Hello! I’m trying out Obsidian for the first time and I find it fantastic, although there’s one feature from Trilium notes that I would love to see here from an organizational-perspective: “Cloning” notes. Despite its misleading name, the “Cloned” notes are basically just symlinks to other notes, thus changing their contents changes the contents of the other mirrors of the same note.
I love this system, because in some situations (like making a folder of relevant topics for use in a project) links could be a little cumbersome and not as clear at a glance, where being able to make a symlinked note that mirrors its changes back to the original would be great.
I suspect it wouldn’t even need to create actual symlink files in the folders themselves, it could just make a copy of the note’s shortcut in Obsidian’s file explorer plane placed in the new location (maybe have an Icon or symbol to show it’s a symlinked file)
I hope others like this suggestion! If it was already suggested elsewhere and I missed it when checking, I’m sorry for the unneeded spam.
I have not! I just tried it now and I think it’s a fantastic feature! However, this doesn’t change my personal need for symlinking within the file-explorer itself, though it does alleviate it.
I see symlinking as a folder-equivalent to backlinking. Where backlinking notes from all across the hierarchy comes about as a natural evolution of the pkm, I prefer symlinking for purposefully collecting notes into one location without disturbing where they’re actually stored when it comes to projects.
Embedding the notes does help a lot because I can make an index file and embed all of the relevant notes into that without having to click on each link, however I still like being able to look at my project folder and see all of my relevant notes right there and easily switch between them.
Bump - I know that this is an old topic, but is cloning notes in the file tree still not practical in Obsidian?
It’s an extremely useful feature that I first encountered in the Leo Editor over 20 years ago - with all of Obsidian’s power this seems like a surprising omission. It’s pretty common these these days in other PKB software.
As @wychwitch says, it’s very useful when you want to organise a subset of your notes for a specific project. I really would miss this feature if it can’t be replicated.