New Plugin: Journey - Find the story between your notes

Whoohoo, the plugin is ready for you to use!

I’m so excited for you to give this a spin.

How to install:

  1. Click on the Settings button in the left side-bar (The gear icon)
  2. Click on “Community Plugins”
  3. Click on “Browse”
  4. Search for “Journey”
  5. Click “Install”

How to activate:

  1. Click on “Community Plugins”
  2. Scroll down and find “Journey”
  3. Toggle on the right to activate

How to discover new journeys in your vault

Super simple:

  1. Click on the Journey icon in the sidebar (It looks like a “Z”, icon TBD btw.)…which will open your search window:
  2. Select a Starting and Ending note (or hit the “I feel lucky” link and see what happens)
  3. Click on “Find Journey” to start the search
  4. …after a moment of searching, you should see the the shortest route through your vault between those two notes
  5. Either copy this route to your clipboard or start a new search

Play with the settings

As I wrote above, you can mix-and-match forward-links, backward-links, tags, taking the scenic route etc.

Experiment, play around and see what works for you!

I want to hear your feedback

My biggest question is if this process helps you find something that you’re excited about. If it does, please share what you’ve discovered! If it doesn’t, let me know why and what you need to succeed.

Send me a direct message after you’ve experimented for a bit and we’ll talk about your experience!

With best wishes and let’s have some FUN! :tada:

Alexis

16 Likes

I am delighted!
I love this plug-in, it’s a creative and useful tool.
Thank you very much for having created it.
Max

1 Like

Sorry there’s no built-in way yet, because it’s pretty complicated if we were to handle the payment somehow.

Nonetheless, we encourage others to join GitHub sponsor or put a PayPal link in the plugin settings page so people can show their appreciation.

Some examples:
https://www.patreon.com/kepano
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kepano
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/tallguyjenks
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/tgrosinger
https://github.com/sponsors/deathau (Licat is sponsoring as well!)

@akaalias Please don’t hesitate to set up some way to support you if you like the idea! Seems like people are LOVING this plugin :heart:

12 Likes

Great work, this is fantastic! And somewhat addictive when I should be doing other things :smiley:

A feature request for you: the ability to define a list of tags that are excluded from the journey (both “I feel lucky” and the actual journey search). For example, I’d like to exclude my daily notes, template notes and a few other notes types I use but still allow tags in general as part of the journey.

And now that I write this, it occurs to me that being able to exclude folders would also do this given how I’ve structured my vault. Maybe support both? :wink:

6 Likes

Was just thinking the same thing after giving it a spin! I would love to exclude my daily notes folder.

2 Likes

Really good result @akaalias!!!

One tweak please – the background/foreground color in the results pane make the results hard to read. Can we have an option to just have plain black on white?

Boring … but useful.

3 Likes

Wow!! Thank you for this amazing plugin; this will significantly improve my workflow.

Nevertheless it would be nice, not just to avoid certain notes with more than X out-bound links, but to avoid notes with a specific word in the title (e.g. “index”).
Because with the link count I fear that some smaller indexes will be used for the journey, which are unter the set number, and some “normal” notes will be above and therefore ignored by the plugin.

1 Like

So here’s a little subgraph of my vault:

image

There are two notes in that bit of the graph, called:
image
image

I can see a route between them in the graph:
image

But Journey doesn’t can’t find a connection? Tags, forward and backlinks are all enabled, taking the scenic route is disabled (so it’s not blocking along the path anywhere). Thoughts, am I doing something silly or missed something obvious?

1 Like

@Klaas! Hahaha, I thought the same thing.

Funny enough, as I was pressure-testing my initial version (the one in the video) I kept on bumping into MOC notes that didn’t add much value to the emerging story. So, I was like “Oh, @thoresson was totally right with the avoid X idea. We should have that!”

And then same thing happened with the tags idea.

xefer this super cool and I would say completely related to what we’re exploring here. Thank you for sharing!

1 Like

@anon27868835 and @Silver – Thank you for pointing that out! I hadn’t even thought about adding that. Good to know that it’s so common and also appropriate! :slight_smile:

Hey @ShaneNZ and @arminta – Got it, makes sense: Ability to exclude notes from certain folders NOTED!

1 Like

Hi @anon27868835, that’s good to know. I’ll see what I can do quickly to help out. We’re figuring what the best visual design solution is together :slight_smile:

Hi @Yav! Thank you for your comment – “avoid notes with a specific word in the title (e.g. “index”).” is NOTED.

1 Like

You’re totally right - those two notes should have a connection from what you’re showing. – You’re not doing something silly or missing anything obvious.

Would you be open to do a quick Zoom session today or tomorrow and look at this together live?

Hey there!

I :heart: the ideas you come up with. Thank you so much. Now, instead of me doing the prioritization what should be the next feature, how about this:

You tell me what next feature would really make a difference to you? (You get one vote :slight_smile: )

What feature should I build next?
  • The ability to define a list of tags that are excluded
  • Being able to exclude specific folders
  • An option to just have results be shown plain black on white
  • Avoid notes with a specific word in the title (e.g. “index”)
  • An option to automatically create links when copying to clipboard
  • A place to share your most freaky random note journey
  • Add a method that we can use to “tip” (with money, not emojis) this plugin

0 voters

Looking forward to hearing what you need!

PS: If you run into a technical issue, please post it in the project’s Github issues
PPS: I am making a call to work on @anon27868835’s request for higher contrast right away, since this is more of an accessibility topic than a feature.

@akaalias thanks again for this really great stuff! :+1: My first try of the “I feel lucky” feature was amazing - I discovered a real cool route from two at first sight completely unrelated notes. This route, however, opened up a really useful topic and plenty of productive thoughts that actually enlarged my thinking on a certain topic I am dealing with anyway! :slightly_smiling_face:

After playing with your plugin, I would like to share two more proposition for possible future releases:

  1. Would it be possible to change the behavior of the selection dialogue so that you can start typing a note’s name in order to narrow down the propositions shown? As of now, I can at least type the first letter of a note’s name and the dialogue will jump to that starting letter in the list. Yet, with several thousands of existing notes, in many cases that still means that you have to scroll a lot till you find the note you want to select.
  2. Would it be somehow possible to integrate the plugin with the “execute command” dialogue (ctrl + p)? This could possibly open up further possibilities like for example “find journey from currently active note to [chose a target note]”. I have no clue if this is easy to implement or not - just an idea… :wink:
9 Likes

I apologize, but I’m going to dump a lot of suggestions on you:

  1. The results display could have clickable note names – click a name on the journey results and that note opens in the background.
  2. (Expanding on the “links on clipboard” feature in your poll). The results could be copied to the clipboard with [[Obsidian URLs]], or, optionally and even cooler, ![[Obsidian transclusion URLs]] – so that when the journal results are pasted into a new note then we have working links or working transclusion without having to manually add the missing syntax.
  3. Once you have #2, then the local graph is correctly populated.

I love what you’re doing here.

3 Likes

Hi, I have tested the plugin and I have to say it is amazing. It allows in effect, the connection of notes in different appearance.
I think I have some ideas to enhance the use in large Vaults.
1: The possibility to choose which # “tag” to use for the creation of connections. “Start the walk”. That is, use specific “tags” so that journey yields results. This is especially valuable for people who use a lot of tags in their notes to differentiate certain important topics.
2: Being able to decide which files, tags and folders to exclude from the journey.

I must say that the plugin surprised me a lot. You can create something game-changing here. :bulb::writing_hand:

3 Likes

Good morning @alltagsverstand – I’m so happy to hear you found something cool and exciting it sounds :slight_smile: I also have used the “I feel lucky” button and have started to make a collection note of “curious routes” because some results (not all, maybe 30%) really stop me in my tracks.

As for your selection dialog - sort of like auto-complete in Google – I’ve noted that and have already reached out to the Obsidian developers if there’s a way to re-use their existing search-box.

And at least adding a hot-key for executing command (instead of clicking the button) should not be too hard. I’ll add it to the list!

1 Like