Plugin: Store

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1

hello. i’ve been using obsidian for like 3 years now. i use a single vault for everything, because it’s more comfortable for me: you just open obsidian and use it.

but with this approach you need to make a proper structure, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to find anything after that. more complex structure means more overhead, because you need to follow it afterwards.

for my usage i had around 4-5 levels of nested folders, many tags, templater/quickadd setups, dataview/kanban overviews and so on.

though it worked great, you cannot make a perfect structure on the first or even second try. probably at some point you need to rethink it. in my case, each refactor was a nightmare.

instead of helping me at hard times, because i shot myself in the foot with the structure, it was actually easier for me to avoid the usage of obsidian. the workflow became too complex to handle.

my solution to the problem is to remove the folders. and the way to achieve this was making my own plugin.

the documentation what the plugin does and why it’s this way is located in the repository on github.

to keep it briefly here, the plugin wants that you have all your notes in a single folder. to avoid filename conflicts, they are all UUIDs. of course, this comes with a lot of drawbacks (but also benefits), and the plugin tries to solve them.

i would be very grateful if you can give me some feedback about the plugin. likes, dislikes, documentation, translation, UX, features and so on. even if you don’t plan to use it, you can give the concept/usage documentation a glance and write what you think overall.

if you are going to use it, it’s not available in the community plugins yet. the settings format is not finalized, as well as the UX. before trying out, make sure to create a backup of your vault.

a few additional notes:

  • plugin has an “integration” for excalidraw and kanban. though they are markdown files, they should be ignored for this plugin. you can add additional excludes in the plugin settings (as in the data.json directly), it’s just not in the settings tab yet.

  • russian documentation for the usage is in the works.

  • some features like progress notice of storing and confirmation modal on the first use are already on my list.

2

For me, UUID filenames would be too big a problem. They make the Quick Switcher — one of the fastest ways to open notes —unusable. And they make the notes harder to work with outside of Obsidian. Filenames are too important to me to make them unreadable.

If we keep everything in one folder for simplicity, then we need to resolve filename conflicts. While Obsidian can resolve this automatically, the resulting filenames with a number suffix don’t look good. (obsidian-store/docs/en.md at main · shimeoki/obsidian-store)

How were you getting number suffixes? I think Obsidian only does that if you drag a note into a folder, or perhaps if you create one by some automated means. If you directly create a note, Obsidian will warn you if the name already exists in the same folder.

3

that’s not true. quick switcher page above says,

Type to search for a note by name or alias.

aliases are probably the main reason this plugin exists in the first place. in the aliases section of the documentation i wrote this:

With the Store approach they are almost mandatory to use, because they work for both links and quick switcher.

maybe i should have made this section a bit more descriptive. aliases are an amazing feature and very useful outside of my plugin as well.

the issue with the note filenames outside of obsidian is also in the documentation and is a sacrifice to use this approach. if you use notes outside of obsidian a lot or filenames are just important for you, then you should skip this plugin.

as for how i was getting number suffixes - it’s as you have said. if you rename a folder via a move, then you get a suffix, but if you rename (or give a name to a note) manually, then obsidian just prevents the rename.

and i totally forgot about the latter in my documentation. the suffix part is mostly a visual thing (but still can change the names unexpectedly), but the “preventing” part frustrated me many times while keeping my previous vault structure.

i have some difficult projects in my vault that span multiple days or even weeks to complete them. i kept a todo/ folder for all notes with the tasks for the project. each task is a self-contained note with properties like “done”, “deadline”, etc. and the description of the task.

the problem was that i wanted to sort the tasks in the folder, so i chose task filenames to be dates (of creation). and i shot myself in the foot, because YYYY-MM-DD naming conflicted with each other every time i made a second task in the same day. i needed to make suffixes, and name format became like YYYY-MM-DD-X.

of course, looking back, i should have made "archived notes” a thing back then and only keep “active” tasks in the folder to use meaningful names. but this is only one situation of many, and overall i just wanted to create a workflow that doesn’t care about the note name, even if it’s a duplicate.

4

Ah, you’re right, my error, sorry. I don’t use aliases much and missed that part of the docs.

A different place that I think could use more info is the README — I had to go to the docs to learn even the most basic details about the plugin.

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5

noted. thanks.