Hearth

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Hearth turns your Obsidian vault into a welcoming front page. A fast fuzzy search bar, quick file-type filters, and a freely arrangeable grid of live widgets — notes, tasks, kanban boards, calendars, web pages, stats, clocks and launchers — on desktop and mobile.

Think of it as a new-tab dashboard, start page and command launcher in one.

• 🔍 Search everything — fuzzy, full-text, tags, frontmatter and commands
• 🧩 35+ cards — embeds, tasks, calendars, Dataview, Git, Jira, Operon, and more
• 🔌 25 integrations — picked up automatically when the plugin is enabled
• 🎛️ Free-form layout — drag, resize and snap cards anywhere
• 🪟 Frosted glass — per-card opacity, blur, color and corner radius
• 🗂️ Multiple dashboards — switch with a click or a hotkey
• 🪄 Plugin view dashboards — give a whole board to one plugin's view
• 📱 Works on a phone — the board stacks into one readable column

Screenshots

Contents

Quick start · Setup wizard · Search · Cards · Integrations · Layout · Appearance · Mobile · Settings & shortcuts · Development · Contributing

Looking for more detail? The Hearth User Guide is a full, chapter-by-chapter manual: every card, every setting, every integration, plus troubleshooting and a glossary. This README is the tour; the guide is the reference.

Quick start

1. Install Hearth from Obsidian's community plugin browser — or drop main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/hearth/ and enable it.
2. Hearth opens on startup and replaces empty new tabs (both toggleable in Settings → Hearth).
3. Open it any time from the ribbon home icon or the Open home dashboard command.
4. Hit Arrange (top-right) to add, move, resize and configure cards right on the board.

Setup wizard

On a fresh install Hearth offers to build your first dashboard for you. It asks a handful of questions — a title, a look, what you use your vault for — and lays out a board from the answers rather than dropping you on a generic starter grid.

It also looks at what you already have. Every plugin below that is installed and enabled is offered with the one thing accepting it will do:

The TaskNotes case is the one worth calling out: its field names are user-remappable and its statuses user-defined, so Hearth reads them from the plugin and copies them onto the card it builds. A vault that renamed due to deadline gets a Tasks card that works on its first render.

The wizard offers the integrations above; everything else in Integrations is added by hand from the Add card picker.

The wizard only ever writes to the dashboard it builds. The title, its icon, the accent, the card surface, the spacing and the background all land as per-board overrides on that one dashboard, and the TaskNotes field mapping lands on the Tasks card itself — so your vault-wide settings, and every other board you have, come out of a setup run exactly as they went in. That is also why it no longer asks about things that can only be vault-wide (whether Hearth opens on startup, where notes open, which search engine to use, whose file icons to show): those live in Settings → Hearth, one toggle each, and apply to everything by design.

The last step previews the board — a scale drawing plus a list of every card and why it's there — before anything is written. Nothing is applied until you press Build my dashboard.

You can run it again any time from Settings → Hearth → About → Build a dashboard, or the Set up Hearth command. Run that way it always adds a new dashboard: every board you already have is left exactly as it is.

Search

The search field is keyboard-first, with four transparent modes:

• Auto-detected filters — file-type chips built from what actually lives in your vault (notes, images, video, canvas, bases, Excalidraw…). Click one to list its items; hide the ones you don't need.
• Recent files appear in an empty, focused search field.
• New note button creates a note in your default location — or sends the query to a web search instead, if you'd rather. That button carries a small arrow: click it to search with DuckDuckGo (the default), DuckDuckGo without AI, Brave, Kagi, Google, Mojeek, Ecosia or Qwant for that one query. Which engine the button itself uses is Settings → Appearance → Online search engine.
• Omnisearch engine (optional) — swap the built-in engine for Omnisearch under Settings → Appearance → Search engine.
• Hide it — Settings → Appearance → Home → Show search section turns the whole section off vault-wide, and each dashboard's Search visibility can follow that default or override it to show or hide the section on that board alone.

Cards

Add cards from the Arrange toolbar; configure each one from the card itself (title, content, colors, size, opacity, blur). Add card opens a searchable picker — type to match a card's name or description, or browse by the categories below. Cards backed by a community plugin are always listed, marked Needs Dataview (or Git, Operon…) when the plugin isn't there, with a one-click jump to install it. If the card you want doesn't exist, Request a card at the bottom of the rail opens a pre-filled GitHub issue or email.

Notes & files

Planning

Inside the Tasks card

• Kanban write-back — drops are written in Kanban's own format, so the note stays editable in the Kanban plugin.
• Dates & priorities — full obsidian-tasks marks (🔺⏫🔼🔽⏬ 🔁 🛫 ⏳ 📅 ✅), relative labels ("Today", "Next Friday"), natural-language input (📅 in 3 days), and per-occurrence completion for recurring tasks.
• Sorting & filtering — smart chain (due → scheduled → priority → created) or a custom multi-rule sort, per list and per Kanban column.
• Custom task fields (opt-in) — name a field, pick how it's drawn (chip, dot, text, row tint or glow), and map any frontmatter or built-in key to labels and colors. Click a value to change it.
• Quick view — click a task for a compact popover with editable metadata and description instead of jumping into the note.

Inside the calendars — both follow your locale's week start and clock by default; week start, hidden weekends, week numbers, drawn hours and hour height are all yours to set. Mini calendar also subscribes to external ICS/iCal feeds, reads TaskNotes (scheduled, due, recurrences, timeblocks) and Operon due dates, and creates a note from any event, linked back by ID.

Vault insight

Tools

Integration cards

Categorized as Integrations in the picker.

The Templater card does something Templater's own per-template commands can't: the same template can feed three different folders from three different buttons. Templater still does the templating — user scripts, tp.system.prompt() dialogs and tp.file.cursor() placement all behave as they do from its own command.

Git and Operon both work through the other plugin rather than around it: Git commits go through the Git plugin's own task queue, so your remote, credentials and commit-message template apply unchanged, and Hearth never parses Operon's notes. See Operon for its setup, which is the one that needs a step from you.

Fun

Everything is live: embeds and editable notes follow vault events without losing your cursor, data cards redraw on vault and metadata changes, and web cards refresh on a timer. Everything that reaches the network respects Settings → Behaviour → Disable external calls — every card, and a background image or title icon given as a web address.

Integrations

Hearth picks these up on its own — nothing to connect, no keys to paste. The full list, with live status and where each one's settings live, is under Settings → Hearth → Integrations.

Community plugins

Obsidian core plugins

External services — all silenced at once by Behaviour → Privacy & network → Disable external calls.

Operon

The four Operon cards read through Operon's own in-process developer API, so recurrence, statuses and completion stay Operon's to define. Filters are pickers over what Operon actually has — pipeline, status, priority, completion, note or text — or you can hand the whole question over to one of Operon's own scopes (Happening today, Overdue, Recently touched). Clicking a task opens its note on the exact line.

Reading is the default; changing is a choice. Switch on Allow changes (Settings → Hearth → Integrations → Operon) and the board card lets you drag a task into another status column — or pick one from the row's right-click menu, so it works without a mouse — and every card grows a + that creates a task where Operon's own settings say new tasks go. Hearth previews the change, Operon rates it and applies it, and anything more than routine is confirmed with you first. A move carries the status the board was drawn from, so a drag onto a stale board is refused rather than quietly undoing someone else's change. Leave the switch off and Hearth can only read.

Before you add one:

Layout

• Free-form drag & resize — move cards anywhere and resize from any edge or corner, with magnetic snapping to neighbours and the board.

• Edge-merging — snap two cards together and their shared border drops out, so the pair reads as one continuous tile.

• Multiple dashboards — a [1] [2] [+] switcher in the top-left. Name each board, give it an emoji or a Lucide icon, reorder by dragging, and override the global width, columns, row height, background and title icon per board. Open a board's settings from Dashboard settings in the Arrange toolbar or by right-clicking its switcher button.

• Plugin view dashboards — set a board's Dashboard type to Plugin view and it stops being a grid of cards: the whole board becomes one plugin's view — your RSS reader, a Kanban board, a Canvas, the outline — at full size and fully working, with the switcher, header and background still around it. So the reader you check twenty times a day is one click from your task board rather than a tab you have to find your way back from.

  Pick the view on the board's Plugin view tab. The list is every view the app has registered right now, Obsidian's own document surfaces included (Markdown, PDF, image, audio, video) — a full board has the room and a file picker beside the type picker, so a specific note, drawing or PDF can be a dashboard. You can also hide the hosted view's breadcrumb header, and let it take focus so the plugin's own commands and hotkeys find it (experimental — Obsidian may then open a clicked note into it).

  Edge to edge. The hosted view gets the whole pane — no page gutter, no card frame, no toolbar row — and the only chrome left is the switcher strip across the top with the board's settings gear at the end of it. The title and search start hidden for the same reason; all of it is an ordinary per-board override you can switch back on.

  Switching is instant. A plugin board stays loaded while another board is showing instead of reloading from cold; up to three are kept warm at a time, and a heavy plugin can opt out per board under Keep running in the background. The board keeps its cards, so turning it back into a Cards board brings them back untouched.

• Pinned cards — pin a card to appear on every dashboard, sharing one definition and position.

• Fit to page — lock the board to one screen or let it scroll.

• Import / export — share one dashboard as a file that looks the same in someone else's vault (wallpaper optionally carried inside it), signed with an anonymous handle Hearth makes for you that nobody else can publish under, with one switch to leave your note paths, calendar links and location out of it — or back up every board and setting as JSON.

• Dashboard gallery — browse boards other people have published, by category, search or rating, install one in a click and leave a comment; publish your own — with a picture of the board, its every word blanked out before the screenshot is taken — from the same dialog you export from, with your paths and private feeds removed and the file signed so nobody can publish under your handle. Every upvote you get adds up on your profile. Nothing is fetched until you open the gallery and nothing is sent until you publish, and clearing the address in settings turns it off for good. Anybody can run their own: the server is in this repository and starts with one Docker command.

Appearance

• Background — solid color, vault image, URL, or a live weather sky: the board's backdrop becomes the painted sky the weather card's artistic style draws, spread across the whole window and following the real conditions and time of day over a place you pick. Or pin one sky — clear night, snow, thunder — and keep it whatever the weather is doing, which needs no location and never goes online. All with opacity and blur. Ships with a soft ambient default.
• Banner or full background — wear that same backdrop either way: filling the whole view, or as a banner across the top of the board, the way a cover image sits above a note, with the cards below it on your theme's own surface. Set the height, fade the lower edge into the page, and choose whether it lines up with the content or runs edge to edge — each a per-board override, so one dashboard can show the vault's background as a banner while the next keeps it as a wallpaper.
• Frosted glass — card opacity and backdrop blur at three levels (global → per-dashboard → per-card). Merged cards blur as one seamless sheet.
• Card corner radius — from the default 14 px down to sharp 0 px.
• Per-card colors — an accent and a background tint for any card.
• Title, title icon and compact spacing for the dashboard header.
• Its own search row and chrome — a dashboard can set its own search placeholder, its own button beside the search field (or none), its own filter chips, whether it stacks into one column when narrow, whether the arrange button and the switcher stay visible or fade in on hover, and whether the painted sky drifts. Each follows the vault until the board says otherwise, and each travels with the board when you export it.
• One title icon, four ways to set it — the mark beside the board's heading takes a Lucide icon (searched from a picker rather than typed from memory), an emoji or a couple of characters, the vault path of an image, or the URL of an image on the web. Each dashboard can override it; leave it empty and the Hearth crystal stays as it was. Hearth's tab and ribbon button takes a Lucide icon of its own.

Mobile

Hearth's board is laid out freely — cards sit where you drop them, at a fraction of the board's width. Below about 600px that stops meaning anything, so the board reflows into a single full-width column, top to bottom, in the order the desktop board reads in. Your layout is never rewritten: the same board is a launcher on your phone and a wall of cards on your monitor.

The threshold is the measured width of the board, not the platform — so a narrow desktop pane gets the same treatment, and you can see the phone layout by dragging a pane narrow.

• Stacked column — cards full width, one per row. Turn it off in Settings → Hearth → Mobile to keep the free-form layout.
• Per-card overrides — in a card's settings (Layout → On a narrow board): hide it, give it a position in the column, set its height, or start it collapsed as a title row that builds the card only when tapped — so an expensive card costs one row until you open it.
• Phone preview — hit Arrange → Preview at phone width to build and check your phone board without a phone, inside a drawn phone so the proportions read properly. While stacked, drag a card's bottom edge to set its height, and use the move up / move down buttons in its header to reorder.
• Edge to edge — the side gutters go, the safe-area insets stay; filter chips and search results grow to 44px tap targets.
• Full-width search — the chips and results span the screen instead of the search bar's share of it, and the button beside the field drops to an icon.
• Its own performance tier — defaults to Balanced on mobile; your desktop tier is stored separately and untouched.
• Its own settings category — everything above lives under Settings → Hearth → Mobile.
• Mobile mode — still there: an optional search-only launcher, if that is all you want on a phone.
• Action bar — a row of buttons under the search field (New note, New drawing, Record voice, Open daily note by default), each swappable for any command.
• Keyboard-aware — the visible area tracks the on-screen keyboard.

Settings & shortcuts

Everything lives under Settings → Hearth, grouped by a category ribbon: Appearance, Search, Dashboard, Behaviour (startup, new tabs, where notes open, mobile, privacy), Integrations, Backup and About. Per-card settings are edited from the card itself in arrange mode.

Bindable under Settings → Hotkeys:

• Open home dashboard
• Switch to dashboard 1…9 — changes the active board
• Open dashboard 1…9 — changes it and brings Hearth up, so jumping to a particular board from anywhere in the vault is one shortcut
• Switch to next / previous dashboard

In the search field: ↑/↓ to move, Enter to open, Esc to dismiss.

Disclaimer

This plugin was created using AI.

All PRs are tested in a testing vault by a human before merging, and all releases are beta tested in a testing vault by a human before being promoted to stable.

Development

npm install      # install dependencies
npm run dev      # watch build -> main.js
npm run build    # typecheck + production build
npm run typecheck

To test in a vault, symlink or copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/hearth/.

Translations — user-facing strings live in src/locales/. English (en.ts) is the source of truth; copy it, translate the values and register the file. See src/locales/README.md.

Contributing

Hearth moves fast, so the most valuable contributions right now are bug reports, feature ideas and translations. Small, obvious fixes are always welcome; for anything larger, please open an issue first — big PRs against a fast-moving codebase tend to go stale. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Support

Hearth is free and open source. If it's earned a place on your vault's front page, you can buy me a coffee — it genuinely helps keep the updates coming.

License

MIT © ondreu · Changelog · Security