obsidian-tasks: Open Source Project & Work Management

What is obsidian-tasks?

What it is

Obsidian Tasks is an open-source community plugin for the Obsidian knowledge base. It is written in TypeScript and distributed under the MIT license. The plugin adds task management to ordinary Markdown notes, allowing users to create checkbox tasks, query them, and update their completion status inside the vault.

The concrete problem it solves is the lack of a dedicated task layer inside a note-based knowledge system. In Obsidian, tasks may be scattered across many notes, and ordinary checkboxes do not provide due dates, repetition, filtering, or aggregated views. Obsidian Tasks turns Markdown checklist items into searchable, sortable, and editable tasks while keeping the source text in the same notes.

Key capabilities

It tracks tasks across an entire Obsidian vault, so users can manage items from many notes in one place.
It supports due dates, scheduled dates, done dates, and recurring tasks, including repetition patterns such as every January on the 4th.
It allows filtering and querying through tasks blocks, with examples such as not done, due before tomorrow, limit 100, group by filename, and sort by due.
It lets users toggle a task status in any view or query, and the change updates the source file.
It provides a Tasks: Create or edit command and modal to help users edit task details.
It can use a global filter, such as #task, to identify which Markdown checklist items are managed by the plugin.

Who uses it and how

Obsidian users who keep personal or project notes in a vault use it to convert ordinary Markdown checkboxes into tasks with dates and queries.
Users who need a consolidated task view create a note containing a tasks query, then display only open, due, scheduled, or filtered items from the vault.
Users who prefer keyboard-driven editing replace the default checkbox toggle hotkey with Tasks: Toggle Done, commonly using Ctrl + Enter or Cmd + Enter.

Getting started

The README says to search for Tasks in Obsidian's community plugins browser, enable it in settings, review the plugin settings, and optionally set a global filter early. Development uses yarn to install dependencies and yarn dev to compile the plugin and watch file changes.

When to use it — and when not to

Obsidian Tasks is a good fit when task management should live inside an existing Obsidian vault and remain plain Markdown. It is less suitable when a user needs task management outside Obsidian, because the README does not mention a hosted option, database, storage, or SMTP service. A weakness is that asking Tasks to display many hundreds or thousands of tasks can slow Obsidian's editing performance, so large task sets may require careful queries and limits.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Obsidian Tasks

Task management for the Obsidian knowledge base.

User Guide - Contributing Guide - Roadmap

Track tasks across your entire vault. Query them and mark them as done wherever you want. Supports due dates, recurring tasks (repetition), done dates, sub-set of checklist items, and filtering.

You can toggle the task status in any view or query and it will update the source file.

For changes in each release, please check the releases page:

Screenshots

All screenshots assume the global filter #task which is not set by default (see also installation).
The theme is default Obsidian theme.

ACME Tasks The ACME note has some tasks.

Important Project Tasks The Important Project note also has some tasks.

Tasks Queries The Tasks note gathers all tasks from the vault and displays them using queries.

Create or Edit Modal The Tasks: Create or edit command helps you when editing a task.

Installation

Follow the steps below to install Tasks.

Search for "Tasks" in Obsidian's community plugins browser
Enable the plugin in your Obsidian settings (find "Tasks" under "Community plugins").
Check the settings. It makes sense to set the global filter early on (if you want one).
Replace the "Toggle checkbox status" hotkey with "Tasks: Toggle Done".
- I recommend you remove the original toggle hotkey and set the "Tasks" toggle to Ctrl + Enter (or Cmd + Enter on a mac).

Getting Started

Write some tasks

Create a few tasks in a Markdown note in your vault. For example:

- [ ] Something non-important, with no date
- [ ] Remember to do that important thing - with a due date 📅 2022-12-17
- [ ] Send Kate a birthday card - with a scheduled date 🔁 every January on the 4th ⏳ 2023-01-04

Find out more in Getting Started, and its sub-sections.

Create your first Tasks search

And then write a Tasks search block somewhere in your Obsidian vault, to find the tasks that are interesting.

Here is an example that shows a few different features. View it in Reading or Live Preview modes to see the results.

```tasks
# Only tasks that are not done, that is, which begin like this (but without the quotes):
#   '- [ ] ' or
#   '* [ ] ' or
#   '1. [ ] '
# Indented tasks are supported, but only single-line tasks.
not done

# Tasks due today or earlier:
due before tomorrow

# Restrict to at most 100 tasks.
# If you ask Tasks to display many hundreds or thousands of tasks,
# Obsidian's editing performance really slows down.
limit 100

# Group and sort the output:
group by filename
sort by due reverse
sort by description

# Optionally, ask Tasks to explain how it interpreted this query:
explain
```

Find out more in Queries, and its sub-sections.

Documentation

For user documentation, please check https://publish.obsidian.md/tasks/.

Development

Clone the repository, run yarn to install the dependencies, and run yarn dev to compile the plugin and watch file changes.

Then see the Contributing Guide.

Donations

The plugin is completely free to use, and very willingly developed and supported by Clare Macrae since May 2022.

If you have particularly been helped by the Tasks plugin and wish to support it, please see the following link.

Donations will go towards my computing costs and licenses for development tools that I use for productivity.

Thank you 🙏.

Frequently asked questions

Is obsidian-tasks free to use?

obsidian-tasks is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does obsidian-tasks do?

Task management for the Obsidian knowledge base.

What is obsidian-tasks written in?

obsidian-tasks is primarily written in TypeScript. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks, and it has 4,015 GitHub stars.