# TaggedSync: Why I Built My Own reMarkable-to-Obsidian Plugin ## Too much capture, too little thinking Obsidian is my second brain. But after a while, my second brain had a problem: I captured far too much. Every article, every video, every idea went straight into the vault. The result was context rot — a pile of material I never read again, and no clear idea which part of it still mattered. So I asked myself where the real bottleneck was. It was not storage, and it was not search. It was thinking. Saving something with two clicks feels productive, but nothing happens in my head while I do it. AI tools make this even easier, and that is exactly the danger: you produce a lot of output without doing the thinking yourself. I noticed that this quietly eats away my own creativity. That is why I wanted to slow my capture down on purpose. Writing by hand is slow. You cannot copy and paste with a pen — you have to decide what is worth writing down. That decision is the filter I was missing. Other people call this "think on paper". For me it was simply the cure for context rot: less input, but processed input. ## Why not just pen and paper? Because paper is a dead end. Handwritten pages cannot be searched, cannot be linked, and are hard to find again two years later. I also read a lot of PDFs and want to annotate them while I read. A reMarkable gives me both: the slow, handwritten thinking, and a digital file at the end. So I bought a reMarkable Paper Pro — and I have not regretted that purchase for a single day. ## The media break And that is where the trouble started. A digital vault and a paper tablet are two different worlds, and I organise them differently on purpose. On the reMarkable I keep it flat and simple: a handful of notebooks, sorted by the situation I am in — one for videos, one for each book I read, one for daily notes. On the Obsidian side I use PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive — four folders that sort notes by how actionable they are). Capture context on one side, actionability on the other. Both are right, but they do not match. And that is my point: I decide how my notes are organised — not the device, and not a plugin. The existing plugins ignore this completely. Most of them sync everything into one single folder. That is fine if you keep ten notes. It is useless if you want each note to land where it belongs. ## How I actually work * The reMarkable is my main capture device. Roughly 70% capture, 30% reading. * Fleeting notes live on paper. Permanent notes live in Obsidian, Zettelkasten style. * I read PDFs on the device and annotate them by hand. * Once a day, I sync, transcribe and digest. * My folders on the reMarkable stay flat and simple. Friction-less capture beats a clever folder tree every time. ## Use case 1: one notebook for all YouTube videos Here is the case that made me build the plugin. I have one single notebook on the reMarkable where I take notes on every YouTube video I watch. One page per video. Most of those videos are not relevant. They stay on the device and that is fine. But a few of them matter for a project, an interest or a hobby, and I want to digest those further in Obsidian. What I do *not* want is to sync the whole notebook. I want one page. So I tag that single page on the device, and TaggedSync extracts exactly that page out of the notebook and puts it into the right folder in my vault. The page does not arrive as just a picture. My handwriting is transcribed by OCR, so the note is real, searchable text in Obsidian: I find it again through search, I can link it to other notes, and it becomes part of my graph instead of a scan I will never open again — the handwriting stays above it, so I can check a word. The rest of the notebook stays where it is. ![para-youtube-note](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/69a98ea33728a9dc35843f0b/2c63aaa4-af5e-4463-aadc-ea40505a7e30.png align="center") ## Use case 2: reading books and annotating them The second case is reading. I try to buy my books as PDFs, because a PDF is the best reading format on the reMarkable Paper Pro: the layout stays as it was designed, and I can write anywhere on the page. While reading, I highlight the passages that are a real new insight for me — not everything that sounds nice, only what changes my mind. In the margin I write my own thoughts next to that passage, and sometimes an action, for example "read the linked article" or "compare with X". When I tag the book, TaggedSync builds a reading digest from it: the highlighted passages arrive as quotes in my vault, and my margin notes come with them, transcribed by OCR and attached to the passage they belong to. My actions arrive with them as plain text, so I turn them into proper Obsidian tasks by hand — a manual step for now, but at least I do it while I am in the note, instead of rediscovering the action a year later on page 214. ![showcase-annotations](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/69a98ea33728a9dc35843f0b/c0ca229a-8c16-40a4-9bdf-3cf593006fb0.gif align="center") ![screenshot-margin-note](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/69a98ea33728a9dc35843f0b/87917f8f-59df-44d2-968e-bbe9cd410152.png align="center") ## What TaggedSync does The core idea is **tag-based routing**: you tag a notebook, a single page, or even a whole folder on the reMarkable, and your configuration decides where it lands in your vault. You define the tag-to-folder mapping once — the plugin does not invent a structure for you. ![tagged-plugin-settings](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/69a98ea33728a9dc35843f0b/e32aaa6a-9b31-49dc-b0a0-61a31958992c.png align="center") * **Single pages, not just notebooks** — pull one page out of a big notebook. * **One-way sync** — the plugin reads from your tablet and never writes back to it. Your device stays untouched. * **Transcription** — handwriting becomes searchable text, margin notes included. * **Reading digest** — highlights and annotations from PDFs become a readable summary. * **No subscription** — it is a plugin, not a service. ## Why I keep building it I want a seamless reMarkable and Obsidian integration that follows my structure instead of imposing its own — and without a monthly fee. It is in the Obsidian community store as **Tagged Sync for reMarkable**, and the pictures and the install link are at [taggedsync.com](https://taggedsync.com). Honestly, I want to build the best sync plugin out there, but I need your help for that: which features are relevant for *you*? Submit your feature request today on my GitHub repository: [github.com/thomas-hochbichler/obsidian-remarkable-tagged-sync](https://github.com/thomas-hochbichler/obsidian-remarkable-tagged-sync/issues). Paper for thinking. Obsidian for keeping. TaggedSync for the bit in between. * * * Tagged Sync for reMarkable is an unofficial, community-built plugin, not affiliated with or endorsed by reMarkable AS. "reMarkable" is a trademark of reMarkable AS, used only to describe compatibility. > **Update, August 2026.** Kevin T'Syen recently wrote about [how he uses reMarkable for thinking and Obsidian for everything else](https://medium.com/@kevin.tsyen/how-i-use-remarkable-for-thinking-and-obsidian-for-everything-else-4fafeb1cd2f4). > He arrived at the same split independently: thinking needs freedom, knowledge needs structure. > He bridges the two by hand, without any sync tool — and makes a good case for that friction. > It's not just me, then.