notes by alifeee profile picture tagged obsidian (2) rss

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here I may post some short, text-only notes, mostly about programming. source code.

tags: all (19) scripting (5) bash (4) linux (3) html (2) markdown (2) obsidian (2) shortcuts (2) ActivityPub (1) advent-of-code (1) ............ see all (+24)

how I organise my notes (project-active-resource-archive) # prev single next top

tags: obsidian, note-taking • 584 'words', 175 secs @ 200wpm

I make a lot of notes¹. Currently, I use Obsidian on my computer, laptop, and phone, and I use Syncthing to synchronise all the notes between my devices. I like making notes because if I write something down, I don't have to worry about forgetting it, and (maybe backwardsly) I can forget it with ease... because I know where I can go to remember it. It frees up my brain a lot. No thoughts. Head empty.

¹ At time of writing I have 1018 notes (result of find . -type f -name "*.md" | wc -l) (the Notion -> Obsidian export makes all database items into notes, so this is quite inflated by a bunch of empty "database" notes).

I used to use Notion but I realised: I would prefer to be making plaintext notes; I didn't like what they were doing with AI; the app was quite slow to use; and I had to be online (a lot of the time) to use it. With Obsidian, I can write notes offline, and they are only ever stored on my own devices, and synced between them.

I have four folders in the root folder of my obsidian, these are

1-Project
2-Active
3-Resource
4-Archive

This layout is called "PARA" (Project Active Resource Archive). I found out about it several years ago; I don't remember where.

The theory (or how I use it) is that you organise notes like:

So, as an example, my current:

There are many ways to organise notes, but I like this way because I can always pretty obviously fit a note into one of the three categories, so I don't have to constantly move notes around, or think too much about where they belong. Also, every few years it feels pretty great to empty out the project notes folder (an impossible task).

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linting markdown from inside Obsidian # prev single next top

tags: obsidian, scripting, markdown • 382 'words', 115 secs @ 200wpm

I like Obsidian. I started using it recently instead of Notion. It is very nice.

The fact that it is static files is nice. The fact that those files are markdown is even nicer.

I sync it to all my devices with Syncthing. Sometimes there are sync conflicts, but https://github.com/friebetill/obsidian-file-diff makes solving that super easy.

Anyway, I've been writing these notes in Obsidian. I have then been copying and pasting the content into https://dlaa.me/markdownlint/ to find problems with my Markdown formatting. It's mainly when I forget to wrap links in <> as this makes them not render as HTML links - I sort of like this as you (my automatic tool) shouldn't try and decide what is and isn't a link, but also maybe you should because you can probably recognise them pretty well with a very established regex by now.

Anyway, I found an Obsidian extension which lets you specify shell commands https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands that you can run via the command palette. This seems super neat - I can do ANYTHING now.

Anyway, I installed it and made a command to lint the current markdown file. I had to install npm globally because it wasn't working when being called from the Obsidian script, and then I made this command to run the lint.

First install the markdownlint CLI:

npm install -g markdownlint-cli

The command is:

(cd {{folder_path:absolute}}; source /usr/alifeee/.nvm/nvm.sh && nvm use 20 && markdownlint {{file_name}} --disable MD013 && echo "no lint issues!")

I disabled MD013 which is the insane rule which wants you to have loads of line breaks per paragraph (I prefer my paragraph to be one really really long line please).

It's not perfect (the output is just in an ugly pop up window), but it is nice to run it locally.

Next... perhaps automatic uploading of notes from Obsidian, and I won't even have to open https://github.com/alifeee/blog/tree/main/notes to add a note to this site... dangerous...

(p.s., I managed to write this without any lint issues ;] )

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