When writing in obsidian, i often find myself typing in prose form, or not using “-” as often until I do require a list of things. When that happens, sometimes all I want to do is just type a small block like the following:
[ ] remember to finish up the article above
instead of turning it into a bullet:
- [ ] remember to finish up the article above
Proposed solution
We should be able to create checkbox tasks even without bulletising them, especially since Obsidian is not an “outliner”. I don’t know about you, but having to bulletise every task produces friction to need to turn a task into a bullet, and then unbulletise any following text.
I suppose if you want to take it even further, I would suggest within-block tasks ([ ]add this later) but that would be tricky and not super needed at the moment, but it would be a fun idea to play with in future if this ever gets implemented.
Since Obsidian uses Markdown, it follows Markdown’s checkbox syntax of - [ ]. I do agree that there is friction of task->bullet so maybe a better FR is easier toggling of task->bullet?
I rarely have that problem but when I do I just use Shift + B (my hotkey for toggle bullet list) twice and it works fine to convert a task to bullet. The first completely removes the - [ ] so it’s just text then the second converts it to bullet
My issue isn’t really with task → bullet, we can just delete the [ ] in front. More in terms of workflow. Let’s say I’m typing this paragraph at the moment. And then to just remind myself to add more things later on, I can add…
[ ] remember to do this later
and continue with what I wanted to do - it doesn’t “break the workflow” per se and also doesn’t restrict you to having to bulletise and unbulletise after creating a task.
Oh but if you say it’s a markdown standard then I can kind of see why this wouldn’t be implemented… oh well.
I don’t think the checkbock all that useful for singleton tasks or even inline tasks. Are you really going to mark it as ‘done’ anytime later?
Rather, I think an inline footnote would be quite adequate which you simply delete when done.
You can, after a fashion, with much experimentation with the white space, and you can use only the bottommost of the checkboxes, even when you entered more than one.
Anyway, that was not the point I was trying to make. I sometimes use footnotes to remind me of things I want to do later. When they are done, I simply delete the footnote.
If you’re using a mac you might consider something like Typinator or Text Expander. I have a Typinator shortcut that turns “;box” into the box character ☐. There’s also a mapping to turn “;check” into ✓.
I suspect it could be done with keyboard settings on a mac too. They come with an annoying replacement for “omw” that turns it into “On my way!”
oh well.