Sorry if I didn’t communicate it clearly. The way I imagine it goes something like this: I’m reading through some notes I just wrote and I see a section or paragraph (or individual line or word I suppose, although that’s not how I’d use it) that I think is important or reusable enough to get its own ‘card’. I highlight that section, hit the ‘embed’ button, and the program pops up a text box to enter the name for the new note. I enter ‘My new note’ or whatever and hit enter. Obsidian copies the text I’ve selected from my current note to My new note.md, and replaces it in the source with ![[My new note]]
Because it’s embedded, the preview looks almost the same, but now anywhere else in my vault I can easily reference or embed that idea. I’m not sure what you mean about changing the display text of the embed - it’s embedded, so what displays is the full content of the note.
We don’t just name the note as the source text for a couple reasons:
- If the section you select is longer than a few words, the note titles become very difficult to parse or work with,
- It doesn’t matter all that much what the note title is. My inclination is that it’s better to have short easily parsable note titles that don’t give much information, since the actual good stuff is in the file itself. All the title has to be able to do is direct me back to the note - it should be the name of the idea, not the idea itself. Especially if we have a good full-text search, where I can easily find something that’s in the text of the file if the name isn’t helping me. I think of the titles more like a subject line of an email, rather than the whole body - if I’m skimming the list of files, I get get an idea what I’ll see if I open the note, and I don’t really need any more than that.
- It doesn’t matter whether the title matches the text because I’m not going to remember the text later. If I have an idea about something, and I want to reference it later, I’m not going to want to, or likely be able to, memorize all my thoughts and reasoning I’ve written down. All I need to be able to do is remember what the idea was about, and I can probably find it, so for me at least, it’s better to call the note ‘ideas about x’ or ‘why x is y’ and make it something easily findable, rather than writing out my whole thought process in the title.
Note titles should be as compressed as possible - I’m not going to be reading through my file explorer to understand my notes, all the title has to be able to do is direct me to the file, and doesn’t really need to be able to convey any information beyond what’s in side - it should be a subject line, not the actual body. I titled this post Note Extractor because that’s enough that you can a) get some idea what it is without opening it and b) if you’re looking for similar ideas, it will come up. I didn’t feel the need to title it
This is something that I’ve seen discussed in discord but I don’t think it’s gotten a request card yet so figured I’d put it up for official discussion over here. The idea is that in order to relieve the inability to link directly to blocks, while still facilitating quick note taking without careful formatting of headings and such, you can easily ‘pull out’ any chunk of text to its own note so you can easily link to it, replacing it with an embed in the original. That is, if I write a paragraph that I think I will want to link to or reuse, I can select it, click ‘extract’, enter a name for the new note, and Obsidian will a) create a new note with that title, b) copy the selected text into that note, and c) delete the text from the original note, replacing it with a ![[new note]] embed. This helps alleviate one of the big issues for people used to outliners, namely that lines aren’t first-class entities, while allowing you to write naturally without thinking about note structure as you go - ideas can be easily pulled out into their own atomic notes as needed, so you don’t have to decide as you go whether it needs its own file or not
because you can’t even read it just scrolling by and it’s not really necessary - the title is for organization, the body is for information
