Note-taking in Obsidian doesn’t always have to be serious. Some of the plugins are helpful for little tasks, while others are there mostly to make your notes more fun. They can be distracting at times, but that’s part of what makes them enjoyable.
Plugins range from emoji pickers and playful themes to bigger add-ons that gamify your tasks, track habits, or let you experiment with interactive views. They don’t replace Obsidian’s core features, but they help give it your personal touch by letting you decorate your notes with emojis. Adding emojis and other playful touches makes Obsidian easier to stick with, especially when note-taking starts to feel dull.
Add visual flair in Obsidian with the Emoji plugin
Use emojis as quick markers
When you add emojis to your notes, the text becomes easier to scan. You can use a red exclamation mark to highlight something important or a warning sign to flag a risk in a project. Instead of digging through dense paragraphs, those visual cues help you find details faster. It’s a simple add-on, and we’re already used to dropping emojis in apps like WhatsApp.
To install it, open Settings > Community Plugins > Browse, then search for Emoji Toolbar. Click Install and toggle it on. It’s worth creating a hotkey to open the emoji picker since, in my experience, it never showed me an icon to click on like some other plugins do.
You can also use a star to mark key ideas, a light bulb to track new thoughts, or even a rocket to tag something you want to launch soon. Emojis won’t change how Obsidian works, but they will make your notes more scannable. Going through your notes won’t feel like staring at the same wall of plain text since you can add all the emojis you want.
Add a vintage touch with Typewriter Scroll
Center your writing like a typewriter
Typewriter is one of the easiest plugins I’ve tried in Obsidian, and that’s one of the reasons I’m keeping it. There’s nothing complicated about setting it up. Open Settings > Community Plugins, type Typewriter Scroll > click Install, and toggle it on. That’s it.
From there, you can open any note and start typing to see how it changes your writing flow. The cursor doesn’t climb to the very top of the page the way it usually does. Instead, it stays around the middle while the text scrolls beneath it. When you press Enter, the line holds steady.
If you backspace through a paragraph, the cursor doesn’t slide upward. It jumps, similar to how a typewriter advances paper. It’s a small detail, but it makes writing in Obsidian feel a little different, where the cursor appears when you press Enter. The only thing I would add is an option to enable the typewriter sound as you type.
Roll the dice in Obsidian with Dice Roller
Add randomness or just waste time
Dice roller is one of those plugins that’s fun to try but can take a little work to get running. At first, I pasted the usual brace format {{dice: 1d6}}, but nothing happened. Even after switching between Source mode and Reading view, I only saw the raw code. The plugin itself was working, though, because the Dice Tray in the sidebar let me roll d4s, d6s, and more by either clicking a button or typing a formula like 2d6.
The fix was using the backtick syntax instead of curly braces. Typing `dice: 1d20` in a note and switching to Reading view finally showed me the roll, complete with a little reroll button. Clicking the dice icon launched an animated 3D dice across my screen, which is fun but also distracting since I kept trying to guess the result.
Between the inline rolls and the Dice Tray, you can play around inside your notes. It’s not a plugin you’ll use for serious work, but it’s one of the more playful ones I’ve tested out. One way to use it is to roll the dice to see how many minutes until you head to lunch.
A playful side to Obsidian
Obsidian is known for plugins that boost productivity, but not every add-on has to be about work. Sometimes the lighter ones are the reasons you keep coming back to it. Emojis break up walls of text and make important points easier to spot. Typewriter Scroll changes the rhythm of the cursor and gives the screen a vintage look. Dice Roller brings in a bit of randomness, whether you try it out of curiosity or just want to use it to guess the result.
None of these plugins is essential, and that’s the point. They help you have some fun in between all the note-taking, but you can also get carried away. You can end up spending more time than you’d like using, and have to speed things up to meet your deadlines. The trick is to pick one or two that make your vault feel less like work and more like your own space.