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.
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.
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.
Both approaches would work quite well, but I’ll suggest a third. I do not know your exact use case, but in my own vault I tend to use Obsidian’s built-in query system coupled with the plugin Query Control to make it look more to my liking (you’ll need BRAT to download it, which allows for plugins straight from GitHub. Light, no clutter & fuzz, & it doesn’t modify notes in any way. It’s just visual. Just copy & paste a link & boom).
Now, if you have not before, I highly suggest you jump on over to the official documentation page on searches & queries. The default ones are very, very simple & easy to set up but allow me to accomplish what I want out of such a system.
If you do try it out & find that it’s not to your liking, that’s okay! In your place, I’d try to see if there’s a way in which I can use Dataview on notes that are “not so important” OR notes whose value lies more in their present usage. Example: You might not need to know who was in what meeting a year from now, but having access to that information through Dataview in the present moment can help in some project or other.
Going back to the two methods you pointed out… In the time that has passed you might’ve found which works best for you, but if not, I’d say to use the style closest to how you already have your Obsidian set up. If you lean more to tags in general, I’d say try that first. If the opposite is the case, try the folders. It might sound contradictory but me personally, I’d use the folders approach since I’m more inclined to use tags in my things. That added bit of friction goes a long way, even if it’s small.
If you would like, I can give you a small example of my build-in query & how I use it. Hope this helps & again apologies for the long response time!
You could perhaps use “#idea” if you want something a little more global & universal. Alternatively, you can have a little note pinned under the file explorer to work as a sort of idea collection note.
Hello and thank you for your tips! And no worries, your response is not late at all
In the mean time I actually did end up chosing the folder option. One, because of the “added bit of friction”. And two, because that way I can keep my tags related to note content.
The Query Control plugin sounds great, I will check it out. For now I’m dabbling with the built-in query feature. I did not realise, I could embed it in notes!
So, yes, if you still have time, I’d love to see some of your query examples! (If you have an example where you strip off the folder path of the search results so that only a list of file names is shown, that would be awesome.)
