Advanced Kanban

A visual Kanban board plugin for Obsidian that stores your boards as plain Markdown files — no proprietary format, no lock-in.

Features

• Visual board view — columns and cards rendered directly inside Obsidian
• Rich task cards — titles with wikilink support ([[note]]), labels/tags, due dates, and a free-text description
• Checklists — multiple checklist groups per card, each with progress tracking and per-item due dates
• Drag and drop — reorder cards within or across columns; reorder columns by dragging the header
• Mobile support — long-press a card to access move actions on touch devices
• Source/board toggle — switch between the visual board and the raw Markdown at any time
• Overdue detection — cards and checklist items past their due date are highlighted automatically
• Wikilink autocomplete — type [[ in a card title to search and insert note links

Usage

Create a board

Run the command Create new kanban board from the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd + P). Enter a name and the file is created automatically with the correct frontmatter.

Add columns and cards

• Click + Add column at the right edge of the board to create a new column.
• Click + Add card at the bottom of any column to create a new card.
• Click a card to open the detail modal where you can edit all fields.

Edit a card

Clicking a card opens an edit modal with:

Field	Description
Title	Supports [[wikilinks]] with autocomplete
Labels	Hashtag-style tags (e.g. #bug, #feature)
Due date	ISO date picker; overdue cards are highlighted
Description	Free-text notes
Checklists	Multiple groups, each with items and optional due dates

Reorder

• Cards — drag a card to a new position or column.
• Columns — drag the column header left or right.
• Mobile — long-press a card to get a context menu with move options.

Toggle source view

Click the columns icon in the view toolbar to switch between the visual board and the raw Markdown source. Editing source and switching back re-parses the file.

File format

Boards are stored as standard Markdown files. The frontmatter tag kanban-plugin: advanced-kanban identifies the file to the plugin.

---
kanban-plugin: advanced-kanban
---

## To Do %% id:abc-123 %%

- [ ] Write tests %% id:def-456 %%
  - tags: #backend
  - due: 2026-06-01
  - description: Cover all edge cases
  - checklist: Subtasks %% id:ghi-789 %%
    - [ ] Unit tests %% id:jkl-012 %%
    - [ ] Integration tests %% id:mno-345 %%

## In Progress %% id:pqr-678 %%

## Done %% id:stu-901 %%

The %% id:... %% comments are used internally to track entity identity across edits. They are ignored by Obsidian's Markdown renderer.

Installation

From the community plugin list

1. Open Settings → Community plugins.
2. Select Browse and search for Advanced Kanban.
3. Select Install, then Enable.

Manual install

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy the three files into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/advanced-kanban/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Start watch build
npm run dev

# Production build (type-check + minify)
npm run build

# Lint
npm run lint

Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css to your vault's plugin folder to test locally.

License

0-BSD — see LICENSE.