Many of Obsidian’s users have this same misunderstanding. Obsidian is NOT a markdown editor. It is a multi-plaform plain text editor that uses markdown and is extensible. That’s a big difference. The programmers are magicians and the community is wonderful.
The more you use Obsidian the more uses you find for it.
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What misunderstanding? It’s not just a markdown editor by any means, but certainly that’s one of its core functionalities. (Neither is it just “a multi-plaform plain text editor that uses markdown and is extensible”—it’s much more than that, too.)
It’s not a misunderstanding at all to want to use that functionality on all markdown files on your drive and not just in certain folders you’ve designated as a vault.
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The "problem to be solved"is that there is no “standard” Markdown.
And I doubt there ever will be. It would be great if we could use all obsidians functionality on all Markdown files.
It difficult also due to differences in the various operating systems, which mostly do similar thing in very different ways.
Its not an easy thing to solve.
Knowledge is knowledge and plain text is the same across platforms. Its the bare basics that makes Obsidian as powerful as it is. everything else is gravy.
But consider all the Obsidian functionality you would lose if the editor knew nothing about other files.
Markdown is plaintext, and after markdown characters—which are really just plaintext characters like asterisks and hash signs—are added to a text file, it’s still plaintext and you can still open it in any text editor. That’s true whether you’re using Gruber’s original spec, CommonMark, Github-flavored, or MultiMarkdown. And one of the advantages of plaintext files—including markdown files—is that they’re portable across platforms, so “differences in the various operating systems” don’t matter.
I and the others who want this feature don’t want to abandon any of Obsidian’s functionality or get rid of the concept of vaults—we love using Obsidian as our PKM program.
As I noted above, the markdown-editor subset of Obsidian’s functionality has gotten so good that many of us find it superior to our standalone markdown editors such as iA Writer and Typora.
The point of this feature request is to be able to use that part of Obsidian—the markdown editor—on any markdown file on our systems, and to ideally be able to designate Obsidian as the default app for opening .md files.
For example, not all of my markdown files would benefit from being in a knowledge base. I have project-specific markdown files—notes, etc.—that I keep in folders with other file formats that are primary to much of the work I do. Often, there are only one or two markdown files in such a folder, mixed in with numerous files in other formats that Obsidian can’t read or process.
It’s too cumbersome to have to designate each of these folders as vaults—and to have to copy my hidden configuration folder into it—every time I need to create or edit a basic markdown file inside it.
Yes, I can use a dedicated markdown app for that. But I’d rather use Obsidian because even for pure markdown writing and editing, it’s simply the best tool available.
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The “problem” isn’t the plain text Markdown files , its the varied OSes and if that’s allowed. On iOS many apps are “sandboxed” so it wouldn’t be allowed. on MacOS, you can designate any .md file to be opened in Obsidian. The problem then is where to save it. Obsidian will gladly store in the the program’s file folder (some call it a vault but it is just a folder). other OSes have other rules. There are also file security concerns, and file permissions to take into account. Its not an easy thing to solve.
You can definitely open Obsidian files from outside of Obsidian. They’re just files in a folder, and Obsidian will notice the changes.
If you’re in Obsidian and want to open a note elsewhere, open the note menu and use “Open in default app” or “Show in system explorer”.
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@CawlinTeffid In Windows, I associated .md files to obsidian, and when I double-clicked on an .md file (even inside a vault) Obsidian started but did not open that note directly. I don’t know, maybe I did something wrong. I will have to double-check. Thank for your comment.
Thank you @BarryPorter13 for your comment. I understand that Obisdian is not just a markdown editor. I’m just agreeing that the feature proposed by the OP would be great for these reasons:
- it would be useful in many cases, as we outlined.
- I suspect it wouldn’t be too difficult to implement.
- it wouldn’t be detrimental in any way for the standard use case.
Then, of course, it is up to the developers to decide what to do about this.
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I see, I misunderstood what you wanted to do. You can use another editor to open the files, but maybe not Obsidian.
I don’t want to change my file associations, but on MacOS I tried using “Open with…” in Finder to open a note (that’s in a vault) in Obsidian, and Obsidian was grayed out as an option. So yeah, what you want probably isn’t possible now. Hopefully it will be in the future.
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My concern with this is that outside of Obsidian, the file is just a text file. So a lot of plugins and functionality would be pointless. No dataview, no frontmatter use, calendar, templater, etc.
Most of what you’d be gaining is a preview mode, a reasonable spellcheck, and maybe some formatting assistance.
I think even without plugins, the Obsidian editor is still just as good / better than most other markdown editors out there (as people have already said).
But to your point, it seems like this feature goes in tandem with another suggested feature: global settings. That way all of your most used plugins could still be accessible by the Obsidian markdown editor without being tethered to a specific vault
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Tangent Notes, which has an architecture similar to Obsidian’s vaults can open files directly from the file explorer. If the file is in a vault, it opens that; if it isn’t, then it makes the folder a new vault. I’ve switched to opening nearly everything from the file explorer except when I’m working within a folder. Works even at the top of my nested system as I just target a file at the top. Can’t see why this couldn’t be possible in Obsidian.
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In iPadOS Files, when clicking Open on a .md file, Obsidian opens - but it does not open with the note.
This is despite the note existing within the Obsidian vault.
Platform
iOS
Android
Obsidian Mobile version: v1.4.1
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I see Obsidian does not open Markdown files via iOS Files …
@WhiteNoise says:
“This is not a bug. We don’t support it.”
That’s a shame. I think it would be useful.
I am contemplating migrating to Markdown and plain folders and files.
Of note:
- “Share” to Obsidian opens a prompt to import the file to the vault.
- Share to Taio opens a Markdown file in Taio.
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I would like to add my vote to this feature request. Don’t be too modest, Obsidian developers, your product is a uniquely excellent Markdown editor (in addition to everything else it is) which ought to be available for all Markdown files on the user’s system.
The responses seem to indicate this feature is not on the roadmap. Obviously that’s up to the developers, but I must say the arguments are puzzling:
True, but that formatting assistance is excellent, and that matters a lot e.g. when editing a table.
Even if it’s not a Markdown editor, it has a very good Markdown editor built in. The request is that this editor be available for system-wide use.
True, but Obsidian understands most varieties and can edit those files.
That sounds strange: many apps that open and save files everywhere on Windows, MacOS, Linux, seem to be developed by lone volunteers after reading a bit of documentation. Macdown was written by a single guy. And the brilliant team behind Obsidian would not be able to figure out how to do it?
Most users find it cumbersome to edit one filetype with two programs – be it editing HTML with WebStorm and BBEdit, or Excel with both Excel and LibreOffice, or Markdown with Obsidian and another editor. You get used to an interface with its particular buttons, shortcut keys, extensions and so on. I really hope this functionality can be added.
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The unit of work of Obsidian is not a markdown file but a vault.
Obsidian manages your vault, parses all the files, builds a graph, makes sure the links are consistent and it is hardwired around this concept.
We could go the route that tangent notes, or vscode, took of implicitly creating a whole vault in the directory of the file that is being opened, but I am not sure that’s something all users want when they just need to edit a file.
Another complication is the need to recursively scan the directories backwards to find if the file belongs to vault whose root directory is above the file being opened.
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Thank you for this and for your upvote. I have iA Writer, Typora, Zettlr, and (with markdown extensions and themes) VS Code all installed on my laptop, and every one of them has annoyances and inadequacies Obsidian doesn’t have even when judged strictly as a text editor. It’s not as if I haven’t been trying to find another markdown editor for files outside my vault.
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