The Ingredients, and the Solution

Drafts was the starting point for almost everything I wrote, and the two integrated seamlessly.

Literature notes

Fully hyperlinked year, quarter, month, week and day planner

Project management

I’m currently using Obsidian on top of a folder — or vault, in Obsidian terms — for these things, and more:

Here are some resources to get you up to speed:

Obsidian: the most flexible, non-proprietary way to create an infinitely useful knowledge base, or second brain. It’s about finding.

Drafts: the fastest, most elegantly minimal way to enter text into your Mac or iOS device, then get it where it needs to go. It’s about capture.

If those were the only two criteria I was interested in, Evernote, Roam, Notejoy or even Apple Notes — all excellent at what they do — would have been enough.

The crux of an effective notes and productivity system is to make text quick to capture and easy to find.

The Aim: Capture and Find

it required some fiddling about and a $40 piece of software to get it up and running. Even with all that in place, it was far from perfect.

I had fun with Templater and Obsidian is working better for what I need. That’s a double win. I still find Obsidian to be a little awkward on iOS but Templater helps out there too. Templates are quickly accessible through icons and the command palette so now I can create a new note where I need it with just three taps on iOS. There are some interesting possibilities here and I haven’t even touched Templater system commands or user functions.

Show me the note ready to edit with the cursor blinking away at the bottom

Move the note to the right folder

Add some front matter that I always want to include in notes

Create a new note with the title containing a date suffix

Ask me for a note title

There are different template plugins for Obsidian and I want everything organized so I know which templates go with which plugin. I’ve now stopped using most of the other Obsidian plugins for templates.

There’s a problem though. Templater doesn’t differentiate between templates that I use for new files and templates that I use for snippets. So I have to give myself hints by prefixing the template names with “ff” for “file” and “ss” for “snippet”. I use repeat characters because these are easy to type on iOS and quickly filter the list.

I’ve pinned both of these commands in Obsidian because I use them all of the time

We can also access Obsidian file properties from within the Templater functions. For example, this line grabs the creation date of the current file and formats it as ISO 8601 (the way nature intended).

Since this code block is at the top of my template I would end up with a blank line before my YAML front matter, which I don’t want. Fortunately Eta has a lot of control over whitespace and the Templater site has some additional notes. That dash in the Eta block closure removes removes white space after the closure, so that blank line is magically deleted. Neat!

If the function produces no text then it outputs an empty line

This await method tells Obsidian to rename the new file but make the user wait to interact until after the file rename is done. Next we tell Obsidian to move the file to a different folder.

Since this block is mostly about moving files, the block outputs a blank line.

but I’m using a code block at the top of the template file for all of the basic logic.

When Templater runs, it creates a new blank file and then runs the code in the template file. Everything we put in the template file results in some output and changes the empty file Templater just created. It’s all based on Eta templates so there’s a lot more power than just inserting predefined text.

Templater can move files, rename them, add new content, and do pretty much anything I want to do inside Obsidian.

Templater is a plugin for Obsidian that adds support for the Eta templating engine.

There’s a bunch of folders but when I tell Obsidian to create a new file I only get one option for the default note location