A case against Dataview - A story

I can very much relate to these pain points in my own Vault. I’ve been a heavy user of Day One for a little more than a decade now, and while I use Drafts[1] as the front-end quick-entry input for almost everything that winds up there or in my Vault, I’ve also been working up some Keyboard Maestro macros to streamline the process of pulling journal entries from my Daily Notes pages into Day One.

Dataview quickly complicated matters, simply because Day One had no idea what to do with it.[2] My Daily Notes Pages go as far back as 2005, since I exported all of my old LiveJournal entries, and at hundreds of journal entries each year, the manual labor involved in deleting all those code fences was just too much.

That being said, I still use Dataview! As many posters have pointed out, it does what it does very well, especially as Obsidian has embraced YAML/Properties. My compromise has been to simply sequester all of my Dataview snippets and queries into their own notes in a dedicated “Dataviews” folder of my Vault that I can then embed wherever I need them in other notes.

I endeavor to keep the notes themselves as clean and plaintext as I can in the event I want to work with them via another client such as iA Writer or Bear and this approach treats all my Dataview tables and queries as simple block embeds. “Hover Preview” might even make the embedding optional.

In any case, there’s no wrong way to eat a Reese’s, and if more of us understood RegEx, our plain text lives would be a lot more manageable.


  1. This may be a non sequitur, but Drafts is about as perfect an app for text input as there is, at least in the Apple ecosystem. ↩︎

  2. I have no idea how to make sense of RegEx, or else this wouldn’t be a problem. ↩︎

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I’m the same here. I like my notes to be as plain text as possible. I do use Dataview as a way to create queries or MOCs to help me find stuff. I just figure if I move to some other software I will just need to come up with a new way to query: but that doesn’t change my note contents.

I suppose I have, off an on, used inline fields which are not so ‘queryable’ in other apps? I might find this a challenge; fFor example I use idea:: scattered around my notes for any idea that occurs to me. I just didn’t fancy creating an idea note that I would then have to interrupt my flow and open to add something. I’d definitely be interested if anyone has an alternative approach for something like this.

(At least, worst case, I know Finder in Mac will be able to show me all the files with idea:: in them. Clunky for sure though).

Edit: maybe I could use QuickAdd to pop an entry into an idea log with the date and so on. :thinking:

Good summary, OP. These are the exact same reasons why I don’t use Data View, although I never started. There’s nothing wrong in the plugin itself, but having it encourages a lot of anti-patterns in Obsidian usage as a PKM tool, e.g. compulsive tracking things you shouldn’t care about, or trying to invent the best org structure for your notes before you actually written that many notes.

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