# Obsidian-Templates organises a Zettelkasten into four listed note-type categories > This repository is a set of Markdown templates and scripts for Obsidian, grouped as fleeting notes, literature notes, permanent notes and project notes, with a separate structure notes category. The templates are coupled to third party plugins, and DataView appears as a dependency on almost all of them. **groepl/Obsidian-Templates** — A repository containing templates and scripts for #Obsidian to support the #Zettelkasten method for note-taking. - Repository: https://github.com/groepl/Obsidian-Templates - Stars: 1,965 · Forks: 170 - Language: Unknown - License: MIT - Published: 2026-10-16 · Updated: 2026-10-16 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/groepl-obsidian-templates ## Copy templates into the Obsidian template folder, then enable the plugins Installation is a file copy. The README's usage instruction is to copy the templates to your Obsidian template folder location so they become available as templates within Obsidian, linking to Obsidian's own help page on Templates. There is no script to run and no package to build. The repository description mentions templates and scripts, but the documented path is the copy. What is not optional is the plugin set. Five plugins are listed as mandatory. Bases creates database-like views of notes for viewing, editing, sorting and filtering files and their properties. Book Search creates book notes from the Google Books API. DataView provides a query language for filtering, sorting and extracting data from Markdown pages. Frontmatter Tag Suggest autocompletes tags in the YAML frontmatter. Wikipedia pulls the first section of a Wikipedia article into the active note. So the effective installation is five community plugins plus a folder of templates, and the templates are written on the assumption that those plugins are present. That is the single most important thing to understand before adopting them: these are not plain Markdown templates that degrade gracefully. ## Four note types, and the plugin each one depends on The template list is organised by Zettelkasten note type, which is the whole point of the repository. Category 1 is Fleeting Notes, with a single template at 1_Fleeting Template.md and no plugin requirement listed. Category 2 is Literature Notes: Book, Person, Quote, Recipe, Term and Tool. Book needs Book Search plus DataView. Person, Quote, Recipe and Tool each need DataView. Term needs DataView plus Wikipedia, which is why the Wikipedia plugin is in the mandatory set rather than the optional one. Category 3 is Permanent Notes: Note, Observation, Proposition, Question and Prompt, each listed as needing DataView. Category 4 is Project Notes: Book, Comment and Post, and here the requirement changes to Better Word Count plus DataView. Better Word Count is not in either plugin list in the README, which is a gap in the documentation rather than in the templates. A fifth directory, 5_Structure Notes, sits at the top level of the repository alongside Templates, Assets, Visuals and EXAMPLES.md. The pattern in the dependencies is itself information. DataView appears on nearly every template that holds structured facts, which means the fields in the frontmatter are meant to be queried, not just read. ## Nine optional plugins, one of them already abandoned The optional list is longer than the mandatory one, and it is more casual. Auto Link Title fetches a pasted web page and extracts its title, creating a markdown link with the right title set. Callout Manager creates and configures callouts. Charts creates interactive charts for notes. File Explorer Note Count shows the number of elements under each folder in the file explorer. Iconize adds icons to files, folders and text. Paste image rename renames pasted images so they are named and organised clearly. PlantUML renders PlantUML diagrams. Sortable offers Wikipedia-like sortable tables. Tag Wrangler renames, merges, toggles and searches the tag pane. Sortable carries a note in the README itself: it is no longer supported. That annotation is worth taking at face value and excluding from your installation, since an unsupported plugin in a note-taking vault can break a view at an awkward time. What the optional list shows is the intended texture of a vault: tags that need renaming and merging, callouts that need configuration, pasted images that need meaningful names, and folder trees large enough that a count per folder is useful. The repository also links an Obsidian-Zettelkasten-Starter-Kit, which is described as a way to use this repository as part of a larger setup rather than on its own. ## Why the four way split is the actual design decision The README describes Zettelkasten as a personal tool for thinking and writing created by Niklas Luhmann, with hypertextual features that make a web of thought possible. The distinction it draws is between creating a web of thoughts and creating notes of arbitrary size and form, with an emphasis on connection rather than collection. That sentence is the design brief for the template set. A system organised by folders and by note size asks what is in this note. A system organised by connections asks what this note links to. The four categories map onto that. Fleeting notes are the capture inbox, undifferentiated and cheap. Literature notes are about source material rather than about your thinking, and the six subtypes exist because a quote, a person, a term and a recipe have different fields. Permanent notes are where the thinking lives, and there are five kinds of permanent note here: note, observation, proposition, question and prompt. Project notes are bounded work with an end. The proposition and question split is the most useful one for a team, because it forces a distinction that a single note type usually loses: a statement you believe, and an open question you have not resolved. A vault that cannot tell them apart drifts into collecting. Obsidian itself is described as an app from Shida Li and Erica Xu that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files, turning a collection of plain text files into a network of linked thought. ## Maintenance, versioning and what is actually in the repository The repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-10-06. The release tags carry dates in their names as well as in their metadata: v11.0.0 - 14.07.2026, v10.1.0 - 10.02.2025 and v10.0.0 - 20.11.2024. The gaps between these listed releases are irregular. The last push being well after the newest tag says work continues between releases. The top level is small and tells you what the project is. Templates/ holds the templates themselves, Assets/ and Visuals/ hold supporting files and the images the README embeds, EXAMPLES.md is a set of finished notes created from the templates, and 5_Structure Notes/ is a note type alongside the four in the README's list. The primary language is recorded as unknown, which is consistent with a repository of Markdown files with no code of substance. Licence is MIT in LICENSE.md, so copies and modifications must follow its notice and licence terms. The EXAMPLES.md file deserves attention before you commit. Looking at finished notes built from the templates tells you what the intended level of detail looks like, which the templates alone cannot show. ## Where this approach stops working The first limit is plugin dependency risk. Five mandatory community plugins, plus more optional ones, each with its own maintainer and release cadence. A template that relies on a DataView query block breaks silently when DataView changes its syntax, and you find out when a view stops listing notes rather than when an update lands. The second is that this is a method, not a tool. The templates encode one person's reading of Zettelkasten, and the six literature note subtypes reflect the sources that person reads. If you work from interview transcripts, datasets or code, the taxonomy does not cover your material and you will write templates anyway. The third is friction. Fleeting notes, literature notes and permanent notes is three places to put the same thought depending on how settled it is, and that triage is the method's strength and its overhead. A team without someone willing to own that triage will produce three parallel note systems. The fourth is Obsidian itself. Its plugin-based features may require reconfiguration when the notes are used in a different editor. ## Conclusion Adopt these templates if you already use Obsidian, already believe in the Zettelkasten split between note types, and are willing to install five community plugins and accept that one optional plugin in the README is marked no longer supported. Do not adopt them as a standalone system, because nothing here works without Obsidian and the plugin set, and a template whose dependencies cannot be installed is just a Markdown file. Verify first that DataView and the other four mandatory plugins still install cleanly on your Obsidian version, since the template bodies reference plugin features rather than plain Markdown. ## FAQ ### How do I install Obsidian-Templates? Copy the templates into your Obsidian template folder location so they are available as templates inside Obsidian. There is no build step; the documented path is a file copy plus installing the plugins the templates reference. ### Which Obsidian plugins does the template set require? Five are listed as mandatory: Bases, Book Search, DataView, Frontmatter Tag Suggest and Wikipedia. Nine more are optional, and one of those, Sortable, is marked in the README as no longer supported. ### What note types do the templates cover? Fleeting notes, literature notes with book, person, quote, recipe, term and tool subtypes, permanent notes with observation, proposition, question and prompt subtypes, and project notes with book, comment and post subtypes. A fifth structure notes directory also sits at the repository root. ### Do I need DataView to use these templates? Almost all of them. The README lists DataView as a requirement for the person, quote, recipe, term, tool, note, observation, proposition, question and prompt templates as well as for the project note templates. Only the fleeting note template is listed without a plugin requirement. ### What licence are these Obsidian templates under? MIT, stated in LICENSE.md at the root of the repository, so the templates can be copied and modified with the notice kept. ## Sources - [groepl/Obsidian-Templates on GitHub](https://github.com/groepl/Obsidian-Templates) - [Issues](https://github.com/groepl/Obsidian-Templates/issues) - [License: MIT](https://github.com/groepl/Obsidian-Templates/blob/main/LICENSE) - [README](https://github.com/groepl/Obsidian-Templates/blob/main/README.md) - [Releases](https://github.com/groepl/Obsidian-Templates/releases) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/groepl-obsidian-templates