Kanban Action Planner

Kanban Action Planner adds a Kanban board view to Obsidian Bases. Any set of notes selected by a Base can be planned and tracked visually. Notes become cards, a status property becomes the columns, and you drag cards between columns or reorder them, with every change written straight back into your notes.

Kanban board

In development. Features are delivered milestone by milestone, and this page reflects what currently works.

Key Features

  • Kanban view inside Bases. Add a “Kanban” view to any Base. The Base’s filters choose the notes, and each note becomes a card.
  • Status to columns. Columns are defined explicitly (per view, from the Starter Kit, or in plugin settings), never guessed from your data, so a typo can’t create a stray column. Cards are placed by their status property, and notes with no or unknown status collect in an Unmapped column that disappears when empty.
  • Drag, reorder, sort. Drag a card to another column to change its status, or reorder within a column (saved to the note). Auto-sort each column by name or any property, ascending or descending. Full keyboard support too.
  • Swimlanes. Split the board into horizontal lanes by note type or any property, with collapsible lanes and columns. A board mixing note types auto-groups by type, each lane with its own type’s columns — a card’s own type is authoritative for its status.

Swimlanes

  • Filter as you type. A toolbar search box with a compact, Jira-like query language (status:active OR due:overdue, parent:"PKM" -tag:archived), saved per view.
  • Relationships. See, navigate, and edit parent, sibling, child, and blocked-by links from the card menu. A blocked card is flagged and filterable.
  • Focus on a card’s children or whole subtree. Zoom into a project (card menu or the ▼ children badge) and the board re-filters to just its children — or all its descendants — or zoom up from a task via its ▲ parents badge to see the whole project’s children at once. A dismissible chip next to the filter box shows the focus; zooming again drills down a level.
  • Triage mode. Work through an overwhelming backlog one card at a time, setting priority, urgency, and effort from one-click controls. It doubles as a spaced-repetition review queue.

Triage mode

  • Calendar mode. Switch a board to a calendar that plots scheduled dates and deadlines together. Drag a card onto a day to schedule it.
  • Timeline mode. A Gantt-style view: one row per card, a bar spanning its start → end dates, milestone diamonds from a configurable list property, and drag-to-reschedule.

Calendar mode

  • Archiving. Move a finished note to a placeholder-driven archive folder, manually or automatically when it reaches a chosen status.
  • WIP limits, multi-select and bulk actions, compact mode, overdue emphasis, hover preview. Soft per-column limits, Shift-click selection with bulk set-status / archive / open, a titles-only compact toggle, red and amber due-date washes, and a native note popover on card hover.
  • Colors and per-type card display. Give each status a color (palette or custom, theme-aware), and choose which fields show on cards, per note type.
  • Obsidian Starter Kit aware. The plugin works fully on its own. The Obsidian Starter Kit is completely optional and simply pairs well with it. With it installed, columns and note types come from your Starter Kit config automatically, and your local choices are saved regardless.

Note types

  • Everything lives in your notes. Status, order, dates, relationships, and grouping are all written to frontmatter, so your board is just your notes. No lock-in.

Quick Start

  1. Install and enable the plugin.
  2. Open or create a Base, then add a view and pick Kanban.
  3. Give your notes a status property. Define your columns by listing the status values in Configure view → Statuses (columns) (one per line, e.g. 10 Todo, 20 Doing, 30 Done). You can also set vault-wide Default statuses in the plugin settings, or let the Starter Kit provide them. Until columns are defined, every card sits in Unmapped.
  4. Drag cards between columns to change status, reorder or sort them within a column, and right-click a card for scheduling, archiving, relationships, and more.

About

Created by Sébastien Dubois.

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