Hey, I wrote a plugin that dynamically creates a table based on frontmatter in your notes.
Quick Example:
Given these two notes in a notebook called Books 2025:
| Note 1 |
Note 2 |
---
title: Book 1
rating: 5
---
Thoughts about book...
|
---
title: Book 2
author: Author 2
rating: 2
---
|
Using the following code block in a note:
```frontmatter-overview
from: notebook:"Books 2025"
properties:
- NOTE_LINK AS Title
- title AS Book
- author
- rating AS ⭐
sort: rating DESC
```
Will render a table like this:
Tips
- use the templates plugin to keep all of your notes in the same format and avoid misspelling properties in the frontmatter
- the plugin supports images and links in the frontmatter
- for an in-depth usage-guide check out the ReadMe.md
I hope this is useful to someone and please reach out with questions, bugs or feature requests!
repo
6 Likes
Great plugin and elegant syntax! 
I noticed that when the search results contain notes without front matter they're still displayed in the table as empty rows. Do you think it would be helpful to have a plugin setting to hide them?
If anyone starts using front matter regularly and would like to search notes by front matter properties, consider trying out the Inline Tag Navigator plugin.
2 Likes
Thanks!
Yeah, that is by design, but I could think about it. My use-case for this plugin is specific notebooks where each note is one item and I would want every item in the overview even if I was "lazy" one day and forgot the frontmatter.
Basically each note that gets returned by the search should be one row in the table, regardless of which properties are missing (except the note where the overview is defined).
But I could definitely add a setting for that if someone has a different use case! I'll look into it.
I've thought about it and I think it might be better to exclude notes without frontmatter locally per overview and not globally in the settings. There might be times when people would want to include them and other times they don't.
Not sure, what a good syntax could be, maybe just something like excludeEmpty: True as an optional parameter with the default being False?
2 Likes
That's a very useful plugin but I would have kept it more generic - something like "Multiple note overview". Then your logic could be the same but you could handle notes without frontmatter too - you'd use the actual note title, author, etc. by default. And if the frontmatter is present, you'd use this.
I say this because probably a lot of users don't know what frontmatter is, so that makes your plugin look unnecessarily technical when it could actually be useful to anyone.
2 Likes
Do I get it correctly that Note Overview plugin is alternative to Frontmatter if you don't want to have custom metadata based filtering and want to only stick with basic note properties?
I've been planning to write this plugin for a while and after I wrote a script to turns properties in an even more specific syntax into a static table overview.
So turning my notes into frontmatter and calling the plugin that was actually already trying to appeal to a broader audience for me haha.
I had actually added the functionality of adding more of the actual note properties into columns, but since most of them don't return the info in a nice, human-readable way, I decided against it.
And also to answer @executed, yes I think the Note Overview plugin already handles that use case.
Although, I don't think frontmatter is only good for filtering based on metadata. It's also just a nice way to capture info about the content of the page in a structured way, so that I can look at a page and know that the info of when I read that book is at the top. I also use it to keep track of the games I own (how many players can play it, how long it takes, when I bought it, link to the rules, etc).
And this plugin allows you to have an overview over those properties.
3 Likes
I love your plugin. That's what I've missed so far for organising my books and reading list.
I used Note Overview Plugin so far but I love this frontmatter thing to have all (for me) relevant informations directly in the header of my note.
Very good job!
1 Like
