This is definitely one of those questions that’s hard to give a definitive answer to. It really depends on what you’re using the YAML for and whether not having it on all relevant notes would prevent you from accomplishing your goal.
Let’s say I have my watched movies in Obsidian. I have basic YAML like IMDB link, genre, and year released. Later, I decide I want to see what directors I have watched the most. In this instance, not having the director YAML on all of my movies is something I would want to fix.
Continuing the above example, I would do two things to make adapting the new structure easier. First, I would update my template for movies to automatically include that field for any new movies I create. Second, I would probably use Dataview to create a utility page to identify movies with no director. The logic of the query would basically be “select all from movies where no director”. That way I could systematically update my existing notes without having to look through all of them individually.
Hopefully this gives you a couple of ideas. If you have any follow-up questions, let me know!
Thank you! This is pretty much how I go about it, but the manual work load is still great.
In my case it is the adoption of LATCH, a concept I only encountered after I had already been using Obsidian for some time. Not to mention that my LATCH template already changed once or twice, until I found what works for me, but this still leaves the possibility open for future changes to it and another round of mass edits. Deciding on a more fundamental level, if and how or if at all I should address these changes is a question that I have not yet found a decisive answer to.
Why would you want to restructure your noted just to add more meta data?
I just leave it as it is. But my notes are categories in their own vaults so there is never a need to Refactor previous notes to a new form as they don’t interact with each other anyway.
Well it’s not just meta data. I write only the bare necessities in an actual YAML header, the rest of the front matter goes into a comment section below that. This gives me the option to add links as meta data. What I would like to do is to embed older notes with LATCH. This would help with cataloging and indexing, which would in turn help with identifying merge-able topics, relating topics and reviewing notes.
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.
It doesn’t work too bad for me. But I find it super annoying that, depending on which UI element was last in focus, you have to double tap a tab to get it to switch.
I was able to get people to reproduce this on the iPad with a totally fresh vault. Doesn’t seem to be something they’re interested in figuring out or fixing. :(
I tried to put my tasks all in Obsidian, but I eventually moved to Apple Reminders. Reminders sends me notifications about the task. Maybe Obsidian can, too, with a plug-in, but I don’t want to fuss with that. I also had problems entering a task in Obsidian on my computer and then having it show up on my phone quickly or vice versa, whereas (because I have both an iPhone and Mac) this is not a problem with Apple Reminders. Again, may be solvable with a plug-in but I don’t particularly feel like looking for a plug-in for something like this, no matter how irrational that feeling is.
Last time I checked, Reminders doesn’t have markdown support, and I’m not even sure if it lets me make line breaks. Not great for tasks that I need to write lots of detail about. But those tasks are usually far and few between, because I tend to write down the immediate next step to big tasks instead of writing down the big task and all the details I have to know about it.
Good to know for PC. I also just checked on my phone and it looks like I can also do line breaks in the notes. Not sure if I misremembered things or if they added this as a feature recently.
I do not see it as a separation of concerns. This is simply selection proper tool for proper tasks. For tasks I need functionality which obsidian does not offer. Therefore, for tasks I use TickTick.
Very fair hehe. Sometimes with all of the backlinking and connections forming in Obsidian I can sometimes reach for one that’s not quite sound. Calling it separation of concerns was probably just me trying to sound smart ;)
Either way, glad to see I’m not the only one that feels this way. I’ve heard good things about TickTick too. I wish you luck!
Yep its that plug in, Im not a big fan of having everything on one note, especially daily notes that I use to dump stuff, so I do full notes for each event I mark in the calendar.
It’s fine for me on iphone 11. Only real issue is there are a few plugins that dont work, but it’s awesome they work at all! So may apps on apple dont have those features. I did have an issue with excalidraw file causing the app to crash on start. The file was synced from my laptop.
Do you use the kanban* plug-in? That’s one of the ones that seems to work worst for me. At some point it wouldn’t let me write on cards because the submit button was hidden behind the keyboard.
Personally not yet. I can see some use cases for it but dataview’s power is incredible. As long as i can pull up notes on my phone, then i’m good. I use a different app to write down things quickly. It then syncs to my obsidian inbox folder.
I started my wiki in TiddlyWiki, which by default means links and search were the only way to find notes. When I moved to Obsidian, I tried sorting everything into PARA-style folders, but… it’s way too much maintenance to mess about sorting everything so I’ve quit caring. I operate exclusively through links and search.
Everything is still in the folders but going back to a mostly-flat folder structure is on my to-do list. Since I’m already not using them to navigate my notes, though, I’m not in too big a hurry.
No need to apologize. Thank you for sharing your idea. I’ll keep an eye out for natural folders. I think I still have two folders that qualify for this as stated in my post: a diary folder and a template folder.
Personally, I almost wish Obsidian didn’t expose a folder structure - but the program is flexible enough to enable hiding the file browser, so that works for me.
Since TiddlyWiki doesn’t even mess about with the concept of folders, imo that forces users to dive in and really think about how they’re connecting notes through linking - which helps build a sort of mental roadmap through their notes. Roam and Logseq are similar, I believe.
I don't see what function or feature would be missing from Obsidian that would make it inappropriate to use. There's even a plugin to export html files.
If you’re using regex I’m assuming you know of utilities like Regex 101 to check your syntax.
With JS-styled regex the entire statement is enclosed in slashes. /parent:: $/ should have the desired effect here.
I second DataView for these kinds of tasks as the plugin revolves around YAML frontmatter. I have a utility note called “notes with cleanable metadata” that has a bunch of these DataView queries that update in real time.
I see there’s a variety of options. To add one more option: I use the extension Self-hosted live sync : it’s very nice and easy to handle (though you have to be technically interested to set it up)
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