Native Tasks for Obsidian

Native Tasks for Obsidian is a free native macOS task app built for people who already keep their tasks inside an Obsidian vault. Rather than asking you to maintain a second place for your to-dos, it reads the checkboxes and Tasks plugin metadata that already exist in your .md files and writes every edit straight back into those same files. The app is shaped for Wunderlist-style task work, giving you a dedicated desktop surface for capturing, scheduling, and completing tasks while your Markdown notes remain the single source of truth. It runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later and requires an Obsidian vault containing at least one .md file, with folder access granted so the app can scan the vault. The problem it addresses is a familiar one for note-based workers: tasks written as Markdown checkboxes inside Obsidian are fast to capture but awkward to actually work through. There is no dedicated window that stays out of the way, no quick way to capture a task while you are in another application, and no simple way to move a task from a project note into a daily note. At the same time, many people are unwilling to move their tasks into a separate cloud service, because that means duplicating information, losing the plain-text record, and accepting an account, sync, and telemetry they never asked for. Native Tasks for Obsidian sits on top of the vault instead of replacing it, so the notes stay portable and readable in any editor while the day-to-day task work happens in a purpose-built Mac app. One of the defining characteristics of the product is that it is a real macOS app rather than a wrapper around a web app. The site states plainly that there is no Electron and no proprietary database, meaning the application is shaped specifically for Wunderlist-style task work on the Mac instead of being a browser engine in a window. The other half of that promise is how edits are handled: every change round-trips back to your .md files through atomic writes, with mtime conflict detection, so concurrent Obsidian saves never get clobbered. In practice this means you can keep Obsidian open in one window and the task app in another, and the two stay consistent because the app detects when a file has changed underneath it rather than blindly overwriting your note. The app is also aware of the Tasks plugin and the metadata that plugin writes into Markdown. It recognizes due dates marked with 📅, scheduled dates marked with ⏳, recurrence marked with 🔁, priority marked with 🔺⏫🔼🔽⏬, and custom statuses such as [/], [-] and [>]. Because these are read directly out of the .md file, tasks you created in Obsidian appear correctly in the app, and changes you make in the app are written back in the same format. For anyone who has already invested in the Tasks plugin, this avoids a migration: there is nothing to import and no new syntax to learn, because the app speaks the format your vault already uses. Capturing tasks is designed to be fast from anywhere on the Mac. A global hotkey and a menu-bar composer let you add a task without switching to the main window, and captured tasks land in today's daily note, with full support for the Daily Notes plugin configuration. That means quick thoughts end up in the same place your existing daily-note workflow expects them, rather than in an inbox that lives only inside the app. The app also lets you drag tasks between files and reorder them within a file, and both rewrites land in your .md files atomically, so a move from a project note to a daily note is a single safe operation rather than a delete followed by a recreate. Overall the product follows a simple methodology: the vault is the database, and the app is the interface on top of it. You point the app at your Obsidian vault, grant folder access so it can scan, and it presents your Markdown tasks in a familiar three-pane layout with a sidebar, a list, and a task detail view. Smart lists for Today, Inbox, and Completed are provided out of the box for triage. Everything is processed locally on the Mac, with no accounts, no telemetry, and no analytics; the only network calls are obsidian:// deep links that you explicitly invoke. The benefits follow directly from that approach. Your tasks are never locked into a proprietary database, because they remain ordinary Markdown in your own vault and stay readable, portable, and yours. Because the app is native and focused, it gives you a fast, dedicated place to work through tasks without opening a full note-taking environment. Because writes are atomic and conflict-aware, you can safely keep Obsidian open at the same time. And because there is no account and no telemetry, adopting it does not add a new vendor to your task data. For existing Obsidian users, the practical outcome is that the tasks they already have become something they can actually run their day from. Concrete use cases map closely to the audiences the site names. Obsidian users who already track tasks in their vault with the Tasks plugin get a dedicated native surface for those tasks. GTD practitioners get Today, Inbox, and Completed smart lists out of the box, so they can capture quickly and triage later. Wunderlist refugees get a familiar three-pane interface of sidebar, list, and detail that respects their existing Markdown notes. Day to day, that looks like firing off a task from the menu bar while working in another app, having it appear in today's daily note, then later dragging it into a project note and reordering it among that project's other tasks. On requirements and availability: the app requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later, an Obsidian vault with at least one .md file, and folder access for vault scanning. It is distributed both as a direct download and through the Mac App Store. The app itself is free to use, and Pro is a one-off £19.99 with a 7-day free trial on the direct download that requires no card. Native Tasks for Obsidian is, in short, a focused native Mac task manager for people whose tasks already live in Obsidian. It keeps the Markdown files as the source of truth, round-trips every edit safely, understands the Tasks plugin syntax, and stays entirely local and private — which is the whole value proposition in one sentence.