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.
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.
| Syntax | Notes |
|---|---|
==text== |
Standard markdown highlight |
<mark>text</mark> |
Including the inline-style and CSS-class output of Highlightr |
<font color="#835cf5">text</font> |
Hex, shorthand hex and named colors |
<span style="background:yellow">text</span> |
Background color is read from the style |
%%text%% |
A native Obsidian comment, shown in the sidebar in its own right |
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 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.
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.
The search box takes text, tags, collections and boolean logic:
| Query | Finds |
|---|---|
onboarding |
Text in the highlight, or in its note's path |
#important |
Highlights tagged #important |
@work |
Highlights in the "work" collection |
#urgent AND @project |
Both at once |
#bug OR #feature |
Either |
(#critical OR #high) AND security |
Grouped with parentheses |
-#archived |
Everything except that tag |
"Projects/Acme/reference" |
A quoted phrase, including a folder path |
Start typing # or @ for autocomplete, and use ↑↓ to pick.
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.
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 gather related highlights from anywhere in the vault.
- Create one from the Collections tab
- Add highlights with the collection button on any highlight
- Jump straight to one from the command palette, where each collection gets its own command as you create it
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.
- 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
Each list keeps its own grouping and sorting, and whether it shows completed tasks, under Display.
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. 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.
- 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
- 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
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.
Standard checkboxes, - [ ] and - [x], 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. Metadata written by the Tasks plugin is hidden by default.
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.
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 format your tasks use, and whether Tasks plugin metadata is hidden
- Typography and Styling: font sizes and weights per element
- Backup and restore: automatic backups of your collections and highlight metadata, with a retention limit
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.
- 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.
This plugin is free and always will be. 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.