Task Overview

An Obsidian sidebar panel that lists the tasks of the note you have in focus, so you can see and tick off a note's checkboxes without scrolling through it.

What it does

The panel follows the note in focus the way the Calendar plugin follows the active date, so switching notes swaps the list and editing the note refreshes it. With no note in focus it says so instead of leaving the last note's tasks on screen.

Three filters sit above the list — open, completed or cancelled, and all — and each filter button reports through its accessible label how many tasks in the current note it matches, so a screen reader announces how much is left without walking the list.

Clicking a row opens the note and puts the cursor on that task's line, which makes the panel a table of contents for the work in a long note. Ticking a checkbox in the panel writes the change back to the file, so the note stays the single source of truth.

Turning on "Group tasks under their headings" splits the list by the nearest heading above each task, which keeps a note with several sections readable.

Working alongside the Tasks plugin

Task Overview reads and writes plain Markdown checkboxes, and it works with the custom statuses of the Tasks plugin. A task marked [/] is styled as in progress and one marked [-] as cancelled, and cancelled tasks sit with the completed ones rather than the open ones.

The "Statuses that close a task" setting decides which marks count as closed. By default only [x] and [-] do. You can instead close a task on any character inside the brackets, or list the characters yourself as a comma-separated list such as x, -, >.

Choosing "Follow the Tasks plugin's statuses" makes the panel use the statuses you configured in Tasks, so a custom symbol such as [>] closes the task when Tasks types it as done or cancelled and stays open when Tasks types it as todo, in progress or on hold. Ticking a checkbox then moves the task to the next status in your Tasks cycle, exactly as clicking it in the editor would. This option needs Tasks installed and enabled; without it the settings say so and the panel falls back to the default.

Some checkboxes are list items rather than tasks, such as [i] for a piece of information. The "Statuses to leave out of the panel" setting keeps them off the list and out of the counts: either list the characters yourself, such as i, ?, or follow the Tasks plugin, which hides every symbol Tasks types as a non-task and, like the closing option, needs Tasks installed and enabled. Tasks nested under a hidden item still show.

When Tasks is installed, ticking a checkbox in the panel hands the toggle to that plugin, so it stamps the done and cancelled dates and creates the next occurrence of a recurring task just as it does in the editor. When it is not installed, the panel flips [ ] to [x] itself. Nothing here depends on Tasks being present; the panel looks for it at runtime and falls back on its own.

Installation

Once the plugin is listed in the community browser, open Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search for Task Overview, then install and enable it.

To install it by hand, download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from a release, put them in <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/task-overview/, and enable Task Overview under Settings → Community plugins. It needs Obsidian 1.6.0 or later and runs on both desktop and mobile.

Development

npm install
npm run dev     # watch build
npm run build   # typecheck + production bundle
npm test        # unit tests

Install into a test vault by symlinking the repository itself, so the build output the plugin loads is always the one npm run dev just wrote:

ln -s "$PWD" "<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/task-overview"

Copying main.js, manifest.json and styles.css instead works once and then silently freezes: the vault keeps serving that copy, and the Hot Reload plugin only watches plugin folders that are a symlink or contain .git or .hotreload, so a copied folder never reloads either. With the symlink in place, every npm run dev rebuild reloads the plugin in Obsidian.

License

MIT.