

Node 20 or newer. No runtime dependencies: everything it needs is the Obsidian API and the DOM.

npm install
npm run build     # typecheck, then bundle to main.js
npm run dev       # watch build, symlinked straight into a vault

npm run dev writes into $CHICAGO_VAULT_PATH/.obsidian/plugins/chicago/. Set that in your environment or in a gitignored .env at the repo root:

CHICAGO_VAULT_PATH=/path/to/your/vault

Releasing

npm version patch (or minor / major) bumps package.json, writes the same version into manifest.json, adds it to versions.json against the current minAppVersion, and tags it. Obsidian requires a bare tag, so .npmrc strips npm's v prefix.

npm version patch
git push --follow-tags

Pushing the tag runs the release workflow, which checks the tag against the manifest, builds, and publishes main.js, manifest.json and styles.css as individual release assets; Obsidian's tooling reads them individually and will not open a zip.

Theming

Every colour in styles.css resolves to an Obsidian theme variable, so the board wears whatever theme your vault does.

Surfaces are the one exception, and for a reason: --background-secondary sits below --background-primary on dark themes, above it on light ones, and some themes make the two identical, which flattened the whole board into a single sheet. The board's three levels are instead mixed from --text-normal into --background-primary, which always moves toward contrast whichever direction that is. Each mix declares a plain-variable fallback for engines without color-mix.

Layout responds to the width of the pane, not the window, so the board stacks correctly when it's sharing the screen with a note.

License

MIT

_{Chicago sounds like a random name, and it is, I guess. I named it after "Chicago" by Michael Jackson, which was playing on the background while I was trying to come up with one.}