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Uses / My Setup

How I Use the Badges Plugin in Obsidian

By Wes Ellis4 min read
Paper tags with bright pink, green, orange and blue color blocks, tied with string.
THE SHORT VERSION4 points
  • Badges is a community plugin by gapmiss. It's not mine; I just like it.
  • You write a badge as inline code, like [!!priority:p1], and it renders as a small colored label.
  • I use a short, boring set: priority (p1 to p3) and a handful of status badges.
  • Because badges are plain text, Obsidian's search finds them. The Dataview dashboards in my notes are still in progress.

I moved my notes from UpNote to Obsidian a while back, mostly because Obsidian keeps everything as plain MarkdownA plain-text format where a # makes a heading and **stars** make bold. Easy to write, and easy to turn into a web page. files in folders I control, synced through Dropbox. A proprietary note format is a lock with someone else holding the key. The one downside of plain text is that it's plain. That's where Badges comes in.

Badges is an Obsidian community plugin written by gapmiss, and it's MIT licensed. I didn't write it. This is just how I use it.

Checked against the plugin's README in September 2026.

What it does

A badge is a bit of inline code with a special shape. Obsidian shows it as a small colored pill with an icon instead of as code. The plugin's own description is that it works a bit like a key-value store: the key picks the icon and style, and the value is the text.

There are five kinds, in the order they appear below: a default icon badge, a blue GitHub-style badge like the ones on a README, a green "success" version of the same, a plain text label with no icon, and a fully custom one.

`[!!priority:p1]`
`[!!|ghb>version:1.2.0]`
`[!!|ghs>tests:passing]`
`[!!|status:draft]`
`[!!|coffee|fuel:second cup|139,69,19]`

Each one goes inside single backticks in the note, so it's inline code. The custom kind takes any icon name from the Lucide set and a color as either R,G,B or one of Obsidian's variables, like var(--color-red-rgb).

Heads up

The value can't contain a pipe | or a colon :, because those split the badge into parts. [!!deadline:3:00 PM] won't render. Write 3 PM instead.

The current release is 1.2.0. My notes are from when I installed 1.1.0, so two newer tricks weren't in them: a badge with no value at all, like [!!todo], and a badge that's also a link, written [!!KEY:VAL>>LINK].

The conventions I settled on

My notes have a very long list of example badges, from weather to dice rolls. Fun to write, useless to keep. What stuck is short:

Badge Meaning
[!!priority:p1] Now
[!!priority:p2] This week
[!!priority:p3] This month
[!!todo:...] Not started
[!!warning:...] In progress, or needs a look
[!!error:...] Blocked
[!!done:...] Finished
[!!check:...] Checked and verified

The rules I wrote down alongside them are the useful part: keep values short, use the same badges for the same kind of note, and don't badge every paragraph. A note with twelve badges has no badges, the same way a page that's all bold has no bold.

Finding things again

Since a badge is just text in the file, Obsidian's normal search finds it. Searching for "[!!priority:p1]" in quotes lists every note with a top-priority badge. Search also takes a regular expression between slashes, so /\[!!(todo|warning):/ finds everything that isn't finished.

What's still on the to-do list

This is the honest part. When I set Badges up, I also planned three things, and none of them are done yet:

  • Dataview dashboards. My notes have a page of Dataview queries for badge dashboards. Checking them now, they lean on a file.content field that Dataview's query language doesn't have. Reading a note's text needs DataviewJS instead, so those queries need a rewrite before they'll work. Dataview itself is still on my "planned" list.
  • Color-coded priorities, with p1 red, p2 orange and p3 yellow, as a CSS snippet in .obsidian/snippets/. The plugin exposes a few CSS variables for the badge border, like --inline-badge-border-color and --inline-badge-border-radius. Beyond that I'd be styling its HTML directly, so I want to look at what it actually outputs before writing anything.
  • Shortcuts for inserting badges, probably through a template, so I'm not typing brackets and exclamation points all day.

It's in progress, and it's useful as it is. The plain search already does most of what the dashboards were going to do.

If you like your Obsidian notes looking a bit more like a printed page, Vignelli is the theme I built for exactly that. And the notes these badges live on are where my reusable prompts end up, as I wrote about in turning a long AI conversation into a workflow.

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