The heading includes a wide range of plaintext files, not just .txt.
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Yeah, I think it’s best to create a precise feature requests for each, with specific discussion about what a user would need from that format. Since Obsidian can now be extended to use other formats, perhaps plugins will be developed to respond to these needs.
The majority of discussion on this thread is about .txt, and I am certain that the plugin I mention satisfies that need.
(As I suggested above, I think you’re looking for something different for .txt than the majority of users interested in .txt compatibility.)
It doesn’t allow Obsidian to treat .txt the same as .md. So no tags, links or graphs and they’re not transcluded. While that seems to be enough for some of the posters above it’s certainly not all.
It’s not a big issue for me, which is probably why I came into it so late, so I’ll not submit a new FR. I don’t use Obsidian for tags or search, because it’s too restrictive, and I’ve never found graphs useful. So I only need to make sure I have .md copies of notes where linking will be important.
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I suggest to move single file support requests to plugins and create a FR to define a “user-customizable extention for the notes files”.
It can be either .md or something else, but it can’t be a mix of extentions because in obsidian the filename has to be unique and we would have problems handling where [[note title]] points if there is note title.md and note title.txt and both are valid targets.
IMHO, This is gonna be a low priority FR because the supporting arguments for .txt are weak.
Both window search and apple spotlight index .md files just fine.
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Thank you for explaining that the filenames have to be unique. Technical limitations make far more sense than highly subjective “this is how a format should be used” arguments.
I’m still going to insist that interoperability with other tools that require non-md formats is not a weak argument. Myself and other potential users in this thread are saying they would need that feature for this tool to fit into their actual, extant workflow.
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That’s true, but we know already that Obsidian reads file extensions and they’re part if a file name. Most programs and utilities work on that basis.
The message I take is that it’s not gonna happen. I can live with that. And it’s fully Obsidian’s decision about what they want it to do.
But this remains true. I’ve tried to live within a md centred system and found it’s awful for the efficiency of my own workflow. It was worth coping with when Interoperability seemed likely to improve some time, but not now. So onto other solutions and Obsidian likely to drift to a fringe niche rather than a place in the centre.
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For those that would like to open rmd files in Obsidian, it is possible to tweak the txt-as-md plugin (GitHub - deathau/txt-as-md-obsidian: Edit txt files in Obsidian.md as if they were markdown) so that it also reads rmd in addition to txt files. In order to do that you need to add ‘rmd’ or whatever the format name is to the array of extensions which should be treated like md files in the main.js file of this plugin.
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