Mantle Kanban

Mantle Kanban is a professional-grade visual Kanban board for Obsidian. It provides a highly interactive way to organize projects, track tasks across different stages, and manage notes with drag-and-drop simplicity.

🎨 Cohesive Styling

Mantle Kanban is designed to integrate with the Project Mantle core ecosystem. While it runs on any theme, it is optimized to merge with the Zenith theme, adopting its color variables, button styles, rounded panels, and interactive glows.

✨ Key Features

• Drag-and-Drop Column Management: Easily move cards between columns to update task statuses instantly.
• Rich Markdown Previews: Cards render Markdown content, links, images, and frontmatter metadata directly on the board.
• Interactive Backgrounds: Features a unique, responsive dot-pattern background that reacts dynamically to mouse movement.
• Sub-task Support: Track checklists and progress bar percentages directly on the card covers.

📥 Installation

Method A: Via Obsidian Community Directory (Recommended)

1. Go to Settings > Community plugins > Browse.
2. Search for Mantle Kanban.
3. Click Install, then click Enable.

Method B: Via BRAT (Beta Reviewer's Auto-update Tester)

1. Install the BRAT plugin from Obsidian's community store.
2. In BRAT settings, click Add Beta plugin and enter: https://github.com/carnalMATRIX/obsidian-mantle-kanban
3. Click Add Plugin to download and auto-update.

Method C: Manual Installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest GitHub Release.
2. Inside your vault, navigate to .obsidian/plugins/.
3. Create a folder named mantle-kanban and paste the three downloaded files inside.
4. Restart Obsidian, go to Settings > Community plugins, and enable Mantle Kanban.

🔍 Troubleshooting

Columns or cards are not displaying

• Markdown Formatting: Ensure that your Kanban board file's frontmatter has the correct Kanban metadata keys. If you opened a regular Markdown file as a Kanban board, make sure it matches the layout expectations.
• Toggling Views: If the board displays as raw markdown text, click the three dots in the top right corner of the note and select Open as Kanban board.

Drag-and-drop is lagging or unresponsive

• Workspace Reload: Reload the UI (Cmd+R or Ctrl+R) to clear memory lag.
• Hardware Acceleration: Ensure hardware acceleration is enabled under Obsidian's advanced settings to handle background animations smoothly.

🛠️ Development

If you wish to modify or customize this plugin locally:

1. Clone this repository.
2. Install dependencies:

   npm install
   

3. Run the compiler in watch mode:

   npm run dev
   

4. Build minified production code:

   npm run build
   

📄 License

Copyright (c) 2026 Ryan Bakker. Released under a Personal Use License. Non-commercial, personal use only. Redistribution or modification for distribution is strictly prohibited. See the LICENSE file for full terms.