Particular questions about properties type and syntax

[netgen]

I keep learning Obsidian.

Pls help me with these questions:

1. Is there any advantage to using nested tag vs two separate tags? Like #games/rpg vs #games #rpg? Which is more convenient for detailed search? I think two separate tags, but I see people use the nested. Why? Maybe it’s just because Obsidian is the first app that introduced these nested tags to me and I simply don’t understand the beauty of it yet.

2. Why people sometimes put one colon ‘:’, and sometimes double colon ‘::‘ ?
   I remember I saw it being mentioned in ‘Help’ documentation, I think it said two colons is for separating the key and the value, is it about Properties? But again, as I said, I saw some people put just one colon instead. I don’t understand.

3. A similar question about ‘{}’. I know that double ‘{{}}’ is used for automatic dates and time, but what is the point of a single ‘{}’ in the frontmatter? For instance: {references}, {rating} etc along with {{date}}.

4. No matter how much I read other people’s tips and see the screenshots of their vaults, I don’t get how they decide the difference between the ‘tags’, ‘category’, ‘type’ names of the property. It confuses the hell out of me. Are tags just normal hashtags and ‘category’ and ‘type’ are internal links for Map of Content? But how do you distinguish type and category? What’s the difference? And what’s the point, if you write a tag #movies and write the same in ‘category’ and ‘type’ as ‘movies’, too? It’s just movies, movies, movies. Is it it all basically the same thing they put three times in a row for some reason?

5. How people decide which custom property to set to a ‘text’ type and which to ‘list’ type? The documentation says the ‘list’ is for putting more than one value to the same property, like tags. But I saw some people use a property named ‘category’ as a ‘list’ type with putting only one value there, while the other people put ‘category’ property as a ‘text’ type. What’s the difference? If I’m to put just one value, does it matter which type I choose (text vs list)? Can both types be used for internal links?

Sorry all these little things are so freaking confusing, I can’t

[Pch]

@netgen

Why people sometimes put one colon ‘:’, and sometimes double colon ‘::‘ ?

The double colon (::) used in the main content of a note is Dataview inline field syntax …
(Although, that could still be coming from other plugins I just don’t know about )

For YAML/Properties, which has noting to do with Dataview and has its own set of rules, AFAIK, a simple colon (:) is indeed used to separate a YAML key from its value…

---
key: value
---  

@netgen

A similar question about ‘{}’. I know that double ‘{{}}’ is used for automatic dates and time, but what is the point of a single ‘{}’ in the frontmatter? For instance: {references}, {rating} etc along with {{date}}.

{{date}} within YAML/Properties could be a template placeholder as in the Template core plugin …
So when you create a note using a template, the date is automatically added by the “template” plugin someone chose and you just don’t need to enter it manually …

But there are other plugins providing “placeholders” which are then automatically replaced by the data one needs/wants …

It all depends on how much you want/need to automate note creations and the workflow that works for you (the plugin you want/need to use, use case, etc…)

@netgen

No matter how much I read other people’s tips and see the screenshots of their vaults, I don’t get how they decide the difference between the ‘tags’, ‘category’, ‘type’ names of the property. It confuses the hell out of me.

Generally speaking, a vault is a personal thing IMHO …
What works for others might just not work for you and you don’t need to follow strictly what others share…

Taking inspiration from others, experimenting with their ideas/workflows is perfectly fine but not everything you see out there might be useful/helpful to you …

There are literally as many ways to use Obsidian as there are Obsidian’s users

The advice I see the most is: “Start small” …
Take the time to familiarize yourself with the core of Obsidian, forget deep shiny customizations, automations, etc… Just take the notes you want/need to take and go from there…

@netgen

How people decide which custom property to set to a ‘text’ type and which to ‘list’ type? The documentation says the ‘list’ is for putting more than one value to the same property, like tags.

tags as list is a bit specific to Obsidian as the key tags is one of 3 default properties Obsidian provide and you can’t change its type…

@netgen

But I saw some people use a property named ‘category’ as a ‘list’ type with putting only one value there, while the other people put ‘category’ property as a ‘text’ type. What’s the difference?

Well, the type you choose for a key is set across the whole vault …
So, if you have a key named category set as a list, each time you use that key in any note it will be set as list…

Now, if one uses the category (list) in the YAML/Properties on a note and just add one value to it, it could just mean that the note belong solely to one category…
Another note though could belong into more than one category … hence the use of list in that case …

I mean, having just one value for list type of key isn’t mutually exclusive with the list type (it’s just a list containing one item)… but you definitively can’t hold more than one value in a text type of key… It’s the full stop limit of that type of key … which some could just prefer (depending on their vault(s) organization/structure, use case, need, etc…) to hold strictly one category (text type this time) for any note in their vault where the key is used…

I can’t speak for the use of tags though (your 1st question) as I don’t really use them …

[netgen]

Thank you! So, do I get it correctly, that ‘list’ type (for properties) is superior in every way to ‘text’ type? And even if you prefer to use one value for a property, you have no particular reason to prefer ‘text’ over ‘list’, because somewhere in the future you can decide to have more than one value for a property, which is allowed for ‘list’, but if you have a ‘text’ you can’t do that. So, again, there’s no point to ever use a ‘text’ type because the ‘list’ is the same but better, right? Is it OK to use a ‘list’ type for providing an internal link (wiki link) as a value to this ‘list’? Or anything else at this point.

[Pch]

@netgen

So, do I get it correctly, that ‘list’ type (for properties) is superior in every way to ‘text’ type?

There’s no “superior” … Just different use cases/needs …

@netgen

because somewhere in the future you can decide to have more than one value for a property, which is allowed for ‘list’, but if you have a ‘text’ you can’t do that.

A vault is not necessarily a “fixed thing” and you don’t have to decide every aspect of it now…
A vault, can grow, evolve… and be refactored as your needs/wishes evolve too, with time …

There’s no right or wrong here …

@netgen

Is it OK to use a ‘list’ type for providing an internal link (wiki link) as a value to this ‘list’?

Yes, both text and list types of key accept wikilinks as value(s)…

There’s only one thing to know about wikilink is that you can’t have a mix of both wikilink and some simple text as a value .

E.g.: You can have this for a text type of key:

--- 
text: "[[Wikilink]]"
--- 

But not:

---
text: "Some text [[Wikilink]]"
--- 

… as in that case, the wikilink won’t be recognize as such and therefore won’t work…

Same goes for list type of key, so you can have:

--- 
list:
  - Some text
  - "[[Wikilink]]"
  - Some other text
--- 

But not:

--- 
list:
  - Some text
  - Some text [[Wikilink]]
  - Some other text
--- 

… for the same reason as for the text type of key, the wikilink won’t be recognize as such…