I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and probably it is better for obsidian to get even more amazing at it’s core mission than to go different directions.
Eventually, once other low-hanging fruit is taken, then perhaps look at DB.
To answer the question of “how” to do DB … I agree with everyone - stick with markdown text files. That’s a great idea. I’d probably propose something like:
- Option to turn it on
- If on, then files that start with ! in their file names become definitions for tables (meta data) … fields, field types, etc. (with smart defaults - everything is text unless you otherwise specify, if you say “date” in the field name it is by default treated as a date, etc.). For example you might have a meta file called !Books which has fields of Author, date published, etc.
- Then you can add a tag #!Books to a page indicating that page is of type “Book”. Then within that #Author refers to the Author of that book, and displays the author
- This handles data entry & organization, then there would need to be layers for display & search, etc.
But as I said, upon further thought, it shouldn’t be a high priority, as there are other features that will make obsidian better at it’s core function. Here, maybe the question is how can we create simple tools that would allow for easy interface with other tools.
If there were an easy way to use “Templates” which could then be setup to allow for easy export of a certain class of things using that template.
- Maybe I have a template !#Books, and I can also have a tool that exports #Books as a csv file, for import into Excel.
- Maybe I have a template !#flashcard and this makes it easy to export to Anki
I don’t know … just brainstorming. Seems better to get really good at 1 thing, and make it easy to integrate with other tools without too much overhead. (At least at the beginning)
Best
David
