Sidebar Highlights and Tasks

Collect every highlight, comment and task in your vault into one sidebar, then find your way back to them. It works with Obsidian's own markdown: highlights are ==text==, comments are footnotes, tasks are checkboxes, and nothing is stored in a format only this plugin can read.

Sidebar Highlights and Tasks is free, and built in my spare time.
If it earns a place in your vault, sponsoring it on GitHub keeps it going.

Highlights

Select text and choose Create highlight from the right-click menu, or run it from the command palette and give it a hotkey. Typing the syntax by hand works just as well.

Hover a highlight in the sidebar to reveal its color picker (on a phone, press and hold it). Your own names for the five palette colors live in Settings → Color names, and those names are what the color filter and color groups show.

Comments

Comments are ordinary Obsidian footnotes, so they survive without this plugin installed.

==Standard comment==[^1]

[^1]: Kept out of the way at the bottom of the note

==Inline comment==^[Written right where you are]

==Both at once==[^1]^[and as many as you like]

%% A native comment, standing on its own %%

Settings → Comments chooses which style the plugin writes by default, and whether deleting a highlight takes its comments with it.

The Sidebar

Four tabs, each remembering its own filters, grouping and sort:

• Current note: highlights in the note you're reading
• Current folder: every note in that note's folder, following you as you move around the vault. Widen it to subfolders from the overflow menu. Hidden by default; enable in Settings → Views
• All notes: the whole vault, paginated
• Collections: highlights you've grouped by hand, across any number of notes

Clicking anything takes you to it, in Editing or Reading view. Follow editor scroll, in the overflow menu, works the other way round: the sidebar tracks the highlight nearest what you're reading.

The status bar keeps count of whatever the tab you're on is showing, after any search or filter: highlights, native comments and notes, or collections. With the sidebar closed it counts the note you're in, and clicking it opens the sidebar.

Search

The search box takes text, tags, collections and boolean logic:

Start typing # or @ for autocomplete, and use ↑↓ to pick.

Filters

The filter menu narrows what search alone can't:

• Type: highlights and comments together, highlights only, or comments only
• Colors: one or several at once, listing only the colors actually present
• Tags and Collections: the same sets search reaches, picked from a list

Filters and search compose, and the filter button lights up whenever a filter is active, so a narrowed list is never a mystery.

Grouping and Sorting

Group by color, heading, note, folder, collection, comment count or creation date. Group headings fold away, and stay folded across restarts. Sort alphabetically, by source note, or by when a highlight or note was created.

Name your colors and grouping by color reads like a set of labels: the screenshot uses Key idea, Problem, Quote, Question and Next step.

Collections

Collections gather related highlights from anywhere in the vault.

1. Create one from the Collections tab
2. Add highlights with the collection button on any highlight
3. Jump straight to one from the command palette, where each collection gets its own command as you create it

Tasks

Open tasks, from the ribbon or the command palette, opens a tab with every checkbox in the vault. Each task stays in the note where you wrote it: ticking it, dating it or moving it changes that line, so the note is always the record.

Lists

• Today: what's overdue, what's due today, and anything in today's daily note. Reschedule moves everything overdue in one go
• Upcoming: the days ahead, then weeks and months further out
• All Open, In Progress, Questions and Done
• Every note with open tasks, grouped by folder, with its tasks under their headings
• Notes you pin, above the folders in the order you choose. Right-click a note (or press and hold) and choose Pin, then drag pinned notes to reorder them
• Give any note an icon: right-click it, or its title, and choose Choose icon…
• New note, at the bottom of the sidebar or in ⌘K, makes an empty note and opens it ready for its first task. Pick a folder from the chip in its panel, or press /

Each list keeps its own grouping and sorting, and whether it shows completed tasks (and gathers them at the bottom), under Display.

Adding Tasks

Press Q, or the + button, and type it the way you'd say it. Call the dentist fri p1 is due Friday with priority 1, and dates understand things like tomorrow, in 3 days and nov 3. Put a time after the day, like fri 3pm, and the task gets that time too. A task added from a note's list goes to that note, otherwise to wherever you added the last one, and typing / picks another note or a heading. Type a heading the note doesn't have yet and quick add offers to create it, or a note name that doesn't exist and it offers to make the note.

Working With Tasks

• Click the box to complete a task, or ⌥-click it to cancel
• Click a task to highlight it, then click again to open its card: the notes under it, its date, priority and status. Click the task's name in the card to rename it (or press R), and Add subtask adds subtasks right there
• Right-click it (or press and hold on a phone) for everything else: move it under another heading, copy it as Markdown, open it beside the note, delete it
• Drag tasks to reorder them, or onto another heading to move them there
• Undo any change from the message at the bottom, or with ⌘Z
• ⌘K searches tasks, notes and commands, and ? lists every keyboard shortcut

Headings

A note's list groups its tasks under the note's own headings, and you can rearrange them from there without opening the note. Drag a heading to move it with everything under it, or right-click it (press and hold on a phone) for the rest:

• Rename heading edits the name in place, and links to it in your other notes follow the new name
• Change level picks anything from Heading 1 to Heading 6, and the smaller headings under it move along
• Move heading puts it somewhere else in the note, picked from a list
• Add a task here, Open in note and Copy link do what they say
• Delete heading, keep tasks takes out the heading line and its tasks join the section above. Delete heading and tasks takes out the whole section. Undo brings either one back

In the Sidebar

Open tasks in the sidebar puts the same tab in the right sidebar, where it starts on This Note: the tasks of whichever note you're reading, under their headings.

What Counts as a Task

Standard checkboxes, - [ ] and - [x] (written with * or + just as well), plus in-progress - [/], cancelled - [-] and question - [?]. Alternate checkboxes from themes like Minimal show up under their own names. A date anywhere on the line, in the format set under Settings → Tasks → Due date format, is the task's due date. A time written right after that date, like 2026-10-30 15:00 or 2026-10-30 3pm, is the task's time: it shows on the row, sorts the day, and turns red once it has gone by. Metadata written by the Tasks plugin is hidden by default.

Reminders

A task with a time reminds you when that time comes, as long as Obsidian is open. On a computer it's a notification like any other app's, and clicking it opens the note at the task. On a phone or tablet, the reminder shows inside Obsidian until you tap it. If Obsidian was closed or the computer was asleep, the day's missed reminders show as soon as it's back, and several at once arrive together. Set how early they come, or turn them off, under Settings → Reminders, where Test reminder checks that notifications get through.

Calendar Sync

Reminders need Obsidian open. To have your phone remind you when it's closed, connect your calendar under Settings → Calendar: Google Calendar, Outlook, iCloud, or any other CalDAV calendar. Your dated tasks show up as events in a calendar of their own (named after your vault), with an alert at each task's time, so your phone's calendar app does the reminding. Tasks with only a date become all-day events, or you can leave them out with Only tasks with a time.

It goes both ways. Drag an event to another day and its task moves with it. Delete an event and the task's date is cleared, with a dated note under it saying why (or set When an event is deleted to put the event back). Complete a task and its event goes. Each synced task carries a short ID at the end of its line so it can find its event again; it's hidden everywhere in Obsidian, and Show calendar IDs reveals it.

Calendar sync needs a Power-Up subscription, the same one that runs Describe in Oriko. Paste your license key under Settings → Power-Up. Outlook work and school accounts may need their IT admin to approve calendar access first. For iCloud, make an app-specific password at account.apple.com.

On Your Phone

Everything works in Obsidian for iOS and Android. Swipe in from the right for your highlights, open Tasks from the menu, and press and hold a highlight or a task for the menu a right-click opens on a computer.

Settings Worth Knowing

Everything lives under Settings → Sidebar Highlights and Tasks.

• Views: which of the four sidebar tabs appear, and whether the status bar shows counts
• Display modes: save your Display and Views settings as a named mode, and apply it from the command palette
• Detection: whether HTML comments and adjacent native comments are picked up
• Filters: skip Excalidraw files, or include and exclude specific files and folders from scanning
• Display: note titles, timestamps, date format, and a minimum character count to keep stray == out of the sidebar
• Tasks: the date and time formats your tasks use, whether tasks start with a capital (Capitalize tasks), and whether Tasks plugin metadata is hidden
• Reminders: whether tasks with a time remind you, and how long before
• Power-Up and Calendar: your license key, the calendar you've connected, and how events are made
• Typography and Styling: font sizes and weights per element
• Backup and restore: automatic backups of your collections and highlight metadata, with a retention limit

Installation

From Community Plugins: Settings → Community Plugins → Browse → search "Sidebar Highlights" → Install → Enable.

Manually: download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release, drop them in .obsidian/plugins/sidebar-highlights/, and enable the plugin.

Payments, Accounts and Network Use

Everything in the plugin is free except calendar sync, which needs a paid Power-Up subscription, sold through Polar. Until you type a license key into its settings or connect a calendar, the plugin works only with your vault and never goes online.

With calendar sync on, it contacts:

• powerup.trevware.com, trevware's server, to check your license. For Google and Outlook it also handles the sign-in and renews access about once an hour, passing tokens through without keeping them.
• Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, iCloud or your CalDAV server, directly from your device, to keep your tasks' events in step. Your tasks and calendars never pass through trevware's server.

There are no analytics, and nothing else is sent anywhere. The privacy policy has the details.

Notes and Limitations

• PDF highlights aren't supported
• Highlights inside code blocks are ignored on purpose, so == in a DataviewJS block won't appear
• Available in English and Chinese (Simplified). The Tasks tab is in English for now
• Screenshots use the Minimal theme with the Nord color scheme

Bugs and feature requests are welcome on GitHub Issues.

Support the Project

This plugin is free and always will be; only calendar sync, which runs on a server, needs Power-Up. It's built and maintained in my own time, and support is what makes that sustainable.

github.com/sponsors/trevware
You can also buy me a coffee. Starring the repo helps too, and costs nothing.