I know how to work around this issue[1], but I came here to see if it was a known issue because I was just showing somebody Obsidian and they tried it, hit this weird error, and said “nah, not for me”.
I think this is probably a blocking error for at least some significant subset of new users, since for many people this is the main way of making a new note linked from the current document. Type “BlahBlahTitle”, then bracket it to make it a link, and enter “./BlahBlahTitle.md”.
This still doesn’t work in version 1.1.15 (Installer 0.15.8) and the nonsensical error message (“folder already exists”) doesn’t make a good impression. So for new users just testing it out, that might be where they close the app and delete it.
[1]: Workaround is crazier than it seems at first:
- Right click the tab of the current file, and choose “Reveal file in navigation”
- Find the parent folder and right click it, then choose “New note”
- Enter “BlahBlahTitle.md” as the title
- Go back to the original note
- Find the new note in the navigation side bar and drag it into the current note
- or you could just type
[BlahBlahTitle](./BlahBlahTitle.md)instead, which might be better because, if you didn’t do that and just dragged it in:
- or you could just type
- note that the link is just
BlahBlahTitle.mdnot./BlahBlahTitle.md… which works for now, but if you happen to later create a file in the root calledBlahBlahTitle.mdthen suddenly the link jumps to a different file - therefore, manually edit the link and add “./” to the beginning of it to prevent this
Whew, now that I typed all that out, it actually looks crazy. Seems like Obsidian really doesn’t work well with relative paths (which admittedly, only some people like, but still).