iOS Shortcuts—Check for existence of plugin

[Calion]

I’m not sure where the best place to post this is; I don’t think there’s any such thing as an “Obsidian Shortcuts help” forum, but perhaps there should be.

Is there any way for a Shortcut to check to see if a particular plugin is installed in Obsidian?

[CawlinTeffid]

I think you can check for the existence of a file. If not or if that’s not enough, you can search for text in the relevant settings file.

[Calion]

The problem is that those things are stored in the .obsidian folder, and Shortcuts can’t access hidden folders.

[CawlinTeffid]

I found 2 workarounds; the easier one costs money. (Oops, 3; 2 cost money.)

The paid app Textastic can access hidden files (or at least hidden folders) if you add their parent/ancestor folder as a bookmark.

[Mobile] IOS : App to work with hidden folder

Hello everyone! As a discussion about hidden folder on IOS appear regularly on the discord, I think it will be good to create a forum discussion about it. I have two solutions in mind to work with hidden folder to access to my .obsidian. Using Textastic, that is a wonderful app created by the same guy of Working Copy. Not free, but work totally with many apps, as it’s an edit text file. Here, you can bookmark a folder and access all file in it, so you can edit a note but also your .obsidian …

Textastic has a “Get File” action in Shortcuts that can then access the hidden folder.

I tested by adding my main vault as a bookmark to Textastic and running this shortcut:

• Get .obsidian/switcher.json in External Folder VaultName
• Get text from File

And it retrieved the contents of the file. So it should be possible to check for the existence of the files you need to know about.

For a free solution, a-Shell Mini has Shortcuts actions can see hidden files. You can bookmark a folder using pickFolder and prove you can see hidden files with ls -a (list files [all, including hidden]). The pickFolder thing might not persist across app restarts so you might need to setup a profile that runs it when a-Shell is launched or something (or not, I’m not sure).

The above-linked thread also mentions that the paid version of Working Copy can see hidden files, and I’ve heard that app has extensive Shortcuts support.

[Calion]

Interesting. I tried a-Shell, but couldn’t get it to work. But I didn’t try very hard.

The problem with all of these, however, is that to require the user to have additional software installed to discover if the user has additional software installed somewhat defeats the purpose. However, it still might be worth a try. Thanks!

[Calion]

…Except that I’m wrong. The Get File from Folder action can indeed see files in the .obsidian folder.