Bob Ledger Tools

Bob Ledger Tools renders task, Pomodoro, freshness, and planning information from Bob notes.

Plugin facts¶

Registered commands¶

Snippets and the plan block¶

The Expand Bob snippet command (or Tab) expands editor snippets. Date calculation uses local calendar days: d[-]<N> (for example d0) expands to the bare ISO date, while D[-]<N> (for example D0) expands to the emphasized local date, an em dash, and a trailing space, with the cursor placed after that space. One isolated - immediately before the cursor expands exactly that hyphen to an em dash plus a trailing space; existing suffix whitespace is left alone, and --, ---, and longer hyphen runs are untouched so Markdown thematic breaks, YAML frontmatter delimiters, and other multi-hyphen text keep Obsidian's normal Tab behavior.

The plugin also renders a live bob-plan block: a TODAY 3/3 · 7/10 chip with the theme and link budget (its tooltip lists each theme with its link count), PENDING n/10, NEXT n/15, and READY n/100 chips that open the matching dashboard sections, the ★ GOALS · DECKS · BOB theme line with the highlight starred, and one muted line per lint. READY is the shared live current backlog (Today excluded) and never changes the PLAN status; READY over its cap adds a ready_cap_exceeded lint line. PENDING and NEXT show the live dashboard section counts (Today excluded; – when Tasks or the current-day Today cache is unready) and turn red only for a strict section excess, while whole-lane pressure stays in the tooltip. next_cap_exceeded / pending_cap_exceeded lint lines appear only when the matching badge is red and quote its section count. Older daily notes follow today's live lanes while keeping their own TODAY theme and link budget.

Today is read from the ledger at render time — the open tasks with a dedicated Task Link under today's open Pomodoros — and kept in a synchronous cache that rebuilds on layout ready, on daily-note change, create, delete, and rename, and at local-midnight rollover. When the cached Today key set changes, open Tasks queries reload their results through the Tasks plugin's reload-open-search-results event. Caps come from the plan: block in the shared bob config file (max_next, max_pending, max_ready, max_ready_per_note; a legacy max_now loads without error), with built-in defaults when the file, the block, or a value is missing or invalid. The block re-renders live when the daily note or the Tasks cache changes and shows – placeholders, never an error, when there is no daily note, no Pomodoros section, or no Tasks plugin.

The plugin shows a desktop review footer in the native status bar: nonempty current walk groups only (PRE → NEW → PROJECTS → PENDING → NEXT → RECURRING → TICKLER → ROTTEN → POST, with TICKS split from ROTTEN). The footer omits the current review group from its trailing summary and shows the full summary when no review row is current; it hides when the queue is empty or Tasks is unavailable. The main button jumps to the next due task, falling back to rotten. While the cursor is on a review row, the footer shows the Alt+P roll preview from nav api.quickRoll v1 in its hint slot and full sentence in its tooltip.

Marks and rendered blocks¶

Marks are display-only: nothing writes them, and each has a session toggle that restores the unmarked rendering:

• The freshness mark renders each canonical [fresh:: YYYY-MM-DD] stamp as a compact mark (✓ today, a draining lease ring with its age, ⟳ Nd when due) in Live Preview and rendered views. Resolution is exact or neutral: an exact memo match or unanimous consensus drives the tone, otherwise the mark shows only the neutral lease and never a guessed due. In source-note Live Preview and Reading view, the freshness mark tooltip adds a 🥀 N keeps logged · last <date> — <reason> line from the task's Rotten Log; Tasks and Dataview query rows never show it.
• The priority mark renders each canonical [priority:: …] field as one signal-bar glyph (4/3/2/1 filled bars for P1–P4, a solid ! square for off-ladder highest) in Live Preview and rendered views. The glyph follows the stored Tasks value, never the ladder position; an unknown ladder omits P-labels instead of guessing.
• The date mark renders each canonical created/scheduled/completion/ cancelled field as one monochrome glyph plus a calendar label (today, tomorrow, Fri, Oct 22) in Live Preview and rendered views, including Tasks query results, and each canonical [repeat:: …] rule as a quiet loop recurrence mark (daily, Mondays, monthly · 1st) in Live Preview and rendered views. Malformed fields get a dashed repair flag, and labels roll over at local midnight without a reload.
• The task tag mark renders each exact #task tag on a task line as one small teal identity hash glyph; Tasks query results hide the tag entirely because every row is already a task. Adjacent #task #ref pairs render as one teal open-book mark.

The plugin also renders the TODAY/PENDING/NEXT/READY badges on dashboard and daily bob-plan blocks as live section-over-cap counts that agree with their Tasks sections (the BLOCKED badge stays informational and neutral with no cap), the CROWDED chip, the bob-ready-notes ranked-bar block, ## Tasks heading chips, Pomodoro home chips (quiet lowercase chips with area-hue dots derived from linked task notes), Pomodoro theme pills (one soft tint per +-separated component of the — NAME tail, with a muted pill for exempt themes such as GTD, a tooltip naming the hue and day count, and a session toggle), and the display-only 🍅 Today mark on open task lines linked under today's open Pomodoros, with a session toggle and a jump to the Task Link. A name the catalog does not know stays neutral on the cursor line while it is typed. The shared behavior and hue contract is Pomodoro themes.

The Day strip is a read-only daily Stats receipt mounted after the last line of canonical daily notes in Live Preview. It shows that note's own day and paints from bob's Stats report; it never changes the note. To place one explicitly, add a bob-day-stats code fence in any note, optionally with day: YYYY-MM-DD. That fence also renders in Reading view. The virtual Live Preview mount stands down when the same day's fence is present.

DEPENDS ON lines render as live dependency chips plus generated BLOCKS rows with live dependents, last-blocker 🔑 badges, stale-entry styling, and frees N summaries. Chips render in Live Preview and Reading view on owned Depends-On rows only, with a session toggle; waiting on N counts open prerequisites only. Open BLOCKS rows add ＋ to open the reverse Blocks stage and hover × to remove a dependent. The Stats bob-stats block renders the responsive area and project panel with home and Themes views, bucket and session drill-down, and task counts; the Themes view wears each theme's hue on its bars, with exempt themes and other in gray. The ★ theme line of the plan block renders the same pills. The read-only bob-reading-board block renders a Reading / Next / Ready / Snoozed kanban of the reading queue drawn entirely from bob ref list JSON — wake dates and waiting-on reasons come from bob, never from vault text — with the Highlights PDF hand-off and the Open Reading Board command.

🪢 **LINKS:** and 🪢 **LINKED FROM:** rows are relation metadata. Their wikilinks are excluded from the live plan Task Link count. Both rows render as live relation chips in Live Preview and Reading view from the relation index, never the stored mirror: label pills with arrows, inverse phrases on LINKED FROM, dashed stale and broken chips, ✓×N collapse for three or more closed chips, and ＋ / hover × through nav api.relations v1 when present. The shared toggle-dependency-chips command covers both rows. See Task relations.

Freshness, review, and readiness¶

The plugin tracks task freshness from [fresh:: YYYY-MM-DD] / [refresh:: N] / [keeps:: N] stamps: the tiered PRE → NEW → PROJECTS → PENDING → NEXT → RECURRING → TICKLER → ROTTEN → POST walk with ordinary reference freshness, daily lane review, checklist tiers, and project reminders, plus the freshness-gated READY lane, NEW/ROTTEN review models and chips, the review queue, counts, lints, and the status bar. Folded keep pips always render in the freshness mark; the leaf plus Alt+F to decide appears only when the navigation decay-card capability is present and decay is on. READY counts gate on the read-time bucket so NEW and ROTTEN review stay out of READY.

Other plugins never place fresh stamps themselves: navigation, the cycler, and Block ID Prompt call the shared stamper instead. keepLine is the sole increment helper (a counted keep stamps and increments once, saturating at 999, with a valid prior fresh before today required; uncounted keeps preserve), and every generic stamper clears keeps.

The noteReady surface backs the read-only per-note Ready cap: each area/project note's Ready lane against plan.max_ready_per_note (default 5) with per-note ready_cap overrides and crowded/full/room states.

Session toggles¶

Every Toggle … command in the generated table above is a session-only toggle (default on) that restores the unmarked rendering while the session lasts. The jump and open commands (Jump to current Pomodoro line on Ctrl+9, Go to today's Task Link, Open today's daily note, Open Stats, Open Reading Board) are the only commands in this plugin with lasting effects; Ctrl+9 is its only registered default hotkey.

Toggle Day stats hides or restores the automatic Live Preview Day strip for the current session. It does not remove an explicit bob-day-stats fence.

Ctrl+9 reuses an already open tab showing today's daily note in any window before using the current tab or opening a new one, including a background tab Obsidian has not loaded yet. Pinned main-area tabs are preferred, followed by other main-area tabs, pinned sidebar tabs, and other sidebar tabs. When the current tab is a lower-ranked copy of today's daily note, Ctrl+9 switches to the best-ranked tab first; it jumps to the current Pomodoro only when pressed again on that home tab.

Settings¶

This plugin adds no settings tab. It reads the shared bob config file: the plan: block for lane caps, the freshness: block for decay and intervals, the stats.day_strip switch (set it to false to hide the automatic Live Preview mount), and per-note task_refresh frontmatter for note overrides. It also serves its rendered state to the other plugins through a versioned api surface (planBudget, todayKeys, freshness, readiness, badge, and mark namespaces) so the dash and sibling plugins share one budget, one Today set, and one set of glyphs.

Related¶

• Plan — the lane model behind the plan block and badges.
• Freshness — the stamp model behind freshness marks and review.
• Task dependencies — the Depends-On lines behind chips and BLOCKS rows.
• Task tag marks — the tag-mark rendering contract.
• Date marks — the date-mark rendering contract.
• Today marks — the Today-mark rendering contract.
• Dashboard — the dashboard badges.
• Stats — the Stats block data.
• Pomodoro homes — the home-chip model.
• Bob Navigation Hotkeys — the review walk and Task Card this plugin feeds.
• Cross-plugin APIs — the versioned planning, freshness, stats, and mark interfaces.