Obsidian Toolkit

[pseudometa]

Over last couple of weeks, I compiled a bunch of features related to Obsidian. It's already been tested by a bunch of people from the Obsidian Community, so should be rather stable. Noticed at some point that I only shared it in the Obsidian Forum and not the Alfred Forum, so here it is. 😅

 

(I know that there are other Obsidian workflows, but they mostly focus on stuff like daily notes and after all have a very different feature set.)

 

Full Feature List
- Search your Vault (Open note, append clipboard, open in new pane, copy hook, ...)

- Fully browse your vault folder structure via Alfred
- Open Starred Files/Searches

- Open Recent Files
- OCR Screenshots (see image below)
- Search the Obsidian Documentation
- Search Community Plugins and directly open them in Obsidian or GitHub
- Search & Preview Community Themes
- Create Backups of your Vault
- Enter Dual Mode (Edit + Preview)
- Create a new note
- Open various folders in .obsidian
- Open the Obsidian settings
- Toggle a CSS Snippet
- One-Click-Convert a font file to base64-CSS
- Open your current theme CSS file
- Access your themes and snippets via Alfred
- Quickly create a new CSS snippet from clipboard content
- Display a list of Obsidian's default variables

 

➡️ Download the latest release at GitHub
➡️ Documentation of all the Features and Settings

 

 

Edited September 12, 2021 by armenaton

[FredLai]

This is great! Thanks for sharing! Would love to give it a try.

I found out is also good to use obsidian combined with Popclip and Readwise

 

[funkymonkey]

Thanks for this workflow! It's pretty incredible and very comprehensive! Wow!

[paulw]

I just switched to Obsidian, thanks for this workflow!

[FranciscoG]

This is amazing ! Thank you for sharing 

[naga098]

On 9/12/2021 at 12:46 AM, pseudometa said:

Over last couple of weeks, I compiled a bunch of features related to Obsidian. It's already been tested by a bunch of people from the Obsidian Community, so should be rather stable. Noticed at some point that I only shared it in the Obsidian Forum and not the Alfred Forum, so here it is. 😅

 

(I know that there are other Obsidian workflows, but they mostly focus on stuff like daily notes and after all have a very different feature set.)

 

Full Feature List
- Search your Vault (Open note, append clipboard, open in new pane, copy hook, ...)

- Fully browse your vault folder structure via Alfred
- Open Starred Files/Searches

- Open Recent Files
- OCR Screenshots (see image below)
- Search the Obsidian Documentation
- Search Community Plugins and directly open them in Obsidian or GitHub
- Search & Preview Community Themes
- Create Backups of your Vault
- Enter Dual Mode (Edit + Preview)
- Create a new note
- Open various folders in .obsidian
- Open the Obsidian settings
- Toggle a CSS Snippet
- One-Click-Convert a font file to base64-CSS
- Open your current theme CSS file
- Access your themes and snippets via Alfred
- Quickly create a new CSS snippet from clipboard content
- Display a list of Obsidian's default variables

 

➡️ Download the latest release at GitHub
➡️ Documentation of all the Features and Settings

 

 

 

this is such a great workflow - thank you so much. i found your theme as well.. they are equally good. donated. thank you so much for creating these useful tools.

[pseudometa]

Quote

this is such a great workflow - thank you so much. i found your theme as well.. they are equally good. donated. thank you so much for creating these useful tools.

Thank you ☺️

[dddd]

thanks for the great workflow. 

I have a little problem here asking for help.

 

I've already set up the scratchpad_note_path and opening scratchpad with 'oo' works perfect.

But I don't know why the scratchpad don't work, I typed 'oo', then some text but nothing appears in the scratchpad note. I'm new ,please help me, thanks!

 

[pseudometa]

@dddd, thanks!

 

Could you open a bug report at GitHub, reason being that the bug report form asks for various kinds of information I'd need to debug.

[dddd]

7 hours ago, pseudometa said:

@dddd, thanks!

 

Could you open a bug report at GitHub, reason being that the bug report form asks for various kinds of information I'd need to debug.

I'm a idiot, I forgot to install Obsidian plugins Advanced URI & Metadata Extractor , problem solved, tks!

[pseudometa]

version 3 of the workflow now makes full use of Alfred 5's new workflow configuration system, which should make the (dauntingly many) settings of this workflow more accessible.

 

Also, there have been so many new features added since I last posted here, that I cannot really list them all – refer to the README on GitHub for all features:

https://github.com/chrisgrieser/shimmering-obsidian#feature-overview

 

 

This workflow is now slowly getting growing into a size similar to the Spotify Mini Player 🙈

 

(cc @vitor this is what I meant  )

 

[JMK]

After upgrading to version 3, I do not understand how to enable the QuickAdd plugin for when I type "on" -- I would greatly appreciate help with that. It's creating a new note when I enter the name of a Capture macro, which is not the desired behavior. 

Edited September 19, 2022 by JMK

[pseudometa]

@JMK Thanks for the report – it was a bug with transitioning the settings from Alfred 4 to Alfred 5. Should be fixed in version 3.1.1.

 

Also, the very same bug actually prevented auto-update from working 🙈

So everyone who is using 3.0.0 to 3.1.0, please manually update once. Sorry!

[JMK]

That worked, thank you. I just had to make the default value "checked" for the variable `use_quickadd`.

[vitor]

This workflow is a great candidate for the Gallery. Would anyone mind sharing a small Obsidian library to aid with the review and inclusion? Don’t share anything with personal data, just a realistic-looking library suffices.

[pseudometa]

22 minutes ago, vitor said:

This workflow is a great candidate for the Gallery. Would anyone mind sharing a small Obsidian library to aid with the review and inclusion? Don’t share anything with personal data, just a realistic-looking library suffices.

 

You can use the Sandbox Vault, which is the official Obsidian documentation in form of an vault, and is often used for such demo purposes.

 

After starting Obsidian, click the "?" button in the bottom left and then open the sandbox vault.

Edited March 31, 2023 by pseudometa

[diyployer]

Maybe I am being utterly foolish but whenever I try to add something to scratchpad - obsidian opens up with a blank file named invalid.

[pseudometa]

10 hours ago, diyployer said:

Maybe I am being utterly foolish but whenever I try to add something to scratchpad - obsidian opens up with a blank file named invalid.

could you check that:

- both required plugins are installed

- you have set up the vault correctly via `osetup`

- you have entered a correct scratchpad path

 

if that is the case, please open a bug report at the GitHub repo. Reason being that the bug report forms asks for various information I need to investigate the issue. (also, I don't have the time to look into it right now, so an issue will make sure that I can keep track of it.)

 

[andy4222]

I can't post in the main thread linked in Alfred.app for this workflow. Getting a permission issue with `You do not have permission to view this topic`. So posting a new thread

 

Anyway, I'm not able to search my obsidian vault using this the workflow for some reason. All other workflow action work for shimmering obsidian, I'm on v4.7.2 for workflow and 5.5 for Alfred.

 

logs:

```

[01:30:28.643] Logging Started...
[01:30:32.383] Shimmering Obsidian[Script Filter] Queuing argument '(null)'
[01:30:32.661] Shimmering Obsidian[Script Filter] Script with argv '(null)' finished
[01:30:32.668] ERROR: Shimmering Obsidian[Script Filter] Code 1: /Users/<user>/backups/app_preferences/alfred_preferences/Alfred.alfredpreferences/workflows/user.workflow.025E0CDA-97DB-4B3B-B649-674BE2A4AA4D/scripts/o_search.js: execution error: Error: TypeError: relPath.includes is not a function. (In 'relPath.includes(filter)', 'relPath.includes' is undefined) (-2700)

```

[vitor]

Update to 4.7.3, already live in the Gallery, as that may fix your issue.

[pseudometa]

My bad, I accidentally broke sth in the 4.7.2 release. 4.7.3 indeed fixes the problem

[TommyRot]

What I’m trying to do

I’d like to use Alfred to search for and open Obsidian notes.

Note

This use case involves using an Alfred workflow to search and launch Obsidian notes. The workflow is ‘Shimmering-Obsidian’. (I’ll call this SO as shorthand from here on.) It depends on two Obsidian plugins – Advanced URI and Metadata Extractor. Both are installed and enabled on the vault.

The issue

It partially-works, but not in any useful sense. If I create notes, close Obsidian and re-open it, they become discoverable. I can search for them in Alfred and open them. Hooray. However, if I create notes and leave Obsidian open, I cannot. Either I have to

1. close and re-open Obsidian or
2. run a command in the workflow called ‘osetup’ which closes and re-opens Obsidian. (This has the same effect.)

This is the only way that Obsidian notes become discoverable.

Thoughts

My initial thoughts were that this may be related to indexing or caching.

Things I’ve tried which didn’t work

I tried rebuilding the metadata cache for the vault.
I tried switching vaults.
I deleted macOS Spotlight index.
I refreshed the Alfred index/cache.
I explored known issues for the Obsidian dependencies – Advanced URI and Metadata Extractor.
I’ve tried various alternative Alfred workflows.

I searched the forum for terms, phrases and keywords relating to ‘Obsidian Alfred search’, ‘Alfred find notes’, but nothing seemed relevant.

[vitor]

@TommyRot When asking about an existing Workflow, it’s best to use its own forum thread. While it may seem that starting a new thread could give your problem visibility, it fragments the discussion and makes it less likely the author and users of the workflow (the people who can help) will see it.

 

I’ve moved your post to the correct place.

[pseudometa]

@TommyRot The problem is that you are closing Obsidian before the index for this workflow is updated. 
 

By default, the index is updated every 30 minutes, you can adjust that value by editing the respective setting in the settings of the metadata extractor plugin. 

[TommyRot]

5 hours ago, pseudometa said:

By default, the index is updated every 30 minutes, you can adjust that value by editing the respective setting in the settings of the metadata extractor plugin. 

 

@pseudometa With one swish (or stroke) of genius, you have solved my problem. Hurrah. After adjusting that parameter, notes are discoverable. Thank you so much.

 

Now, I wonder if I can ask you to clear something up: I couldn't get the workflow to work when I used the path to the parent folder of my vaults (which is just the Obsidian folder in iCloud Drive). When I did so, I received the below error:

 

"No plugins found in the selected vault. Please install & enable the 'Metadata Extractor' plugin and 'Advanced URI' plugin, restart the vault, and run 'osetup' again."

 

Example vault location structure below:

 

~/iCloud \Drive/Obsidian [parent]

~/iCloud \Drive/Obsidian/Vault1

~/iCloud \Drive/Obsidian/Vault2

~/iCloud \Drive/Obsidian/Vault3

 

It only worked when I pointed it to one specific vault e.g. Vault1, Vault2 or Vault3. If this is by design, that will shape how I come to organise my notes, which will need to be one super vault. This is possible, but I'd prefer to have multiple. Are multiple vaults supported?

 

Many thanks.