Activity Timeline for Obsidian

See what you actually did in your vault on any given day — with previews, not just file names.

Activity Timeline logs your work as you go and shows it as a scrollable timeline: notes you created, the lines you changed in notes you edited, tasks you completed or dropped, and tags you added. It's built as external memory — a way to answer "what was I working on last Tuesday?" at a glance.

⚠️ Early version (0.1.2). It works day to day, but expect rough edges. Feedback is very welcome — see Feature requests & bugs.

Features

• Timeline grouped by day, with Day / Week / Month / Year views and arrows to move through time.
• Edit previews — each card shows the lines that changed, not just the top of the note. Edits to the same note within 30 minutes are grouped into one card.
• Tasks plugin support — ticking a task ([x]) logs Task completed, cancelling ([-]) logs Task dropped. Priority, due date and recurring tasks show on the card. Tasks with ✅ / ❌ dates show up on the right day even from before you installed the plugin.
• Tags — cards show tags added and removed; click any tag to filter, and the sidebar shows your top tags for the period.
• Sidebar — 10-week activity heatmap (click a day to jump to it), counts by type, folder filter.
• Daily-note embed — add a code block with the language activity-timeline (or day-activity, if another plugin already uses that name) to a daily note (named like 2026-10-06) to show that day's activity inside it.
• Optional capture folders — if other apps save notes into a folder for you (web clipper, voice transcripts), label them so they show as Captured.
• Choose how far back it looks — when you first enable it, pick Only from today, Last month, Last 6 months, Last year or Everything. Change it any time in Settings.
• Bulk changes stay tidy — renaming a folder, find-and-replace across the vault or an importer shows as one Bulk change card (with the list of notes) instead of hundreds.
• Built for big, old vaults — tested on 10,000 notes with two years of logs: views draw in well under a tenth of a second, older history is indexed gently in the background, and log months load only when you look at them.
• Works on desktop and mobile. Each device keeps its own log in your vault, so if you sync your vault, every device sees the full history without double-counting synced edits.

Installation

Not yet in the Community Plugins directory. Two ways to install:

Option A — BRAT (easiest, gets updates automatically)

1. Install BRAT from Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
2. In BRAT's settings choose Add beta plugin and paste: dornbyg/obsidian-activity-timeline
3. Enable Activity Timeline under Settings → Community plugins.

Option B — Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. In your vault, create the folder .obsidian/plugins/dorn-activity-timeline/ and put the three files in it. (The .obsidian folder is hidden — on Mac press Cmd+Shift+. in Finder to show it.)
3. In Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins → reload the list → enable Activity Timeline.

If your vault syncs (iCloud, Obsidian Sync, etc.), the plugin folder syncs too — just enable it on each device.

Installed 0.1.0? Its plugin ID clashed with a different plugin in the Obsidian store, so Obsidian may have replaced it with that one. From 0.1.1 the ID is dorn-activity-timeline. Remove the old activity-timeline plugin, then reinstall with BRAT or manually. Your history is kept.

Using it

• Click the clock icon in the left ribbon, or run Open activity timeline from the command palette. Show today's activity jumps straight to today.
• Click a card's title to open the note (task cards open at the task's line).
• Settings: how far back to show history, excluded folders, capture folders, edit-grouping window, preview length, and how long to keep the detailed log.

Good to know

• Detailed history starts the day you install. For earlier days, the plugin can only show when each note was created and its last edit (plus Tasks completion/cancel dates). That's a limit of what Obsidian stores, not a setting.
• Older dates can be unreliable. Copying or syncing a vault often resets file dates. If a note has a created property, that date is used instead. When many notes share the same date, they're shown as one Imported or copied entry rather than flooding that day.
• Logs are plain JSON lines in a hidden .activity-log folder in your vault (one file per month per device). Nothing leaves your vault.

Feature requests & bugs

Ideas and bug reports are welcome — please use the Issues tab, which has short forms for both. If someone has already posted your idea, a 👍 on it helps decide what gets built next.

Credits

UI design and original idea by the author of this r/ObsidianMD post, whose mockup (timeline with type-labelled cards and previews, filter chips, Day/Week/Month/Year toggle, activity heatmap and by-type sidebar) this plugin is built from.

Built and tested by Dorn, adapted to the Tasks plugin and tagging; code written with the help of Claude.

License

GPL-3.0 © Dorn