Today we’re going to look at two plugins that have taken Obsidian on my phone from passable to amazing.

Slash Command

I’ve talked about the Slash Command being added to Obsidian before and mentioned that while it was great, I hoped it would be even better when you used a mobile device.

Well, it came out for mobile and I was right. This has revolutionized the experience of working with Obsidian on my iPhone. It took it from passable to good, not excellent but I’m not sure that a small screen device like your phone will ever be excellent at more than taking down thoughts for a tool like Obsidian.

To use the Slash plugin, make sure it’s activated in the Core Plugins Settings for Obsidian. If you’re sitting at any of your devices with Obsidian, turn it on and as long as you have sync configured correctly it will show up activated on your phone.

Now all you have to do is type / when you want to access anything in the command palette. I rarely use this plugin when I’m at a keyboard since I can type ⌘ + P to access the command palette, but when I’m on my iPhone waiting in the car for a kid to finish some event and reading, it makes it so much nicer to take notes and access all the power that obsidian has.

Advanced Mobile Toolbar

Advanced Mobile Toolbar is another plugin that has helped enhance my experience on mobile. It allows you to customize the way the mobile toolbars is displayed. I’ve used it to set the number of rows the mobile toolbar shows to 2, which means I can easily see more of the commands I want to see without scrolling.

If you’re so inclined you can also use it to set custom icons for any action or to change how the actions in the toolbar are laid out.

One thing I’ve used this for, in conjunction with the default Obsidian Command Palette is to add the open command to my mobile toolbar. I regularly want to switch to a different note and always found it cumbersome to trigger this behaviour while on my mobile device.

Now I’ve customized the mobile toolbar to include the open command as the first option in my list of commands, along with having two rows of actions available.

How have you optimized your mobile experience in Obsidian?