Introduce preset/user definable variables system

Feature requests
1

I think some kind of preset and/or user definable variables will be a great addition to growing Obsidian possibilities.

Example of preset variables:

  • UName = user account name
  • Date = current date
  • Time = current time
  • Title = current note name
  • etc

It will be good to give user a way to define it’s own variables. (Special GUI needed? Or just a quick config-file setup.)

There should be a special syntax to expand variables. Something like this:
[%Date%]

Thoughts? Let’s brainstorm this!

10 Likes
2

Something like this is probably better suited toward a specialized text expansion program (I use aText, somewhat arbitrarily). This are going to be more fully featured than Obsidian could realistically be without taking time away from developing other features.

I have a few useful shortcuts already set up. Besdies xdate (which would be replaced with 2020-05-27, or xday (Wednesday, May 27, 2020), I also have xz set up to replace with [[(contents of clipboard)]], so I can highlight text, press CMD-x to copy, then press xz to insert it as a link.

3

These are mostly mean to be used as a placeholder in newly created notes. Say: %UName%-diary-%Date%, or %Cursor% - for cursor placement.

4

I agree, this would be very useful with new note templates. I come from VSNotes which has a similar feature, where variables can be defined in the config and then used in new note templates (both in the file name and in the note content). Examples of variables I use:

  • ISO timestamp. This is included in the note header.
  • Note title. This is included in the generated note file name and automatically inserted as the title in the note content.

A related feature I use in VSNotes is transforming the variables, specifically lowercasing the title and replacing spaces with underscores in the note title when used in the file name.

5

Agree with this. If we could have variables, some parts of text could autogenerate on the fly. For example, in my notes, I like to have the note title as the first line, with Header 1:

My Note

It would be nice if this was a variable such as:

#<note_title>

So that it would automatically render properly, even if the note title changes.

1 Like
6

I would find this very useful for generating daily notes. If the date is “2020-06-05”, I’d like to generate a title such as “Friday, June 5”.

7

A note for future people searching for this. (I would still like a variables system)
In v8+ there is date feature for Daily Notes re b3u question.

Go to the Daily Notes plugin and change Date Format for new daily to
“Friday, June 5”
dddd, MMMM d

And in the template if you wanted to repeat that in the markdown template.
{{date:dddd, MMMM d}}

2 Likes
8

Is there any feature like this now? :slight_smile:

1 Like
9

Would also love to know!

10

Does this do the job? GitHub - d-brown43/obsidian-macros