[Feature] Home Screen Quick Action for “Quick Note”

Feature requests
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Use case or problem

The one feature that keeps me hooked on Apple Notes, is the ability to long press on the icon, drag to “New Note” and be instantly able to type information.

This is very useful for taking down phone numbers, recommendations during conversations, or anything else where the multiple clicks and mentally recognizing and resetting the current app state required to add a note takes a painful amount of time.

To do so right now in Obsidian, you need to open the app, reset any current state, find the right place for the note, create a new note, give it a title, refocus to the body of the note and start typing.

Proposed solution

Add a Home Screen Quick Action on iOS for “New Note” or “Quick Note”.

Long-pressing on the Obsidian app, dragging to “Quick Note” and releasing should automatically create a new note with a default title (possibly the current date), open this note, and focus text entry on the body of the note.

(Optional) Allow the target folder for Quick Notes to be customized or default to a “Quick Notes” folder that is automatically created in the last active vault.

(Optional) Match Apple Note’s behavior and automatically set the first couple dozen characters in the note as the title of the note.

5 Likes
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This is some of the iOS documentation for this feature:

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/system-capabilities/home-screen-actions/

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/menus_and_shortcuts/add_home_screen_quick_actions

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I have a half-finished plugin solution for this. I’ll try to remember to post it here when it’s public!

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Cool! Would it be OS-agnostic and use obsidian:// URLs? Or is it an iOS exclusive?

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It’s URL-scheme based. I don’t think a plugin developer could do more than that.

2 Likes
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Yeah, for iOS Quick Actions I think it would either need to be explicitly added directly to the app, or a generic “Quick Action Plugin API” might be possible. Not familiar enough with the implementation details to know if the later is possible.

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Hello! I wonder if you continued your work on that plug-in. Looking for a way to create a new note or search Obsidian vault within the app with one click.

I don’t think long pressing in the iOS icon for Obsidian supports that yet, but it would be amazing for it to support something like Things 3 does for tasks.

https://imgur.com/w5acRBf

Is there a way I can put in a feature request? I’ve supported Obsidian for a while, but have never asked for features. Thanks

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Yep, it’s called Lumberjack: Plugins - Obsidian

Just create a new thread in Feature requests. Be sure to search first — if it already is requested, +1 that thread instead.

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Keen to revive this feature request, I’ve released a plug-in for desktop and keen to extend this to iOS but can’t find any documentation or sample code to work from.

Can any Obsidian devs tell me whether adding iOS quick actions technically achievable from an Obsidian plug-in?

1 Like