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Plainva 0.3.0: a Tasks view, a redesigned graph, and a lot more keyboard shortcuts

July 15, 2026

0.2.x was a long run of small, quiet releases. 0.3.0 is not that — it’s the biggest one since launch, and it’s the fun kind: a whole new view, a graph that finally looks the way I always wanted it to, and a pile of keyboard shortcuts. Still plain Markdown files, still your disk, still no format changes.

Every checkbox in one place

There’s a new Tasks view. It walks every note in your vault, collects every - [ ] and - [x], and lists them grouped by note — with filters for status, text, folder, tag and due date. Tick a box here and it writes straight back into the file at the right line; click a task and it opens the note where it lives.

This is something a .base database can’t do, because .base works file by file and tasks live inside files, line by line. If a note shouldn’t show up — a template full of example checkboxes, say — you keep it out with plainva.tasks: false in its frontmatter. The truth stays in the file: it syncs, Obsidian sees it, you can read it in a text editor. No hidden list of paths somewhere in the app.

A graph I actually like now

I rebuilt the graph — the context graph in the sidebar, the full vault map, and the .base graph view all share one engine, and all three got the pass. Notes no longer overlap, bigger hubs look like bigger hubs, edges curve with little arrowheads, and hovering a note blooms its neighbourhood. Alt+drag a note and its linked neighbours come along.

The part I’m happiest with is the vault map: expand a folder and it becomes a translucent circle that contains its notes and sub-folders, packed recursively — so the map reads like a map of your actual structure instead of one flat hairball. Open a folder and the camera follows it in. index.md and log.md are hidden by default now, so the useful shape isn’t buried under wiring.

Shortcuts, and a window that tells you all of them

This one started as a GitHub issue — a macOS user wanted ⌘N for a new note and a quick way to flip between reading and editing. Fair. So I went through the whole app and filled in the gaps: formatting, headings, tab management, day notes, read/edit/source toggles and more, on both keyboard layouts. Press F1 and a window lists them by area, with search, plus mouse-and-gesture help for the graph and databases — and it detects your OS, so macOS sees ⌘/⌥ and everyone else sees Ctrl/Alt.

And two more things worth the upgrade

Vault-wide find and replace (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+F) previews the changes per note before you commit them, with regex if you want it — and you can rename a tag across the entire vault from the Tags sidebar. You can also now create a new vault straight on a cloud provider — Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, S3 or WebDAV — with a starter structure, instead of making it locally first and connecting afterwards.

The same macOS report also turned up a real bug: selecting a group of files and hitting delete didn’t work there, because Ctrl+click is the right-click on macOS and quietly changed the selection. Fixed — the multi-select key is ⌘ on macOS now — and fenced code blocks are syntax-highlighted in the reading view too, which was the third thing from that issue.

If you’re on 0.2.x, the built-in updater will offer 0.3.0; otherwise it’s on the releases page. Plain files, no format changes — your vaults just work.

— Marco