Apex Dashboard: a one-page workbench plugin that turns Obsidian into a personal cockpit

One page instead of ten tabs

Apex Dashboard, by pandorareads and available in the Obsidian community plugin market, starts from a simple observation: daily work inside a vault keeps pulling you between scattered notes, a task list, and half a dozen plugins. The plugin's answer is a single dashboard page where those surfaces live together: memo cards for quick thoughts, an interactive todo list, project cards that organize documents, compact note lists, a calendar, and embeddable web views.

Data ownership is the design anchor. All dashboard content lives in one plain markdown file, dashboard.md, created at the vault root on first launch, and every change saves directly to that file. The note is the interface: deleting, renaming, or reordering sections happens by editing the note, and changes reflect immediately in the dashboard view. If you ever leave the plugin, what remains is a readable markdown file.

Memos, todos, and projects

Memo cards are sticky-note style text areas for灵感, meeting notes, or daily reflections, and both memos and todos render double-bracket wiki links as clickable connections into the vault. The todo section supports adding, drag reordering, and completion, with a progress bar showing the percentage done in real time.

Project cards organize vault documents into groups, each card linking multiple notes with support for cover images from local vault files or the web, plus inline document search for quickly attaching files. The file types are not limited to markdown: PDFs, images, audio, and video all attach. A separate notes section provides a denser list layout, up to five cards per row without covers, for reference documents where information density matters more than visuals. Since version 2.5.1, cards can be dragged across sections by their title bar, with todo and memo conversions preserving task and checkbox state.

A calendar that needs no dataview

The calendar section is a native month grid that aggregates every dated task across the vault without requiring dataview or an external plugin. Each cell lists that day's tasks, clicking a cell opens the day's schedule, and a full-screen month view supports month switching and in-place checking. Multi-day itineraries written with start and end markers span days correctly.

The same full-screen view doubles as an embeddable calendar section inside the workbench, with a complete month view, a weekly timeline grid, task filtering, and a jump-to-today button. Clicking a date number adds a task for that day, written automatically to the daily note or the dashboard todo list. The calendar widget also exists in the sidebar, so the same data surfaces at three scales: glanceable strip, sidebar grid, and full-screen planning view.

The built-in query engine

The most technically substantial section is the query engine. Apex embeds its own DQL engine, so you can query the whole vault without installing the Dataview plugin. A query section accepts statements such as the documented example, TABLE file.name, rating FROM "Books" WHERE rating >= 4 SORT rating DESC, and supports TABLE, LIST, TASK, CALENDAR, and HEATMAP outputs.

Sources work over folders, tags, and links with WHERE, SORT, GROUP BY, FLATTEN, and LIMIT clauses, roughly 40 built-in functions, all implicit file fields, YAML frontmatter, and inline fields. The configuration dialog validates syntax live and offers one-click example queries. TASK results are checkboxes that write back to the source note, CALENDAR draws a month grid, and HEATMAP renders any numeric field as a yearly contribution chart. Results update through a per-section refresh button, keeping the dashboard from re-querying the vault on every keystroke.

Sidebar widgets and embedded web

The left sidebar carries 11 independently toggleable, drag-sortable widgets. The list covers weather from Open-Meteo with no API key and 5-day forecasts, a Chinese lunar calendar with traditional festivals, a pomodoro timer with focus-rest cycles and statistics, reading tracking with Douban book search and page-based progress, countdowns, a year-progress percentage, the calendar, habit check-in with streaks and heatmaps, an expense tracker with CSV import and export, a photo-frame album that auto-plays a folder with four transition styles, and a NetEase Cloud Music player with playlist import and a floating mini bar.

The web section embeds any URL as a panel. The engine is automatic about it: sites whose embedding policy allows iframes embed directly, sites that refuse get a desktop webview with persistent login state, which the README says makes login-type apps such as Google Keep and TickTick usable, and mobile shows a fallback card with an open-in-browser action. Display scale presets run from 50 to 125 percent for dense web apps.

Themes, customization, and installation

The plugin ships 13 themes, several with slow-drifting painted backgrounds: earth tones on parchment, Nordic frost, a high-saturation My Little Pony scheme where every section gets a character color, rose soft light, impressionist lilac, an Animal Crossing style default, tundra, matcha, a vermilion ink-wash theme that replaced an earlier mono design, and four dark themes with neon, volt, magma, and lemon accents. All themes respect Obsidian's light and dark modes.

Section types number 14, covering todos, memos, sticky notes, project cards, coverless notes, data views, databases, folders, images, videos, calendar, WeChat Reading, TickTick, and web embeds, freely composable per workspace. Settings cover the dashboard file path, theme, language in English and Chinese, and recent-document count. Installation is a community-market search or a manual drop into the plugins folder, and a quick actions system pins file and command shortcuts, including new daily note and new note presets, to the sidebar.

Editorial conclusion

Apex Dashboard earns its place by doing the work of five plugins in one page while keeping every byte of data in a plain markdown file. The native calendar that ignores dataview, the embedded DQL engine with write-back tasks, the automatic web embedding with persistent login, and the 11-widget sidebar make it a genuine cockpit rather than a pretty start page. For Obsidian users who want their vault to open onto a workspace instead of a file tree, this is currently the most complete single-plugin answer.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. License: MIT
3. PandoraReads/apex-dashboard on GitHub
4. README
5. Releases