Properties: preserve `tags: [ foo, bar ]` instead of converting to list?

Feature requests
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1

Use case or problem

Is there any way the inline tags: [ foo, bar, baz ] format could be preserved when editing tags with the new Properties editor?

I have some notes with 10+ tags. The way it converts them to the list format with 1 tag per line means that in editor mode, the actual note content ends up getting pushed way down the page.

Hoping somehow in the future the existing format could be honored/preserved.

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+1 from me

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+1 from me

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+1 from me

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+1 from me as well. I also prefer tags in [].

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Absolutely, this breaks my shell scripts which depend on my formatting not being changed. Also, I feel like Obsidian should not reformat any part of my notes without asking me. As it is, it does and I don’t like it. :slight_smile:

Cheers

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+1 from me. More generally, I think it would be good if there were options specifying how YAML should be formatted “behind” the properties UI. Here I’m also thinking about multi-line fields (e.g. abstracts), which I prefer to format with a pipe character followed by indented paragraph, which I find much more readable than just enclosing the paragraph in quotes.

image

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+1 from me
Obsidian should not modify my document content, and this makes it difficult for me to perform global regex operations.

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I’d like to second that. In order for Properties to work Obsidian has to do some kind of formatting, there’s no way around it.

I guess what this FR requests is a set of settings to configure how each field type should be configured. E.g. I prefer having my aliases in json-style lists and @oldjove prefers his strings without quotes. So there could be settings that control how strings and lists are formatted.

Although if Properties have a great UI/UX I probably won’t be looking at plain YAML much, so honestly I’m not sure if this FR is worth what could turn out to be a huge PITA for devs if there’s no existing formatter that allows such customization.

For scripting purposes, some formatting could be an issue for environments where YAML parser is simply not available, so that’s a tradeoff.

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+1 and for some reason I’m seeing this new behavior in version 1.3.7 non-beta. I liked the more compressed single line formatting.

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This behavior is not new to 1.4. It has been happening since last year when we introduced the API and connected library for plugins to read/write YAML. You are noticing more because you interact with this API every time you use the properties UI.

It is a non-goal of properties update to preserve exactly what you wrote, what matters is that according to YAML the semantic (meaning) is preserved (If it isn’t, open a BR).

Instead of regex, to interact with YAML, you should use a YAML parser.

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hi @WhiteNoise

Can you explain how to use the YAML Parser?

My Business case is the following

  • the Tags Format allow we to update the Devonthink tags when I modify it in Obsidian.
  • I had set my Obsidian Tags this specific format. For that I used a rule the Plug in of Linter:
  • YAML Test section in :“single string comma delimited”
    If they are set in multiline like the new obsidian version , DVTK not recognize it as a YAML section. It’s means that my workflow is broken.

Because we are many user of Linter or YAML management like in this post before this new release how we can proceed?

Thanks

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I’m having a similar problem with YAML blocks formatted like your abstract example. When I modify a different property, Obsidian erases the entire contents of my abstract, replacing it with "". I understand changing formatting for semantic reasons, but completely erasing data is an entirely different level that is NOT OK.

It’s a really good thing that I had my vault under version control before updating to v1.4; otherwise I might have had no idea this was happening.

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+1 from me