Five Charts for an Obsidian Note: Countdown, Clock, Family Tree, Travel Map, Goal
Most text-to-diagram tools are built for engineers: sequence diagrams, flowcharts, architecture boxes, gantt charts. Diagrammo draws all of those, and the gallery shows every chart type it has. That is useful in a work vault and not much use in a daily note. But a few chart types fit a personal note well — the kind of note that holds a trip, a friend’s number, or a savings plan.
The charts below follow one trip: the Okafors are going to Japan for Chidi’s 50th birthday. These five are written in DGMO, a small plain-text diagram language, and rendered in Obsidian by the Diagrammo Diagrams community plugin. Each one is a fenced code block, so it lives inside the note, shows up in search, and syncs like any other text. Each chart below shows the source it was drawn from; paste that source into a dgmo block in a note and you get the same chart.
A countdown that ticks inside the note
A countdown recomputes every time the note opens and ticks while it is on screen. since takes the first date of something that comes back every year, and the chart always shows the next one. It rolls forward by itself after the day passes, so the note never goes stale, and since-label Nth Birthday counts which birthday it is.
How a countdown changes as the day nears
The picture under the number changes with the distance: a month-by-month bar when the day is months away, real calendars inside three months, and a strip of days in the final week. Which one you see above depends on the day you read this. These three always land in the same picture, because of how far ahead they repeat:
A monthly repeat is never more than a month away, so it draws calendars with day numbers (in its last week, the strip of days).
A weekly one is always in its final week, so it draws the strip of days.
A date in the past counts up instead (“N years ago”), and anything years away draws one cell per year. Set expired to a message instead if you would rather it stop. The countdown page has every tier.
A clock for the travel agent’s office hours
A clock like this one is less a world clock than a note about one person or office in another timezone: the travel agent booking the trip, or a friend coming along from abroad. Name the zone, label the panel, and set the working week:
Open the note and it answers “is the office open?” without any time-zone arithmetic: green while it is open, amber in its last hour, grey once it closes. Like the countdown, it is live: it reads your system clock and ticks every second.
A family tree from one line per person
The people going on the trip, as a family chart:
A couple goes on one line with +, and their children are indented below it. That is enough for the note you keep before a wedding or a reunion, where the question is “whose cousin is that?”. The tree also handles remarriage, adoption and generation labels when a genealogy vault needs them.
A map of the route
A map draws the itinerary. A route line starts the trip, and each indented line is the next stop: ~> draws an arc, -> a straight line, and text inside the arrow labels the leg. The map frames itself around the places you name, with no projection or zoom to set. poi puts a label of your own on a stop.
A goal for the trip fund
The money for the trip, as a goal: change now as you save and the thermometer moves. Leave out thermometer for a progress bar, or write gauge for a dial.
Setting it up
- In Obsidian, open Settings → Community plugins → Browse and install Diagrammo Diagrams.
- Write a fenced code block with the
dgmolanguage tag:
```dgmo
countdown Chidi's Birthday
since 1977-04-15
since-label Nth Birthday
on-day 🎂 Happy birthday, Chidi!
```The chart renders in reading mode and live preview, on desktop and mobile. In a PNG or SVG export, the countdown and the clock show the moment they were exported, because an image cannot tick.
All five chart types, with every option, are collected on one docs page: Charts for Your Notes. The Obsidian setup page has the plugin’s settings and commands. The same blocks also work in the online editor if you want to try one before installing anything.