For those still missing an editor similar to Obsidian’s native properties editor but with support for multi-level (nested) YAML, I might have some good news. I finally managed to port my nested properties editor into an Obsidian plugin. The editor is currently part of my electronic lab notebook plugin, which also includes a templating infrastructure for complex nested metadata. Currently, the metadata templates cannot be modified in the settings, but they are based on a simple JSON object. So future versions of the plugin may support custom templates which can be loaded from a JSON file. So although the current focus is on providing a templating infrastructure for an electronic lab notebook, it may be adapted to other applications. The nested properties editor included in the plugin is fairly stable, but doesn’t yet fully support complex nested arrays (lists of lists).
The nested properties editor is currently available as a side panel view and a custom code block view, which supports a couple of options such as loading only a certain key of a nested frontmatter object, and which can be embedded anywhere in your notes.
There are other neat features like an image viewer which lets you cycle through images in a folder and can be embedded in your notes, a circular, self-updating progress “bar” that shows the percentage of tasks marked as completed in your note, and an interactive periodic table of elements.
Other parts of the plugin aren’t as stable yet, so I would qualify the plugin still as experimental. If you are curious enough, you can download a first version of the plugin from GitHub. If you want to try it out, I would recommend using the testing vault in the repository, which also contains a couple of examples of what is possible with the plugin.
7 Likes