This is a very important point IMO. Taking proper notes also means that I have to think more about what I want to state with this note. E.g., being forced to write a title for the note means that I have to come up with a short summary (or core statement) of what this note is about. IMO, performing this little extra step is truly helpful in the long-run, since it helps to increase the clarity of my notes, and sharpens my senses.
This is even more true for the act of “transcribing” the note’s thought with your own words in the comments of the note.
In addition, I think it’s important that I can reuse my notes in external applications. With block references, unless it‘s a software agnostic implementation, this may be tricky.
Also, what happens if you’d like to expand on a block, and convert it into a proper note? This likely would require the app to help you with converting all the links to the block into proper note links.
Block references are surely nice for quick reuse of little bits of text. But they should not replace the creation of proper atomic (& self-contained) notes. Long term, the latter will likely help you better to achieve structure & clarity in your notes archive.
@macedotavares This seems like a nice syntax! You might get it so that Obsidian auto-generates an ID in place if you don’t supply one, and this blends well with Obsidian’s existing piped link syntax - the part after the pipe is what you actually want to display. Might even allow nested blocks! Though I’ve no idea what use you’d have for that…
And as you say, it allows people in the future to do it manually too, even outside Obsidian - one could imagine writing a parser that generates a separate file for each block, with the title being the block name and the content being the block itself. So it’s portable too. It might even be as simple as just replacing ((block id|block content)) with [[block id|block content]] to generate a note.
if you use [[note_name#title]] rather than ![[note_name#title]], in both the editing mode and the preview mode, you get a readable content which is self-described. But with something like this, well, I guest the ![[]] or [[|some text]] are the only possible ways to use it
Perhaps, I’d like to excerpt the content from the other note directly or take the content as a footnote.
@GLight: I have not had any readable content with any form link in Edit mode. Unless, we’re not talking about the same thing. The only thing I get is the text of the link itself, and only in Preview is rendered, whether that be a link with or without a ! in front.
You just remind me about a bug that I has reported. Since the block reference is a link to a line in the other note, maybe the insiders can do me a favor to see if the bug is also valid for block reference.
create a note-a
In the note-a, create a block reference link to an item in a list within note-b.
change note-a to preview mode, and click the block reference link.
in the new windows(also in preview mode), I want to know is it the item being highlighted or the entire list is highlighted?
In the example I posted, the todo’s block ID was randomly generated. You can also append your own to the end of a line. ^likethis
I could then write ![[this note#^likethis]]* to get at it, and you can use custom IDs to infer what the item contains while in edit mode.
(*incoming syntax change for block as we experiment in Insider: the links will soon require #^ instead of just # so that they’re more apparent and block IDs are more easily searched, among a few other benefits; thanks to Insiders for the feedback!)
