Quick capture and append to daily note using Applescript on OS X

Plugins ideas
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I’m a big user of daily notes, they are my general purpose catch-all for most of my unstructured thoughts - I am looking for ways to reduce the time and friction going from ‘thought’ to ‘capture’.

I am looking to see if anyone has built a quick capture script using applescript for OS X. I’m imagining something like:

  1. I trigger an OS hotkey
  2. A text input dialog appears with dictation turned on
  3. I finish saying my thought (or typing) and hit submit
  4. It is appended to the end of today’s daily note as a bullet markdown.

I’ve seen that @edgarasben created something similar for iOS using shortcuts, but I’m looking for something to work on my macbook.

There is also this thread which outlines a similar request, but Ideally I would like to explore an option that doesn’t rely on Alfred to start with.

Does something like this already exist in the community? I’ve browsed this forum but couldn’t find something exactly like this.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!

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Do you have Drafts for Mac or iOS? Drafts has a dictation feature or you can type. you can then create a action to append to your daily notes. I use this on my iPhone when I am out and about. I can dictate a note or type it, then tap the action and it appends to my daily note. I keep my Vault in dropbox. on the Mac version you can setup a hotkey to activate the dictation. Drafts does support Markdown so it does integrate well with Obsidian as well as other apps.

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@devin Thank you for the mention.

I think it’s very interesting what you are exploring here, I would love to achieve the same thing and I believe it’s possible to do so with Applescript.

Besides the text input dialog, I would like this implemented in a way so I can select any text on any browser and the script would append the text to today’s notes in Obsidian. That would be amazing.

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I made something like this using keyboard maestro.

It’s based off of this: MACRO: Choose File From Folder List With Incremental-Search and AutoComplete - Macro Library - Keyboard Maestro Discourse

And receives the input from a simple AppleScript prompt (not dictated tho)

Once the correct file is picked, since “open in obsidian” doesn’t seem to work, it activates obsidian, brings up the quick switcher, searches the exact title, and then prompts to append the note.

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One of the benefits of Obsidian is that all the files are just normal text files, so you don’t even need to go through the hassle of going into Obsidian. The script can append the simple text file.