Just wanted to talk about the only separation I have in my workflow. Obsidian was a game changer for me when I discovered it a couple of years ago. Suddenly remembering and following up on thoughts was a game, and even more excitingly, a collection.

I fell off the productivity bandwagon a few months after. When I returned to the software about a month ago, the first thing I did was identify what went wrong the last time. Aside from going too crazy with community plugins towards the end, I believe my primary pain point was keeping all of my tasks readily at hand. Frequently I would write something to do in my daily note only for it to be lost and never followed up on. I would return to a note and see either a task I had completely forgotten about or a task that was later duplicated somewhere else in my vault.

This time around I have had a lot of success using a different utility specifically for tasks. This is not a Todoist sub so I won't go into detail but it's absolutely the missing piece of the puzzle. I try to minimize time from thought to writing, but this tiny bit of extra friction to categorize between "want to do" and "want to know" was a big help.

Curious on other peoples' thoughts on this! I know some people do absolutely everything in Obsidian. What has worked for you and what hasn't in terms of keeping your action items readily at hand?

Just bought a commercial license for #Obsidian. Had a good read of the license terms and realised it's the right thing to do. @obsidianmd

I like that they're using an honour system for this. I could have kept on using Obsidian while justifying it's (mainly) for personal use, but the fact is, I'm actively using it to earn a living in my company and with my writing.

Thanks, @kepano, for trusting us! Simply *expecting* someone to act with integrity without forcing them to, is a powerful thing.

So I downloaded the extension and started creating events, but I noticed the notes created appear in the general graph but are all disconnected, is there a way to make the plug in add a tag automatically to the notes it creates?

Alternatively, another way would be to add a template to all notes created or put into a folder so that the tag is inserted, is there any way to do this using any plug in?

I just want all my calendar notes to have a central connection so that they don't disperse.

Any solution is appreciated even if its different to what Im asking for as long as it links everything (or makes them all disappear from the graph)

For context, I use obsidian on a PC, an iPad (with or without keyboard), and an iPhone. I use obsidian sync to keep everything going, and that works like a dream. None of my criticism is of sync itself.

Now, the complaints.

The iOS/iPad app is on the shitty side of usable for me. Navigating notes is very clunky, organising them is nigh impossible, and there are so many little UI papercuts that there’s just too much to list.

And I’m true online complaint style, I shall now try to list them:

• long pressing a tab on iPad brings up a context menu or makes the tab drag-able to reorder. One of the two, with no indication of which is which at the time you start pressing, like some sort of shroedingers pachinko long press function.
• if you’re a fast typer (I use obsidian, among other things, to write novels), then good luck with special characters. One in a while, obsidian will decide that you want all of them at the start of the line and nowhere else is acceptable.
• in the same vein, sometimes the cursor will disappear, or just chill above other UI elements like the tab bar.
• so you’re scrolling through a long file and happened to touch a link? Oh you meant to drag the link to keep scrolling? Fuck you, you are now in the note the link sends you to. Did you press back? Fuck you again, start scrolling from the top.

I could go on for a very long time, but the message is that the app is very clunky, very hard to use efficiently, and feels very out of place among other high-quality apps I use on a daily basis.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

New to obsidian. I have installed tasks, and have created a page called widgets/personal.md with the following query:

''''tasks
(not done)
tags include #tasks/personal 
hide backlink
''''

In preview mode, this shows me the list of personal tasks. So far so good. I want to show the contents of this page as an ios widget. I found some tutorials to use widgy and make a widget that shows a page content. When I do that, instead of seeing the output, I'm seeing the above query in the widget. I know that's because that's what is in the file itself.

My question is, is there a way to automatically save the output to a file, or is there a different/better way to create task widgets for different tags?

Is Obsidian a good tool to use for writing technical manuals? I would like to write an Operation Manual for municipality's water system. There will be embedded screenshots and some links to other sections of the document.

Ideally we could "publish" to offline html. The customer would also like a printed manual.

If Obsidian is no good, I would love suggestions on software you have used to write short manuals with pictures, preferably not Word.

I was really hooked by Obsidian right from the start. It's one of these things, where you feel the potential electrifying your fingertips. My first few notes were clumsy, as expected, but I also expected it to get better over time. I read something about Evergreen Notes and tried to apply those principles. I still sorted everything into neat folders though, some of which had sub-folders and it felt structured, but it felt like I wasn't getting the most out of Obsidian, not even a fraction. The process of sorting my notes into folders and searching for notes within those folders also became a tedium and I started forgetting about notes, just because I couldn't find where I put them.

Once I watched Nicole's video on the LATCH method, something clicked. I copied her format and adapted it for my use. I established parent-child-links between my notes, created index notes listing child notes via Dataview and today.. today I finally got rid of all folders (except one diary folder). They didn't give my vault good structure, but actually obfuscated information, and once I used LATCH they were obsolete.

What are your thoughts on and experiences with folders and linkage?

Do you have a method of organizing, that you want to share?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Hi all,

Discovered that I could embed images into dataview and have been changing up a bunch of my index pages excitedly.

It works great with my gear list:

> [!tip] Gear list
> ```dataview
> TABLE
>regexreplace(file.folder, ".*\/([^\/]+)$", "$1") AS "Department",
> shows AS "Shows",
>embed(link(image, "125")) AS Image
> FROM "Knowledgebase/Video Production/On-Set/Equipment"
> sort file.mday desc
> ```

At the top of each 'Equipment' note I have the variables:

category:: Lighting
shows:: [[Show Name 1]],[[Show Name 2]]
image:: [[MoonLite by LumenRadio-1689061964287.jpeg]]

That works entirely as expected - I get a snazzy list of images down the dataview for each item.

However, it doesn't work in this dataview, which is slightly different in the sense that it groups by 'type' - but even without the group-by clause it doesn't work:

> [!Example] Devices
> ```dataview
> TABLE
> rows.file.link AS "Title",
> embed(link(rows.file.image, "250")) AS Image
> FROM "Journal/Entities/Devices"
> WHERE type
> GROUP BY type
> SORT type DESC
> ```

With these notes having these variables:

type:: Server
image:: [[Pasted image 20221026215500.png]]

I thought 'rows.file.image' is how I'd access the image this time around, but unfortunately not.

This works, but not when I try to group them and bring in information using rows.file.

> [!Example] Devices
> ```dataview
> TABLE
> embed(link(image, "250")) AS Image
> FROM "Journal/Entities/Devices"
> WHERE type
> SORT type DESC
> ```

Any thoughts?

How can I search for notes using the built-in search plugin, which supports regex, to search for notes that have no entry in specific keys within the frontmatter?

I am using templater and thus am using my frontmatter looks like this:

---

aliases:

publish: false

tag:

---

%%

date:: [[2023-07-11 Tue]]

parent:: [[XYZ]]

%%

Searching for "parent:: " works fine, but I want to find notes that do not have a parent note yet. For this I tried parent:: /$ as indicated here and here, but this and other variations like parent:: /\$/ do not yield any results.

Where am i going wrong?

Features

1. automatically create note in the specified directory with the configured file name
2. automatically open current note related graph view
3. automatically open Memos like quick note in macOS
4. switch on/off plugin in command palette
5. automatically update plugins with one command
6. automatically update themes with one command
7. automatically set color of graph view
8. list all callouts css configuration for quickly inserting

Was looking into a way to create a widget on iOS showing my task list on Obsidian, and stumbled across this very helpful guide which worked really well for me.

It requires a $5 app, but honestly really worth it because it’s so versatile. Thought it was cool and figured I should share

So a friend of mine recommended Obsidian ages ago and I looked at it but thought I was happy using Joplin (another text-based note tool) which I still think is a great app. Took a brief look at it and thought it was just too complicated...

Then recently, I went down a youtube rabbit hole watching videos of how people use Obsidian... OMG 🤯

Now I have 2x Vaults, one for work and one personal. Dataview, templater, quickadd, periodic notes have just changed everything. Now I have documents for each person at work with their basic info and then when I make a meeting, I can just tag them which then updates a dataview table that shows what meetings I've been in with them.

Tasks allows me to just create a bunch of todos in random notes and then I can create a table to show all my undone tasks.

I mean, why did I wait so long? I've been using it for about 10 days now and it's been such a game changer. Sorry Joplin.

I seem to have done something that is preventing the sidebars from following any themes I’m using (Nord in this pic.) After going through every setting I can think of, I’m hoping someone here can help point me in the right direction to get these sidebars “unstuck” from being a black back ground.

I have iOS, and use MacBook/Linux.

EDIT: Wow! It’s impressive how many different ways there are to achieve this. I tried obsidian git, but couldn’t get it to work as expected. Remotely Save is working perfect! Obsidian flew under my radar all these days because I thought sync was the only way. I’m looking into plugins and there’s literally a thousand plugins. It’s kinda overwhelming tbh. I’ll make another post for plug-in recommendations and workflow setup advice. Thank you all!

Hello all!

Here's a community dedicated to discussion regarding techniques and tools for maintaining Digital Gardens. Since, many manage Digital Gardens using Obsidian (I do, for example), I thought sharing here makes sense.

I've been taking handwritten notes using my Rocketbook when I'm away from the computer, and I'd like to get them into my vault via a workflow more reasonable than emailing myself my notes and then copying them to Obsidian.

Does anyone do this? What's your workflow?

I already looked for plugins and there are none.

JUST RANT AND RAVE ABOUT HOW AWESOME THIS APP IS!?!

I just found it a week ago and my god… it’s everything I’ve ever needed out of a note taking application.

Looking forward to all the awesome plugins y’all can recommend me ❤️

Hi lemmy!

This is my first post here :)

I just wanted to share my first successful addition to an Obsidian plugin. I've made two academic templates and added a the ability to select them through the Obsidian Enhancing Export plugin.

No need to change folders or add template paths. These templates are embedded in the plugin and don't require much configuration.

I go through this and much more in my article Obsidian for Academic Writing , which has now been updated to feature this new addition.

Hope this helps :) A few more links for those who want to dig deeper:

• Repository of Pandoc Templates: https://github.com/universvm/obsidian-pandoc-templates
  • This repository is meant to aggregate useful templates compatible with pandoc. Feel free to contribute if you have a template!
• My other article on Obsidian for Scientific Research

Has anyone managed to get ctrl-p/ctrl-n working to move the selection up and down in menus? This works when editing notes in a file, but not from a menu. For example, I'd like to bring up the command menu and move up and down using ctrl-p and ctrl-n instead of the arrow keys.

I've tried various plugins but none of them seem to provide this functionality. I'm tempted to try writing my own, but before I start down that rabbit hole I figured I'd ask here as I'm sure I'm the only one who'd appreciate this functionality. Thanks.

source: https://obsidian.md/plugins

Hi Obsidian legends!

I’m trying to find a way to do this:

1. I type /@PersonsName
2. Obsidian recognises /@PersonsName is a person because of the @ symbol
3. Wraps in a hyperlink: [[/@PersonsName]]
4. Creates a templated note in a specific folder e.g. /people

Is something like this possible?

I do a lot of pasting files into notes, and this works really well. However, is there a way to have the paste default to [[attachments/filename|filename]] instead of ![[attachments/filename]] ?

Taken directly from Deathau's Notation theme.

I could not find this key feature anywhere else but noticed it was implemented in Deathau's theme so I ripped it straight from there and can confirm it works great!

A must have feature if you are constantly switching focus and need to find which pane is currently active.

Just copy the below into a snippet file:

/* 7.2. Active pane border */
/* Notion doesn't have multiple panes. And with the header modifications above,
  how do you tell which pane is active? I'm just putting a border around the
  active pane for now (unless there's only one pane) */
.workspace-leaf.mod-active {
  border: 1px solid var(--interactive-accent);
}

.workspace-leaf:not(.mod-active),
.workspace>.workspace-split>.workspace-leaf:first-of-type:last-of-type {
  border: 1px solid transparent;
}

I had a really hard time finding any beginner friendly info on AidenLx's Zotero plugin despite it potentially being the end-all zotero plugin, so I have written up a summarized guide to it on github here with all the information I could find distilled into a single page for how to use it and how to start making templates.

Please drop any feedback you have here, especially if you have any advice on how to make it better. Thanks!

Follow Up FAQs

Q. Can you say what make AdienLX's plugin better than the Bibnotes Formatter plugin (or other implementations)?

A. Check out this comparison thread here. Right now I would say personally, bibnotes formatter is the most feature complete but is also very "jank" and pretty much does not work for me at the moment. The AidenLx plugin interacts directly with the Zotero database and thus is very fast and very smooth in experience, especially when updating a note. It also has a many features as bibnotes (almost, see the custom frontmatter issue) but these require knowledge of javascript / eta in order to do more than the basics.