I am surprised that nobody mentions dataview plugin… The thing about ToDos is that you need a central place to display them. This can be done with a dataview snippet in a ToDo-Note and Dataview is perfect for task keeping since you can add any type of key to your notes and display those in a sorted table as well, e.g. Deadline, Urgency, Workload, Parent-Note.
It’s not sending you automatic reminders though, so if you are not habitually checking your ToDo-Note you might benefit from setting a reminder for that and eventually building the habit.
Appreciate the reply! Now that I have my mind wrapped around a couple of the more commonly-used plugins I think I could probably manage it in Obsidian. I do use Dataview for a few different utility notes, like making sure my YAML is properly formatted.
I have definitely seen some nice-looking task setups in Obsidian. Perhaps one day I will try integrating the two again. For right now though I’m loving having a separate spot for my “thought inbox” and action items, using Obsidian as a means to brainstorm and explore further.
Can someone give me, and anybody reading this who wants to know but wouldn't bother to ask, a basic-as-possible idea of what the hell dataview does and why I would care? Or point me to something that does?
I read what you wrote and yes I'm tired but my eyes sort of glazed over. What's the "why it's cool" for people who aren't devs and only know Obsidian basics?
Dataview let’s you list notes, which contain certain keys. So you can index your notes automatically.
One can for example add category: and date: to the YAML and then use a dataview snippet like the following to list all work related notes and sort them by latest:
LIST
WHERE category = work
SORT date desc
With more keys you can make more conditions or show more information in a table. For example deadline: or urgency: in the YAML.
You can also check for notes, which are missing information in their YAML through:
TABLE
WHERE !category
There are lot of tutorials and the documentation online, if you want to know more.
A Digital Garden is a website where nurture your thoughts publicly. Mistakes are fine (unlike in blogs, where we tend to publish only the finished works), interactions are encouraged.
I asked on the official forum, nobody there seems to know either. I just remove them manually for now, maybe somebody will make a plugin sometime that gives you the option to have either.
Is this just a new way to use/render the YAML metadata or something different?
If so, it is great to be able to have live links, tags, etc. inside the block. Not too sure about the editor, though. It seems to increase the disconnect with what I think is one of the big selling points of Obsidian: notes are just .md files. The properties editor feels like something different, not part of the note’s text…
Sounds like a nice front end and utilities to manage Properties, which are stored as frontmatter adhering to the practice of it all being plain text. Which I like. :)
So it does look like it’s a UI convenience layer for the YAML block. That is nice indeed. And the ability to have links there will save me from having to replicate some info right after the YAML block exactly because I need those links! Neat!
Could you elaborate? I only just started using dataview to list meetings I’ve had with people, under a page for that person directly. It’s finicky though (probably an issue with me) and wonder if this will make it easier.
Sure, I do something similar. I have a note for a person and I have a note for a recurring meeting. In a recurring meeting I have a Dataview field called Host.
<span style="color:#323232;">#Meeting
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is my meeting note
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Host:: [[John Doe]]
</span>
In a Person note, I have a section for meetings the person hosts. I use Dataview to search for the Host field and see of it matches the current Person note.
<span style="color:#323232;">#Person
</span><span style="color:#323232;">This is John Doe's note.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># Meetings
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">dataview
</span><span style="color:#323232;">table without ID file.link AS "Meeting"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">from #Meeting
</span><span style="color:#323232;">where contains(Host, this.file.link)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span>
The new Properties feature sounds like it’ll be what Dataview fields are. Except now it’ll be in a native interface where I can easily change the information about the note.
If I’m understanding you correctly, I think I do something similar to track my book reading progress. I log my book reading progress in my daily note, with a [[link to bookname]] and then use dataview to also list all the progress entries inside the note for the book.
on my daily page, I’ll have something like this:
<span style="color:#323232;">## Reading
</span><span style="color:#323232;">* [[Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow _ Gabrielle Zevin]] - 20%
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> really enjoying this book so far! the perspective changes... (paragraph snipped)
</span>
(I’m not sure it’s obvious above, but I do the four spaces thing to nest a paragraph under the bullet point.)
Then on the page for the book itself, I have this dataview query
<span style="color:#323232;">```dataview
</span><span style="color:#323232;">LIST
</span><span style="color:#323232;">regexreplace(replace(L.text, "[[" + this.file.name + "]]", ""), "^[ :-]*", "")
</span><span style="color:#323232;">FROM [[]] and "Log"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">flatten file.lists as L
</span><span style="color:#323232;">WHERE meta(L.section).subpath = "Reading" and contains(L.text, this.file.name)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sort file.name
</span><span style="color:#323232;">```
</span>
I think for you, you would replace the check I’m doing for the section heading = Reading with a check for the tag instead. The replace and regex business is just so I don’t wind up repeating the [[link to bookname]] inside the note for the book, and also to shave off some inconsistent formatting I’ve used over time. What displays on my book page is something like this:
<span style="color:#323232;">* 2023-06-09: 20%
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> really enjoying this book so far! the perspective changes... (paragraph snipped)
</span>
(with a link back to the original daily note)
By the way, I couldn’t figure out a way to do this using dataview without using list items (and nesting paragraphs under the list item). I think because dataview indexes list items, but won’t necessarily index other blocks of text? (The future version of dataview, datacore does mention supporting queries at the section and block level though.)
Yes, this is helpful but still very complicated to have it fluid. Could be something for a plugin that somebody could write, that expands Dataview with this tho
Pioneers have it hardest lol, that’s why you guys see a little seen problem and you have to write a bunch of code to do it and propose it be abstracted into a plugin. But if it’s a little seen problem, the likelihood of actually getting that plugin is slim unless you yourselves develop it or convince someone to do it. It won’t happen spontaneously.
Sweet! I’ve been using Notion lately for a work project that fit very well with Notion’s collaborative databases. But in doing that it made me want Properties for my personal Obsidian notes.
I think that giving too many choices to users who are already confused by the concept of federation and instances will enhance their paralysis of making choice due to cognitive overload (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice ).
I've found out kbin.social the easiest to get used to (end-user wise).
Just mentioning to cover all the bases: you’ll want to make sure you’re using the correct multi-value YAML syntax in your front-matter when you include multiple authors (eg. single line or multi line array). I like using the Linter plugin to help me out with this.
<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;"># single-line array
</span><span style="color:#323232;">author: [Sam Jones, Mary Apple]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"># multi-line array
</span><span style="color:#323232;">author:
</span><span style="color:#323232;">- Sam Jones
</span><span style="color:#323232;">- Mary Apple
</span>
Once you have something like the above, using flatten should enable returning results for either author; with one test file in my vault, this worked for me:
I use it because it stores my files in a versatile exportable format (markdown) and the app is well made. I have blocked all network access from Obsidian so I’m not worried about data harvesting. I sync my notes with syncthing, so the folder that contains my markdown files is synced across all my devices.
I also sync them with Syncthing and I store/backup them in a private GitHub repository, that allows me to access my notes on any device connected to the internet. All of this is compatible with Android and Windows platforms.
Yes, the synchronization is in real time, and you can install it in Android and IOS devices (ok git can also be install but it’s more dificult). Also, you can have a lot of devices in constant sync without launching commands or touching any app, it works in background. I use both and they work perfectly for me.
In my case, it’s a mixture of life wiki, personal project wiki, videogame wiki, and journal (not daily, but more for a few significant days).
Like, there’s this cluster with all the people that I know, pointing to their respective communities, and who participated in which annual social gathering (which have their own articles with pictures and videos). With one (usually rather empty) article per person, I can just link to them from other relevant places.
Then there are all my (software) projects and generally intellectually interesting stuff I thought about, which I wrote down over the years (which took me a few weeks to digitalize/find/sort once I got my hands on obsidian).
In terms of video games, it’s either the knowledge/realizations I made or rough copies from some online wiki articles. Considering my internet provider is horrible and unreliable, having an offline source can be really nice sometimes.
In general, it’s really useful to support my shitty memory. Having detailed descriptions of what I’ve made or what happened just makes it easier to re-experience certain moments.
And even though the graph is an interconnected mess, the clusters are still mostly distinguishable from each other. funnily enough, the video game articles blow their space out of proportion because of all the attachments. some of my video game articles tend to be asset or screenshot-heavy.
I loved Gruvbox from the moment I first tried it, but couldn’t live without Things’ tasks status, so… I’m using Things as active theme, but I’ve added Gruvbox’s entire CSS as a snippet. Beautiful beast.
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