Fast Inbox (a.k.a. Quick Entry, Send to Inbox) via Alfred

Concept - Sometimes an idea comes to you, and you want to jot it down in a flash. Opening Obsidian, clicking New Note or navigating to a note, clicking back to what you were doing before Obsidian, that’s just too much work. Yes you’re that lazy. This post is about maximum optimization.

Solution - Hit the spotlight key on your macbook, -type your idea. Done. It doesn’t matter if Obsidian is even open. All of your ideas are safely in Inbox.md.

Click to play the whole thing (idk why it plays the first couple seconds on loop)

My implementation - I just use Alfred to run a text append command in shell. Obsidian Quick Capture.alfredworkflow.zip (208.4 KB) Only issue is I told it to add everything new to line 1 so your Inbox.md can’t be blank.

Future ideas - dedicated homescreen icon for Android/iOS that brings up your keyboard in 1 click, and saves whatever you typed to Inbox.md when you change focus (turn off phone, click away from input popup, etc).

What made you think of this?
This feature is already familiar to Dynalist users, I thought Obsidian needed it too. -

https://blog.dynalist.io/inbox-capture

d’oh, I should have searched instead of just asking the discord chat. Looks like someone already did almost exactly the same thing already (see their t command) Alfred - Obsidian Utilities

Nice idea.
This is what I get when I add two items.

  • This is another testn- this is a test

The sed code is sed -i ‘’ ‘1s/^/- {query}\n/’

So the final \n is not turning into a new line.

Am I doing something wrong?

macosxguru

Hmm does yours look like this, with the same checkboxes at the bottom?
I just googled “append text to top in terminal on mac” for the code, and put {query} in for the input. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work on your mac. I am using a new M1 macbook air.

Yes.

Thanks for the workflow. I will post again if I can figure out how to make it work.

macosxguru

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