#1

Just sharing a guide I wrote up for doing some fancy Obsidian things in Shortcuts. The result is a nice homescreen with a bunch of features.

Enjoy!

9 Likes
#2

Excellent! I had planned to start exploring exactly how to things like this. Your post will provide welcome shortcuts in that exploration. :slight_smile:

1 Like
#3

Hello Ryan

Thanks again for these wonderful shortcuts that truly makes a difference.

A quick question, I canā€™t seem to get Widgetpack working with the Todayā€™s plan widget. As I understand it, I need to run your shortcut and then it should be available in Widgetpack as a widget. But I run the shortcut and give Widgetpack all the permissions it needs but still no widget available. If anyone knows what I am doing wrong, please say. :smile:

#4

Youā€™re welcome!

To be clear: once youā€™ve run the shortcut, you add a Widgetpack widget to your homescreen of the desired size, and then you hold-tap the added widget, select Edit Widget, and select the newly created widget from that menu.

Is the Todayā€™s Plan widget not showing on that last step?

#5

Indeed, not showing in that last step.

#6

Interesting. Try this variant?

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/fbe50229e66141a5a94a3d34a96092ec

#7

I did some more refactoring, fixed some
bugs. Perhaps this fixed whatever it was!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/65901745c4824f059ee1d2687eff1f7b

#8

After a bit more debugging: believe it or not, you might simply have to reboot your device.

I couldnā€™t get the last link I posted to work on my iPad. So, I rebooted, and lo, there was the updated widget.

#9

It kind of works. The widget is working now but it is not showing any of the tasks from my daily note. I attach some pictures here. (And in case you are wondering, why the mix of languages, itā€™s because we Danes are notoriously famous for mixing a lot of English in our language)

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#10

iOS widgets are updated kinda sporadically. If those tests are not showing by now, though, mind pasting the content of that note in here with ``` code fencing?

#11 
---
tags: Daily-note
---

## Dagens plan
- [ ] Test
- [ ] Test
- [ ]


## Dagens foto


## Journal



## Review


## Fleeting
#12

Aha, got it. I forgot a key setup question: it needs to know how you format your daily note filename.

Try this one:
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/98705f3ab8c94c0482e519baabcb54c0

#13

Love the work your sharing here, thank you @ryanjamurphy, and for making the video w @nickmilo

Iā€™m not using Obsidian on iOS, (nor eager to upgrade to macOS monterey), so Iā€™m not using Shortcuts app. Iā€™m curious: are using a non-Shortcuts approach to get similar results on a Mac?

My vault is project-focused like yours, but Iā€™m relying entirely on tags + dataview to slice and dice. It felt like a more robust solution to me than the ā€˜GUIā€™ Kanban plugin, though Iā€™m missing drag and drop, and the horizontal space.

Howā€™d you decide on Kanban (over tags, for example)? Are you having to navigate to the ā€œproject indexā€ page to update the projects status?

I havenā€™t set up much automation around my tag-based system yet, but assumed the tag-approach would make automation easier. Just curious to hear any of your thought process / experience with that. :v:

#14

When Iā€™m on a Mac Iā€™m pretty keyboard-driven, so I donā€™t mind using keyboard shortcuts and the Command Palette/Quick Switcher to jump around there. It wouldnā€™t be hard to emulate Shortcuts via e.g., Keyboard Maestro, though.

Actually, Iā€™m hoping to build out a plugin that automatically updates a projectā€™s status whenever it is moved on the Kanbanā€”but Iā€™ve also been told that MetaEdit can help with that? I havenā€™t tried playing around yet.

In general I try not to spend too much time doing ā€œjanitorial workā€ on what project is whereā€”thatā€™s one of the reasons I like the Kanban. Itā€™s pretty easy to mess around with it without getting lost in metadata.

On that note, this is a neat dataview snippet that finds projects that are not yet tracked in the kanban:

LIST FROM !outgoing([[ā«æā«æā«æ Projects Kanban]]) WHERE contains(file.name, "ā–³")

ā«æā«æā«æ Projects Kanban is the kanban note, and WHERE contains(file.name, "ā–³") is how I find projects. Switch the latter with however your projects are designated; e.g., a FROM #project.

#16

Hi Ryan, great work on this shortcut. Iā€™m having trouble getting the Todayā€˜s Plan shortcut to work. When it asks for the file path for the daily notes, how do I work this out? Is it from the vault level, obsidian folder or within the daily notes folder?

#17

It should be the path from the vault root. No leading slashes. My daily notes are in the top-level Calendar folder, so the path is Calendar/.

What error is it giving you, if any?

#18

PNG image

Iā€™m struggling to understand what the ā€˜Mainframe
ā€˜ variable represents?

#19

Ah, shoot, my bad! I missed a setup variable. Thatā€™s supposed to be the root folder of your vault.

This shortcut link has the missing setup question. Iā€™ll update the link on the blog post too. Thanks for the report!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b7095ede5b4e425c9f1a02bb0a0801f8

1 Like
#20

Yay, the shortcut runs now. However I am having a similar problem to @Kullenej where it shows the widget with the current date at the top but not the tasks. If you tap the widget it launches into a new blank note in a folder a level up with a file name yyyy-mm-dd (filename format I set was yyyymmdd) rather than my current daily note file.

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I have tried rerunning the shortcut but I am now getting a new error!

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#21

Huh. Did you add weather features? I did not.

Iā€™ll look into the daily note thingā€¦ maybe thereā€™s another variable missing a setup question.