The Workbench plugin might help you with appending content in various notes the way you’re describing. It allows you to choose a note as a destination and then add to it via a variety of methods.
…I happen to make that one, too.
I don’t think it’s a perfect solution, though I’m not sure I fully understand the workflow you’re going for.
All the time! There’s no better way to keep a bunch of haphazard materials together if they all fit with the same project/deliverable.
That’s actually why I made the DEVONlink plugin—I was jumping between Obsidian notes in specific folders and those folders in DEVONthink constantly. DEVONlink allows you to click a button (or tap a hotkey, or invoke a command) and reveal the note in its folder in DEVONthink.
For me, tags are metadata. They add things like status and type to an item, but they aren’t a location. Links are a great navigation tool, and I keep hub notes for different topics, but they won’t help you if you need to send someone a bunch of files related to a project they’re paying you for.
Please please share your tag set up. Not because I think your tag set up will automatically work for me, but because I’m evaluating my current tag structure and just like to see examples.
Also, I’m very curious about your todo set up in Obsidian. Didn’t you briefly use NotePlan3 for this as well? (Also, one reason I’m actually beginning to lean MORE towards Craft – first world problems, amiright @Bmosbacker ?? – is that I WANT a superior iOS/iPadOS experience and as technically impressive as the Obsidian Mobile beta has been, it’s a looooong way from Craft-levels of usability.
What I think I want to do is select a block and tell Obsidian “append this to this other note there without my actually having to open the note.” I’m not sure this is actually useful. Thinking out loud here.
I really enjoyed this episode. I have recently started using Obsidian, even paying for Supporter access to get the mobile app. I really, really like the look and usability of Craft, but my brain keeps getting hung upon the fact that the data there may not be readable in the far future. The app is so delightful in that they have really thought through the user interactions and it has built-in hooks to so many of the apps I use…Day One, Things, etc. If I could get a Daily Note and a real-time or even daily sync to plain old Markdown, I would go all in with Craft over Obsidian.
One more question. Does anyone have any Drafts actions they can share that work with Obsidian? I can’t seem to figure out how to get it to write to the Obsidian folder, which I assume is a problem with sandboxing and that I need some kind of scripting to make this happen.
I cheat on this a bit. I index a specific Obsidian folder (my “Obsidian Inbox”) in DEVONthink, synced from Mac to iPhone and iPad, and use this action to send notes from Drafts to that folder – and thus synced over to Obsidian. The second action contains the DEVONthink UUID of that folder (from DEVONthink’s perspective), and would need to be replaced with your own destination UUID:
I wanted to build an app that was pretty remarkably similar to Obsidian a few years ago, I wanted plain text but block level linking and includes, figuring out how to do it without a database is the hurdles I couldn’t figure out a way past and gave up. Obsidian’s solution is brilliant and a surprisingly elegant hack.
Hah, it’s nothing magical. In Obsidian I use a status-type tag: either #🔥, #engagement, or #backburner. (For specific kinds of notes, I indicate note types with special unicode symbols in the title: ⧸△ is an open project, ⨳ is an area of responsibility… this makes it easier to quickly filter when using autocomplete-type searches, and it provides a visual indicator of project status just from the link. A bit weird, but it works for me!)
Then, I just tag my reference material by type. I have a predefined list of type tags, and use a Keyboard Maestro macro to call it up. From there I select whichever ones that apply to the current record.
That’s it!
Yeah, Workbench does this. Right now the workflow is choose note, append stuff (as two separate commands), so it’s kinda clunky if you want to send things to all manner of notes. I’m planning an update that provides a mechanic for on-the-fly appending to any note in your vault, though.
Out of curiosity, why? I can’t think of a better large body of work in which named references would work, the serialized nature of verses would be perfect for organization by chapter with named references after each verse. Perhaps a pain to script initially but I don’t see a limitation inherent in the medium.
I’d be interested to hear what it was that you didn’t like about Craft.
I’m in the middle of the free trial at the moment, and want to love it mainly because of how it looks (one of the major hangs up around Obsidian for me is that it just doesn’t LOOK that enticing!), but I think the main reason my gut says that I should be using Obisidian is the non linked references.
If I’m going to be making random notes and dumping information somewhere, then the real value for me will be where the app can point out links and connections that I hadn’t realised/or thought of.
Roam and Obsidian do this really well, but it’s not a feature that’s currently in Craft. It’s allegedly on their roadmap, but there’s not been any commitment around priority level or when it may get implemented - so until then I think I need to start getting up to speed with Obsidian.
For those who are not fond of Obsidian’s editor, it might be worth mentioning that a “WYSIWYG editor (like Typora)” is on the Obsidian roadmap. Perhaps after the mobile apps are fully baked and released.
You’re right, chapters would be ideal! That’s what I was doing in Roam, but the way Obsidian does “Block References” unfortunately made it impossible. I posted a video earlier about how I use this setup to create my own cross-reference library, and I needed to be able to navigate between individual verses using the graph.
To be clear, I actually really like the way it turned out in Obsidian. There are benefits and limitations to individual text files vs. a true database. Biggest unexpected benefit of Obsidian - it’s a GREAT writing tool! Completely replaced Ulysses for me.
Can you explain this a bit more? Is it the replication that is not recommendd or the indexing of the top Obsidian Vault folder? I tried to locate anytning over on the DEVONThink forum but not finding it.
Right now I’d consider that a possible thing for future.
If I was diong it in DEVONTHink, like I have been, I’d save the file in my digital filing cabinet that is indexed in DT. But what I’ve been finding with that is that I don’t always find those things when I evnetually need them again.
In Obsidian I’d either incldue the PDF in my Obsidian vaul as an attachement and create a note in Obsidian probably a “possible Sermon’s” sort of note and I’d consider linking in the text, or perhaps add a tag from a selected controlled vocabulary.
Or I if I had a document that was the original text or area tha the article speaks to, like a chapter and verse I mght have a note for that and links to that article and all the other articles about that particular section that I’d use.
Now knowing what specific religious text you are referring to I can’t speak to how it’s organized but most of the major religions have ways to reference segments of their texts.
My start was to define the various types of inputs I get. Then I started documenting the workflow for processing those inputs currently and the workflow I want to use with Obsidian. I have also documented things like what my tags look like, my file naming conventions and the Obsidian structure I will use (very limited use of folders but some)
As I reference things in my old system I either move or copy the text into new notes in Obsidian in a way that follows my conventions for names etc. and do all the linking I can. Notes intially go into a folder in Obsidian that is my Inbox there and I process them out of that into the final structure.
I am starting to use Obsidian for all NEW notes and information from the very beginning.
I am doing as muhc of the curation as I move stuff. Form even deciding whether it’s worth moving, to cleaning up syntax and the links and adding tags as required.
I’ve also got several decades worth of stuff but most of mine is LibreOffice Files or PDF files in the filing system, plain text and rich text notes in DEVONThink and a bunch of things in Scrivener. I’m treating each type of input differently and only doing the conversion as I need to access the old stuff. At some point I will bite the bullet and finish moving whatever is left over after some undetermined period of time. I am also simultaneously moving all my scientific papers into Zotero and then using a bibtex file to get citation data into Obsidian as I highlight and annotate the papers. I am also eliminating duplicates as I work through my digital filing cabinet.
I think it is a game changer if you have widely varied interests or a very large collection of stuff you try to integrate. It is also a game changer if you like to use that corpus of stuff in highly creative or scientific endeavors where the ability to make conenctions between disparate bits of information is critical.
It can export text into .md files with mostly-correct markup. Most attachments into a sub-folder called images. AFAICT It doesn’t export PDF, so those will have to be moved manually.
Also, locked notes need to be unlocked at the time of export, otherwise a file with the correct name will be created, but that file will be empty. The lock doesn’t need to be removed completely, just in unlocked status when the export runs.
And there’s a $5 in-app purchase that gives the ability to pick which folder is exported. Without the IAP it will export everything every time. I don’t think it allows notes to be exported based on a time range (e.g. everything since 01-APR-21).
OMG. This is amazing. I didn’t know this was possible.
I am making the transition to Obsidian from Roam and have been really excited about what Obsidian is able to do (I continue to learn new tricks I didn’t realize).
I need to look into the Review and Daily Planner plugins. I didn’t quite understand what the planner was doing originally. Will give it another look.
For folks on Obsidian now, what are you doing to organize all your new notes and backlinks. Are you using the “default location” or “same as current file” or “a custom space?”
I currently am using the P.A.R.A.S(ystems) from Tiago Forte, which works well for me generally. method for folders with all new notes going into the default vault so I can see what I’ve created throughout the day. But I can see how organizing all of those notes daily or weekly could get to be a lot of overhead (too many decisions). I’d like something a bit more fluid and less fussy for the majority of new notes I create (which are backlinks).
– is that I WANT a superior iOS/iPadOS experience and as technically impressive as the Obsidian Mobile beta has been, it’s a looooong way from Craft-levels of usability.