Home Cards offers a straightforward Obsidian homepage alternative without the fluff

Patrick is a seasoned writer with more than a decade of experience, specializing in any and all things tech. His work has been featured on platforms like CNET, Yahoo, Xfinity, and many other outlets. When not typing away, he can be found with his nose in a book. 

Creating an Obsidian homepage is practically a rite of passage for anyone who uses the app long enough. It's a fun project that teaches you a lot about your vault and how to customize it, and it can (though it doesn't always) improve productivity. I've been a fan of Hearth since I discovered it, but it's more focused on aesthetics. Home Cards is a more straightforward alternative, focused on productivity rather than appearance, and it's easier to set up out of the box.

With Home Cards, my homepage is immediately useful

No setup is required

When I first open Hearth, it opens the default layout. It's not a bad layout, but it barely scratches the surface of what Hearth can do. To really take advantage of it, I have to spend a fair amount of time customizing it. Home Notes is immediately more accessible, showing four categories: Recently opened, recently created, Most popular, and Least popular. It's set to show eight notes in each section, but you can change the number of notes per header, along with a slew of other features. Home Cards has unexpected depth when you start digging into it, which might not be apparent at first glance.

But that said, I don't have to spend time customizing it. I can go with the bare-bones layout, and Home Cards will still surface notes relevant to my workflow. And if I do choose to customize it, that functionality only improves. I can change those four sections (and add more) to whatever I want. I can sort by the default settings or modify the search parameters to be much more specific. Custom conditions let me narrow the cards to match only exact properties, tags, or both.

You can tweak the background, too. Several subdued patterns are included by default, but Home Notes lets you upload your own images as a background if you want. The granularity this plugin offers is impressive, especially for a relatively recent release.

The Pages feature lets you group similar interests and projects

These are more regional, rather than vault-wide

One of the most interesting features Home Cards offers users is Pages. This option, tucked away in the plugin settings menu, lets you create home pages for specific tags and properties. Think of it as a much more focused home page: instead of covering your entire vault, a page might look only in a specific folder or for cards tagged with a note or property. It's useful for grouping different projects together. Since my primary vault operates as a sort of operating system for my entire laptop, I created pages for each of the major undertakings I track in my vault.

For example, I have a "Substack" page that shows me my most recently opened notes, as well as which notes are drafted and ready for publication. It's an easy way to see the status of things at a glance. I could recreate the same effect in an Obsidian Base, but it would take a bit more work and wouldn't be on my homepage (at least not without throwing a few more plugins into the mix).

Bringing notes back from the dead is the best feature

It lets me revisit ideas I'd forgotten

My favorite feature of Home Cards is the "Rediscover a note" feature. It's in the toolbar in the top-right corner and looks like the shuffle icon. It works by pulling a note from your vault that hasn't been opened in a set amount of time. It defaults to six months, but you can set it to pull anything that hasn't been touched in as little as one month to as long as 36 months. If you have a big vault, this feature will surface notes you've long since forgotten about.

There's another way to find older cards, too. If I create a new section, I can tell it to pull from the "Rediscover" section and get eight notes at a time that haven't been accessed in a while. The options for sorting are even more refined, dividing the content strategy by "Forgotten notes," "Forgotten gems," "Unfinished Thoughts," "On this day," "Sleeping hubs," and "Old friends." Each one chooses to show notes based on different criteria; for example, "Old friends" is defined as "Notes you opened often that you haven't opened in a while."

For my fiction work, I find it useful to resurface old notes with story-idea tags. If I'm ever stuck on a scene or not sure what should happen next, browsing ideas I once had but decided against can spark the next big plot twist.

A functional home page doesn't have to be another project

I think Obsidian is a fantastic tool at its most basic level, but I can't deny that a home page elevates it. Obsidian becomes more useful when you have a springboard to start from; it helps you stay organized and track everything you're working on in your vault. However, if it becomes another chore, you're unlikely to keep using your homepage. Home Cards is a great solution that gives you access to what you need out of the box, with easy customization for more refined results.