Looking for experiences for or against note titles in body of notes

Hi, the last week I’m weighing the pro’s and con’s of including note titles in my notes for PKM.
On the one hand, I think: who needs a note title in a note when you can display it by activating a setting, on the other hand it could be useful when referencing notes or using backlinks.

I would be curious to know what your thoughts are on this.

Hi @janpeeters ,

With the new features in recent versions of Obsidian, I’ve changed how I manage titles in my notes:

Now that there is a built-in feature for displaying the note title at the top of the page, I no longer use note titles for my individual notes. The automatic display is more convenient for me, especially because it stays in sync with the page’s filename.

Now that the export-to-PDF function also supports including the page title in the exported document, I don’t need inline titles for printing anymore either.

An added benefit to this is that embedding pages becomes more convenient too – embedded pages no longer cause a giant header to appear in the parent page. :slight_smile:

I hope this is helpful,

Craig

I show the inline title and remove the tab title bar. No markup note title.
The tab right-click is fine. → & ← for navigation and +E for toggling the edit/view modes so the icons on the tab title bar are not really needed.

By default I don’t include the title in the body. I include it on “notes” that are documents I intend to export (short stories, etc.) and on my media notes where I want the full title of the work which may differ from the filename.

I haven’t yet decided what to do now that Obsidian shows the filename in the note body. If I turn that off the note name will sometimes be hidden on mobile because the tabs include the note’s folders.

I don’t see how it would. Do you mean an alias, not a heading?

The PKM gurus harp on about friction in the tools we use and I can understand the reasoning. What is also a ‘pinch point’ is when the tool doesn’t fit in with your own gut feelings. I like logseq in many ways but the auto-generation of pages from tags and some properties (that can’t be removed in the settings) is why Obsidian feels ‘easy’ to me. The new note title options are great for most but perhaps there is a way to add a frontmatter title property which shows a markdown title only when it’s entered and can be part of a template.

I should have checked the preview of my previous post as the angle brackets were removed. Noob mistake.

Thanks all for your thoughts and experiences!

@Craig I missed that PDFs can now include the note titel. I have to check if this also is the case with Pandoc exports (which I mainly use to export to .docx).
for the embedding of atomic notes it’s indeed more convenient to not have a titel above. I know there are CSS snippets to omit the title but like this it’s more seamless.

@CawlinTeffid my thinking was flawed regarding backlinks. It shows the note title I saw later. So there is no problem there.

@MagePrometheus it’s an interesting idea to be able to show the Note title only when set in FrontMatter.

Thanks again.

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