Quick Notes

An Omarchy shell plugin: a pencil in the bar that captures a thought straight into your Obsidian vault.

Click the pencil → a small editor drops down → type → Ctrl+Enter → the note is written to your vault's Inbox/ as a timestamped Markdown file. Esc or a click outside closes it.

Obsidian needs no plugin or API for this — a vault is just a folder of Markdown files, so the note simply appears, ready to process later.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/BenDowswell/omarchy-quick-notes.git --enable --yes

Plugins are unsandboxed code that runs inside omarchy-shell — the three files here are short; read them first if you like. Without --yes the command is interactive and shows you the code before enabling.

The pencil lands in the right section of the bar. Move it with:

omarchy bar move ben.quick-notes --section center

Update or remove later:

omarchy plugin update ben.quick-notes
omarchy plugin remove ben.quick-notes

What a saved note looks like

~/<vault>/Inbox/2026-08-30-0734.md

---
created: 2026-08-30T07:34:12+01:00
tags: [inbox]
---

whatever you typed

Configuration

The vault is auto-detected from ~/.config/obsidian/obsidian.json (the open vault, or the most recently used one). Override anything with environment variables — put them in ~/.config/environment.d/quick-notes.conf so the shell picks them up on login:

Variable	Default	Meaning
OMARCHY_QUICK_NOTE_VAULT	auto-detected	Vault root directory
OMARCHY_QUICK_NOTE_DIR	Inbox	Subfolder for per-note files
OMARCHY_QUICK_NOTE_TAGS	inbox	Comma list written to the YAML tags:
OMARCHY_QUICK_NOTE_FILE	(unset)	If set, append every note to this one file instead of creating per-note files. Relative to the vault. Supports {date} and {time} tokens.

Append to one file instead

# ~/.config/environment.d/quick-notes.conf
OMARCHY_QUICK_NOTE_FILE=Inbox.md

or a daily note:

OMARCHY_QUICK_NOTE_FILE=Daily/{date}.md

In append mode each note is added under a ## <timestamp> heading.

Open from a keybinding

~/.config/hypr/bindings.lua:

o.bind("SUPER, N", "Quick note", "omarchy-shell shell toggle ben.quick-notes '{}'")

Files

File	Purpose
manifest.json	Plugin manifest — bar-widget, right section
Panel.qml	Bar button + editor popup (extends qs.Ui.Panel)
bin/omarchy-quick-note	Resolves the vault and writes the note; prints the path

Development

Clone into your plugin dir and iterate:

git clone https://github.com/BenDowswell/omarchy-quick-notes.git \
  ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/ben.quick-notes
omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins
omarchy plugin enable ben.quick-notes

Editing bin/omarchy-quick-note takes effect immediately. Editing Panel.qml needs a full omarchy restart shell — the shell's hot-reload re-reads shell.json and plugin config but does not recompile a mounted bar widget's QML.

Requires jq (an Omarchy dependency) for vault auto-detection.

License

MIT © Ben Dowswell