Just starting obsidian and I am stumped already. The whole point is to have atomic notes and I have to name every single note? Books need titles, papers need titles, I thought the whole point of this program was the links and tags. Not only do I not need a title for every note, I really don’t want to have to provide one, and I find the big field with ‘Untitled’ on it just irksome.
Am I just going to have to get used to this, or is there a way to turn it off? I have searched the manual and this forum and not found any ready answers.
You can take the pressure off having to add a title using daily notes, but those are not atomic notes, as far as I’m savvy with the PKM lingo.
Indeed a title can be more easily given when you have the content or you know where you are going with whatever you have.
I think you are not ready for atomic notes or to put it more mildly, not about to be cornered into making them. That sort of makes two of us. I don’t think I’ll have atomic notes. What are they? Everything is about connections and relativity. Darkness = lack of light. Etc.
I am also not a daily note or project note maker, because that only makes sense if you have a good setup with dataview queries and templates.
I recommend trying out a few demo vaults and see what fits. As you spend active time with what’s actually possible with the app, your horizon broadens and you’ll get that Ah-2-Mick baddie or what’s his name.
To put in my two cents, maybe instead of daily notes@dcnblues is looking for the built-in feature of unique notes.
Furthermore, every note itself - atomic or not - needs a title, for this is also the name of the physical file and will be needed to link it to other files in the vault.
No, you don’t, because the system will set a default title for you. You can leave the default as it is (untitled, untitled 1, untitled 2, etc), or use the core plugin Unique note creator to manage titles for you.
Books need titles, papers need titles,
… and so do notes, to make them identifiable.
I thought the whole point of this program was the links and tags.
File names / file titles are links.
Not only do I not need a title for every note, I really don’t want to have to provide one,
… again, every file needs a title, but you don’t have to provide one unless you want to (in most cases it helps to have user-defined file titles because they add meaning and, possibly, structure).
and I find the big field with ‘Untitled’ on it just irksome. Am I just going to have to get used to this, or is there a way to turn it off?
Obsidian > Settings > Appearance > Interface > Show inline title (toggle off)
Okay thank you. I was not clear that titles were links. So the title forces you to have at least one link per note, but is there anything that distinguishes that link from a manual one? To put it a different way, does that create two categories of links?
As well, I was going to research how to put a timestamp in every note, but it looks like unique notes will do that for me. If I wanted a timestamp function without using the title for that, is there a similar plug-in? Many thanks for the help.
Thank you, I was not aware that the title was an automatic link, essentially forcing one link per note minimum.
I had in mind inputting all of the historical quotations I have collected (a couple of hundred). And tagging them with a) it’s a quote, b) subject matter, c) author (at a minimum). I’m not sure the best way to go about that now as perhaps I should just put that info in the title.
I’ve been told to just go ahead and start using obsidian, but I think I need to read more on the difference between tags and links. Thank you all for responding to the question, I understand better now. Feel free to give advice on how to best input a collection of quotations.
Your outlined concept for collecting quotations to me seems quite useful, go for it.
Additionally maybe have a start in reading here: Best way to manage saved quotes?
And no, the title itself is not a link yet, it is just the name of the text file where Obsidian saves your note to.
Title is not a link, but it is a potential link adress. Like, if you want to link to a note, you simply write the note name in double square brackets. You would not be able to link if there was no titles.
In the file explorer, global search, or graph view, all of the file titles are—by virtue of their existence—inherently and unquestionably links, showing connections in the entire vault or in subfolders.
Possible to see things differently, of course, or to describe the same concepts with divergent semantics. If a file title wasn’t an immanent, implicit, and explicit link, users would only ever need one single file containing all their data.