Do you place a heading at the top of your file?

[Eugleo]

Well, as the title says — do you leave it at the filename to describe the file’s contents, or do you use a. # Heading as well? I think headings are better for flexibility (they are visible in every other editor as well), but then you have some minor problems with notes transclusion (you basically have to link to the heading directly, to prevent duplication, which is worse for transferability to other apps).

[sam.baron]

See related feature request:

Use H1 or YAML property "title" instead of or in addition to filename as display name

I’m interested in a setting that would use a note’s H1 or front-matter title instead of or in addition to the filename as the display name everywhere: links, backlinks, graph view, search, etc. How would this be useful: For users who use IDs as filenames or who generally want more concise filenames Use illegal filename characters and emojis in note titles More readable graph, search, backlinks, etc. Other assumptions/thoughts/questions: Is this global or feature-specific? By feature-specif…

[austin]

I have the same question. Do you add an h1 at the top of your files? If so, why? If not, why?

Newbies need your wisdom.

I thought this would be good for future-proofing: the file is complete as an html file w/ the h1 at the top. It also allows a slightly different title than the file name.

However, it makes some things in Obsidian annoying.

For example, it makes file embeds look dumb. (I do a hack now where a top paragraph is a summary of the note with the title in bold and a brief description that I can include as a block in place of a standard internal link.)

[obsequious]

I don’t. I think that the Markdown-based note-taking tools I care about rely on the filesystem for organization and filesystem metadata (i.e. filename) whenever possible. So having the title at the top is redundant and is annoying in Obsidian transclusions/embeds.

I’m guessing that the supposed “best practice” of having the title in a heading at the top of Markdown content makes more sense when you’re talking about an isolated Markdown document as a whole; e.g., if you copy-and-paste a Markdown note to send to someone.

Having said that, I would prefer to have the canonical title in the frontmatter and wait for https://forum.obsidian.md/t/use-h1-or-front-matter-title-instead-of-or-in-addition-to-filename-as-display-name/ to be implemented in Obsidian core

[cwhiii]

I use the plugin “Embedded Note Titles.” Solves the problem by automatically displaying the title as a # Heading.

[markf]

Yes that’s what I’ve been doing by default for my notes, when not using plugins, but indeed it doesn’t look elegant when using embedded notes. I haven’t needed to embed notes in my main vaults.

For my university notes I have two H1 headings in a note: <NOTE_NAME>; References. This splits text into the main content and supplementary info.

If there were a plugin that hides the first H1 heading or else avoids the use of MD filename when embedding notes, that would work really well for my main vaults!

It can be quite convenient to use a H1 heading to do a shorter title for a note - that’s why I prefer doing them for my notes. For example, I have filenames like <CONCEPT> (<CATEGORY>).md but note header <CONCEPT>, as a way of doing disambiguation for concepts that have the same name but are unrelated to each other.