14 Comments
User's avatar
David Klein's avatar

In Obsidian how do you consistently get the top metadata area in notes?

James Bedford's avatar

It’s not actually frontmatter - hence it is visible all the time. I just use templates that populate these tags for me whenever I create a note.

Allen's avatar
Mar 5Edited

Your post was very helpful. I have a question. What is the purpose of the commonplace folder? I would like to know where to save clipping notes or other people's writings.

James Bedford's avatar

Thank you Allen!

I’m trying to stay true to the definition of a commonplace book - “used to compile any information the owner finds interesting or useful.” - so it is generally everything that I come across that I want to retain/collect.

Clipping notes or others writing is a perfect place for this!

Dan Bartlett's avatar

Nice! Magpie-ing a few ideas, particularly Polaris (which I was already emulating with a single pinned note) and Outputs. A couple of questions:

- I've held off giving Claude access to Obsidian for a while because there are years of extremely private journals. I'm not sure what kind of access you're granting here (are you essentially just running `claude` in the Vault directory?), but what was your thinking?

- Of course you wrote a guide and now obsidian-cli came out—curious if you're looking at integrating that in. I'd guess it wouldn't make too big a difference to your flow.

James Bedford's avatar

I've held off giving Claude access to Obsidian for a while because there are years of extremely private journals. I'm not sure what kind of access you're granting here (are you essentially just running claude in the Vault directory?), but what was your thinking?

Yes pretty much, I have a Claude directory which now contains all my code repositories as well as vaults etc. I think fortunately this is actually a conundrum that I have missed out on un-intentionally, because majority of my private/no-one-must-ever-see-this writing is still done the old-fashioned way on pen and paper and it has been this way for years. There is still private stuff in Obsidian ofc.. but not anything I wouldn’t want anyone else seeing specifically.

Regarding obsidian-cli, yes very interested to play with it and see how it changes my workflow, but simply not done so yet :)

Thanks for the kind words also Dan! Pleased you are going to try a few things.

J.R. Clubb's avatar

I’m obsessed with Obsidian right now! Thanks for sharing.

James Bedford's avatar

Nice - have you only started using it recently? You are very welcome.

J.R. Clubb's avatar

Yes I’m an obsidinoob

mr.Foxset's avatar

What is the theme in obsidian?

James Bedford's avatar

Minimal theme with a few tweaks :) Plan to do a full personalisation walkthrough soon

mr.Foxset's avatar

just planning to move from AppleNote and Craft to Obsidian

James Bedford's avatar

Ah nice :) I used to use Craft and was a fan. If I can help in any way let me know!

mr.Foxset's avatar

Excellent, I am waiting✊🏻