Obsidian VS Apple Notes Search

[lukasweichselbaum]

Hey guys!

I absolutely love Obsidian. It’s so responsive and the features are incredible.

There’s only one reason why I still mostly use Apple notes:

SEARCH

If I want to quickly navigate to a note I can use spotlight, both on my phone and Mac. It’s incredibly quick and effective, especially on my phone.

On my phone I swipe down and type in my keyword (I know my most important notes via keywords, I also use tags).

Navigating to notes in Obsidian (especially on iOS) is a lot more tedious, sadly.

Even if I find the note as “markdown content”, it opens in an editor that I can’t edit in.

I also feel that Spotlight doesn’t treat these files with the same care as it does Apple Notes. Which is a pity.

Do you guys and girls have any cool ideas or suggestions?

How did you solve this for yourself?

(second brain) Love,
Lukas

[gino_m]

iPadOS user here. I don’t use anything else but Obsidian on my device anymore. I don’t use text editors (Taio, MWeb, Textastic) or search apps (Samurai Search, ripgrep with a jailbroken shortcut solution or in-built Spotlight) anymore. Never used Apple Notes too much either. It’s a matter of preference and living with what you chose.
Obsidian needs to be open to search and edit. Obsidian search is powerful, especially with regular expressions or with its built-in syntax.
With tag:#dg_uploaded -tag:#englishtexttranslated /^.*(\b(that|the|he|she|was|were|have|are|they|with|this|or|not|but|from|by|if|how|where|when|why|of)\b)[^áéíóöőúüű].*/ query, I can search for notes which have English text that were published but not yet translated (I write bilingually but cannot expect all my readers to handle English). Of course this query expects a certain tagging convention of my own.
You cannot use such a powerful query in Spotlight. But one needs to put in the time to learn about the innate power of Obsidian.

[rigmarole]

That’s not meta, moved to help.

I hear you! I miss good fast fuzzy search from anywhere. Or even from a specific place.

Obsidian isn’t designed to open files. It acts on a vault as a collection of files. So a solution directly in Spotlight isn’t going to work. There are open feature requests to open Markdown files. (And one more reason not to open a “meta” thread, and just support these threads.)

Open and edit standalone Markdown files

Use case or problem Edit Markdown files that do not belong in any vault, from Obsidian. Proposed solution Hidden directory in the vault, with a symlink or copy of the file getting created there upon open and destroyed on close. All plugins would then be available (I’m thinking “editing” plugins, such as Advanced Tables, Templater, etc…)

Have Obsidian be the handler of .md files / Add ability to use Obsidian as a markdown editor on files outside vault (file association)

A suggestion to have the possibility to make Obsidian the default app to open .md files, when accessing them in Finder. That would allow for very quick note-opening opportunities using Alfred. Simply open Alfred, type in the name of the note hit enter and have the note opened straight in Obsidian. [Screenshot 2020-05-23 at 13.18.55] My environment is MacOS but I guess there are familiar easy-access workflow possible in different environments as well

Possibility for headless syncing with a CLI/daemon

Use case or problem To make automated backups without the need for a running desktop system, I’d like to use the Obsidian Sync feature headless in a CLI. Proposed solution Implement a CLI or provide access to Obsidian Sync API.

Access Obsidian notes via Spotlight search (iOS/iPadOS)

Use case or problem Many iOS apps allows you to search for and open their files via the home screen Spotlight search. This can speed up finding and opening a file by quite a lot (for instance, no need to find and open to respective app first). As of now this feature seems to not be implemented for Obsidian. (Though, yes, Obsidian’s files do appear if you search for them in Spotlight, but this is via the Files app, not via Obsidian; If you “click” them they don’t open in Obsidian but some othe…

In Obsidian, there are some community plugins around fuzzy searching, but they don’t feel as blazingly fast, or easy-to-read as a fzf (fuzzy search finder) in Vim, for example. (There might be some plugins I’m missing out on.)

I’ve been thinking of figuring out a workflow (if someone hasn’t already solved this) of using an external tool like Alfred Workflows. To do something like this:

a) Start an Alfred search
b) Trigger a fuzzy command-line search using fzf or some other fast command line tool, in my Obsidian path.
c) If it finds it, parse an Obsidian URL and launch that to open that note.

I don’t really know if that would help jump straight to the fuzzy content that I searched. It might take a more integrated plugin in Obsidian. Or maybe it would be possible to launch a javascript function or macro in Obsidian to finish the last step.

[lukasweichselbaum]

Thanks, Gino. Great example. I understand where you’re coming from! Much appreciated.

[lukasweichselbaum]

Thanks for the housekeeping.

Thanks for the links