tuan3w/obsidian-template: a Zettelkasten starter vault its author has stopped maintaining

The problem is a blank vault, not a missing note-taking app

Obsidian ships as an empty editor with a plugin browser. That is fine if you already know how you want to organise notes and painful if you do not, because the first hour of use is spent deciding folder structure, naming conventions and which of several hundred community plugins to install. tuan3w/obsidian-template addresses that specific gap. It is a pre-built vault: a theme choice, a set of note templates, a curated plugin list, and a written workflow describing how the author actually takes notes. The intended audience is someone who has read about the Zettelkasten method and wants a working example rather than a blank canvas. The README's motivation section is explicit about the origin: the author started the method after reading a Hacker News thread about Zettelkasten, and had previously tried Pocket, browser bookmarks, Medium, Trello and Twitter likes without any of them sticking. The template is the residue of that search. It is a personal system published for reuse, which explains both its specificity and its eventual abandonment.

What is actually in the repository

Four things, according to the README. First, a theme: Obsidian Minimal. Second, a templates folder containing note types named Term, Resource, Quote File, Create Anki Card, ID, Book and Thought. Third, a plugin list of roughly twenty community plugins, among them Templater, Dataview, Kanban, Spaced Repetition, Auto Note Mover, Linter, Excalidraw, Tag Wrangler and Khoj. Fourth, a long tips section covering note creation, review, reading tracking, file naming, Anki cards, hotkeys, auto-organisation, stats, Khoj question answering, automatic link titling, image conversion and web clipper templates. The templates are the load-bearing part. Term is described as short, simple and atomic. Resource is an entry note that collects related terms and links for one topic. ID generates a unique Zettelkasten identifier for the current note. The rest follow the same pattern: one note type per kind of thing you record. Note that the repository's primary language is listed as Python, which is worth flagging as a mismatch with what the README describes. Nothing in the supplied material explains where Python is used, and the templates folder is the only content the README points at directly.

How the workflow runs end to end

The loop described in the README is: create a note, tag it, review it, and let plugins move and format it. Creating a note means pressing Ctrl+N and then Ctrl+T to pick a template through Templater. A new note gets a review tag, which is removed once the note is considered good enough. To find notes that still need work, the README suggests Ctrl+R or the command Spaced Repetition: Open a note for review. Reviewing a topic means searching for a tag and pressing Ctrl+Tab to jump to a random note from the search results, which is the Smart Random Note plugin's behaviour. Organisation is delegated: Auto Note Mover files notes by tag, and Linter reformats the note on every save. Reading is tracked on two Kanban boards, one for regular reading and one for books. Naming carries the note type in the filename, so a resource note is (Resource) Topic name, a board is (Kanban) Books, and a book note is (Book) product. The interesting design decision here is that the type lives in two places at once, in the filename prefix and in the template's front matter, and the two can drift. The README does not describe any check that keeps them in sync.

Installing it means installing plugins by hand

There is no package, no CLI and no install script in the supplied material. The repository is a vault folder, so the practical path is to clone or download it and open the folder as a vault in Obsidian, then enable the listed community plugins from Obsidian's settings. Because the README lists plugins by GitHub link rather than by a lockfile or manifest, there is no pinned version for any of them, and no way from the repository alone to know which versions the author was running. Templater is the one you have to get right first, since the templates folder depends on it. If Templater's syntax has changed since the templates were written, the templates will render as literal text instead of populating fields. The README does not state a minimum Obsidian version, and no releases are listed for the repository, so there is no changelog to consult when something breaks. Treat the plugin list as a shopping list you verify one item at a time, not as a dependency manifest.

The maintenance problem is stated by the author

The README opens with a note that the template is no longer actively maintained. The author's stated reason is a change of belief: that Claude Code is all you need, and that Obsidian's file over app philosophy suits AI agents because notes are just files that agents can read, write and reason over. The README points to claudian, described as a Claude Code plugin for Obsidian vaults, and to a successor repository, tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent, described as simpler and better. This is the single most important fact about the project. It is not abandoned in the sense of being broken; it is abandoned in the sense that its author moved to a different approach and said so. That has two consequences. The templates and workflow tips remain readable and copyable as a description of one person's system. But the plugin list will age, and no one is updating it. A reader who adopts the vault wholesale inherits a maintenance burden that the original author has already declined.

Where this is the wrong tool

If you want a vault that an AI agent can operate on, this is not the repository to start from, and the author says as much by redirecting to obsidian-vault-agent. If you want a minimal setup, the plugin list works against you: roughly twenty community plugins, several of which overlap in purpose, and each one is a surface that can break on an Obsidian update. If you are not already sold on Zettelkasten, the template set will not persuade you, because the note types only make sense once you accept that terms should be atomic and resources should be entry points. And if you need reproducibility across a team, the absence of pinned versions makes the vault hard to hand to someone else and expect the same result. The honest reading is that this is a reference implementation, not a product. It shows one working configuration; it does not guarantee that configuration still assembles.

What to compare it against

The natural comparison is the successor the README names, tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent. The difference in approach is not cosmetic. This repository organises knowledge for a human reader: templates create notes, tags route them, Kanban boards track reading, and the review loop depends on you pressing Ctrl+R. The successor, as described in the README, is built around agents reading and writing the same files, with the author's argument being that plain files are sufficient interface for that. So the two projects answer different questions. This one answers how should a person structure a vault. The successor answers how should a vault be shaped so an agent can work in it. If your reason for looking at this repository is the Khoj plugin entry, note that Khoj is listed here as one plugin among twenty, whereas the agent-oriented direction makes retrieval and question answering the centre of the design rather than an add-on.

Licence and the cost of keeping it alive

The repository is MIT licensed, which permits reuse, modification and redistribution provided the licence and copyright notice are kept. That covers the templates and the README text in this repository. It does not cover the plugins, the Minimal theme, or any other project the README links to; each of those carries its own licence, and the README does not reproduce them. If you redistribute a vault built from this template, check the licences of whatever you bundle alongside it. On upkeep: since the author has stopped maintaining the template, the cost shifts entirely to you. The concrete tasks are re-checking each listed plugin against Obsidian's plugin browser, confirming the Templater templates in the templates folder still parse, and deciding whether the Auto Note Mover tag rules match your own tag vocabulary. None of that is large, but it is work the repository will not do for you.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt it if you want a worked example of a Zettelkasten vault layout and are willing to treat the plugin list as a starting menu rather than a specification, because nothing in the repository pins plugin versions. Do not adopt it if you need a maintained starting point, since the README states the template is no longer actively maintained and redirects to tuan3w/obsidian-vault-agent. Before copying anything, check which of the listed community plugins are still installable from Obsidian's plugin browser and which Templater syntax the templates in the templates folder rely on.

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: MIT
3. README
4. tuan3w/obsidian-template on GitHub