Devonthink & Obsidian?

[chrisaalid]

@echej

I index Obsidian files in DT

I haven’t thought of this. What’s the benefit to this? Besides a unified place to search in DT.

How do you work with these on mobile?

[echej]

Yes, the search and access to my notes from DT on mac is the main reason for that;
For example I could use @ryanmurphy plugin;
I could access my notes on mobile using DT (I don’t have access to beta) but I don’t do that often;

[seishonagon]

Rooting around in your blog, I also found the Connect DEVONthink PDFs, Bookends references, and Obsidian summary notes with this script - Axle post about which I have a few questions / remarks. I don’t think I’ve seen you post here about it. Is there a thread somewhere (I’m particularly interested by the apparent KM integration in the script, which you don’t mention in the post itself …)

[ryanjamurphy]

Sorry for the delayed reply!

@seishonagon

Rooting around in your blog

Oh no! That’s probably a terrible idea.

@seishonagon

the apparent KM integration in the script

Good eye. This is actually an artifact and can be deleted. I was trying to find a way to stitch together a one-button method of activating this so that it worked whether I launched it from DEVONthink or Bookends. The solution I went with is much simpler. I use the following macro:

Essentially, if I launch it in Bookends, it first runs a simple script to open the PDF in DEVONthink, then it runs the script I provided in the blog post.

As for questions/a thread about it here, I’ll start one in a few days or a week or so. DT’s latest beta actually introduces a little thing that makes this script more robust, so I’ll launch the new version, post about it, and tag you.

[seishonagon]

Revisiting this (sorry …) I realized that for some reason my DT names Summary files differently than expected in your script. I had to replace

set highlightsSummaries to lookup records with file (eachItem's name & ".pdf" & space & "Summary.md") in theDatabase

with

set highlightsSummaries to lookup records with file (eachItem's name & space & "Summary.md") in theDatabase

because my summary files don’t include the original “.pdf” extension …
I guess there’s a setting somewhere

[friednslip]

Devonthink Noob here— is there a way to automatically create an inbox folder in devonthink that syncs with Obsidian? So if I wanted to make use of devonthink’s web clipper to save files — can I create a folder in my obsidian vault that makes it possible to search using Obsidian (as opposed to indexing an obsidian vault and making things searchable in Devonthink)

[ryanjamurphy]

You’d ultimately still be using indexing—but sure:

1. Create an Inbox folder in Obsidian
2. Index that Inbox folder in DEVONthink in a database’s Inbox (or the global Inbox).
3. Whenever you clip something, put it there if you want to see it in Obsi.

It actually isn’t strictly necessary to put the inbox folder in a DEVONthink inbox in step 2. You can clip to any folder in any database from
the DEVONthink clipper.

[manuelalonso]

@ryanjamurphy Hey Ryan, the apple script, as simple as it is, it is giving me a “Vault not found” error. I copied/pasted the vault ID from the obsidian.json file in my ~/library/application suppor/obsidian folder. Twice. Same error.

[ryanjamurphy]

For which script, sorry? I modified one recently to take the vault name instead.

[manuelalonso]

@ryanjamurphy I downloaded from your website, Axel? Can you send me the link to the new script? Thanks! (That is the DT3 script to open a file in Obsidian, using the call back url)

About - Axle

[manuelalonso]

@ryanjamurphy The link to teh script I got is here: DEVONlink - Integrate Obsidian and DEVONthink - Axle

[ryanjamurphy]

Ah, sorry, I failed to update the comments on that script. You can just write the vault name instead of the vault ID.

I’ve updated the script at the link you posted to make this clear, if you wanted to redownload it!

[vanderwal]

I have been roughly working this way since 2005 with DevonThink. I started by tucking things of potential interest and relevance into DevonThink and sometimes lightly annotating them in a comment (tags didn’t exist in DT then and they didn’t understand why they would be helpful). When DT added the ability to index, monitor, and update its contents by pulling in what is in and then what is new in a folder of text (later markdown) files that was incredibly helpful.

DevonThink has been brilliant for retrieving things from 3 to 15 years ago that are relevant to work, writing, expert witness work, mentoring grad students, etc. as much of what is gone from the internet around a certain subjects I have tucked away and searchable. I also have ALL of my ~70k PDFs, text / markdown notes, and documents in one DevonThink database (it shouldn’t work, but it still does).

About a year ago (June 2000) I put Obsidian on top of my text / markdown notes. Having the capability to interlink notes, drafts, presentation outlines, exploratory braindumps on subjects, articles, as well as concept pages and domain pages with booklists and notes on books and much more. I had more than 2k to more than 3k text / markdown notes (which DT had indexed and included in its own collection), but they were all distinct and not connected. Obsidian, over time has allowed me to interconnect these disparate ideas to move from one chunk of information to other related ones and synthesize new ideas. But, using tags I can easily aggregate concepts and ideas that have that tag on them. I use tags as hooks to aggregate and interlinking as bridges.

This works insanely well as I can now find what I am looking for much faster and make use of it far more easily.

The piece that is bumpy for me still is the crosslinking easily between DevonThink and markdown files in Obsidian. The issue is I work on my laptop and my iPad with Obsidian, but mobile DevonThink can’t work with my full DevonThink database / corpus. I have a couple techniques for connecting them on my laptop, but I need to pick one.

[ashish]

My struggle is maintaining the links in both. Wikilinks work well in Obsidian but are fragile in DT. And index note links in DT work well, but they are not recognized as links in Obsidian

[ryanjamurphy]

Wrap them in <angle brackets> if you aren’t putting them in a markdown-formatted link.

Edit: sorry, Discourse syntax hid the angle brackets part of that sentence when I hadn’t code-fenced them.

[ashish]

There are two ways of making in link in DT.
Either a wiki format like [[…]].
or a DT indexed link like […] (x-devonthink-item://…)
Obsidian only recognizes the wiki format, but those are fragile when used in DT. Is there a way to make the index link recognizable as a backlink in Obsidian?

[ryanjamurphy]

Yes, wrap them in angle brackets:
<x-devonthink-item://5B7C9A13-4AB5-49E5-9609-B70D003A194A>

Or format them as a markdown link:
[some file](x-devonthink-item://5B7C9A13-4AB5-49E5-9609-B70D003A194A)

[ashish]

Thanks. I use the latter. But my concern is that Obsidian then no longer sees them as backlinks or outgoing links. Also, they don’t show on Obsidian graph. This format makes Obsidian treat them as external links.

[manuelalonso]

@ryanjamurphy Sorry this drags on. Cannot make work the new script either. Name of my vault is “MAIN VAULT”. Is the space in between words? I also tried to add the path.

[ryanjamurphy]

d’oh, sorry. I forgot to fix the last ObsidianVaultID variable there, on the fourth-last line. Fixed and reuploaded to the site. Hopefully it works now!