Hi everyone,
I’ve built an Obsidian plugin that brings a Stashpad-style nested-outliner experience to managing your JDex. It lets you capture notes like chat messages — frictionless, auto-timestamped — while still letting you reorder, nest, and reorganize them like a proper outliner. The goal: make manually managing your Index on mobile feel natural instead of fighting indentation on a small screen.
I was going to wait until things matured more, but with the new Obsidian mini-course in JDU, this felt like the right moment to share.
Why Stashpad, and why this fits JD
Some years ago I discovered Stashpad, a note-taking app that worked beautifully on mobile for someone who probably has OCD and ADHD. Mobile screens can’t accommodate a deeply indented outline, and Stashpad solved that by nesting notes inside each other rather than indenting endlessly. You got the versatility of a real notes app — reorder things, move them between folders — with the frictionlessness of a chat UI.
I remember reading some years ago about an attempt to build a cross-platform app for managing the Index/JDex, and thinking Stashpad would’ve been a great fit. I never shared the idea with the community because I was too anxious. Stashpad was discontinued in 2024, so now I’m bringing the idea to Obsidian instead.
I would like to express my thanks to the following people/groups:
- Huge thanks to Cara, Theo, and the rest of the Stashpad team for creating the original product.
- Thanks to Claude for Claude Code for folks like me who can’t code enough to save their life.
- Thanks to Haseab, who made an open source clone of the discontinued Rewind app for macOS, for the inspiration to make something genuinely useful for free for a community that might need it.
- And, finally, thanks to the Obsidian team because I don’t have to create an app for every platform just to use this. That would be a nightmare.
Disclaimers before you install
- It’s alpha, permanently. The plugin is entirely vibe-coded with Claude. Treat reliability accordingly. The full code is in the repo, so you can patch bugs yourself or with your own AI tool.
- Install via BRAT. I’m not sure I’ll publish to the community store — I’m not confident I can commit to maintaining it and responding to issues at the level that requires.
- I asked permission before posting this.
What to expect
The plugin has a lot of features and still needs work, but in its current state it should make manually managing your Index pretty painless. I might not fix every bug or add every feature requested here — I have a list of things I want to build before engaging more deeply with the community — but please don’t hesitate to share feedback. Hope you like it.
(I wrote this post by hand initially and then had Claude fix it up. Sorry about all of the em dashes.)
