Quick Capture Note Link to Things 3

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1

Workflow

I am using Things 3 as my goto Task Manager. A common workflow is, to quick capture Todos to Things with a global hotkey. For getting the context in which one captured a task, there is the great Things Helper. With a special hotkey one can e.g. from Safari capture a note with the current URL in the description.

Problem

I want to have the link to an Obsidian Note in the task I capture, when I want to e.g. follow up on something in the note. The Things Helper does not (yet?) support Obsidian.

Workaround

  1. Install KeySmith
  2. Create a shortcut in Obsidian for Copy obsidian url (I use Shift CMD C)
  3. Create the following Keysmith macro: image
  4. which will result in: e5b3bf0625082fb21c02aa3d65c2ffdc35c72d15

Apple Script:

set note_link to the clipboard
tell application "Things3" 
  show quick entry panel with properties ¬
{name:"", notes:note_link}
end tell
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2

Nice!
I’ve made a similar one for Keyboard Maestro that will also fetch note’s title and currently selected line and paragraph:

image
image950×3528 454 KB

3

The hook-get-address is interesting. Where did you find that? It’s not documented in the obsidian help afaics.

4

It is docummented. It’s by the end of the URI help page. It generates a markdown link that serves as input for my RegEx match that follows.

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5

Thank you for this. This made Obsidian even more useful in my workflows.

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6

Hi :smile:
The KM macro looks good and just what I need…however, trying to reproduce it exposes my severe lack of KM skills :frowning:
Any chance of uploading/sharing the KM macro file please?
Thanks in advance.

7

Sure, here’s a dropbox link to the exported macro.

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8

Thank you :grinning:

9

Do I have to disable things helper, bc if i try to capture the hotkey for keysmith the helper pops up?

10

@ocarid: that did not happen for me. If it does, then that might be a workaround

11

@dabai thank you for your quick response - I solved it by:

  1. assigning different keybindings to the things helper
  2. building the keysmith script
  3. assigning things helper back to the default keybindings
12

Thanks for this. This can possibly be used with Obsidian Advance URI plugin to fetch link to the selected text within the note instead of just the note link.
There may be a way to have KBM shortcut generate a block id and create a URI link in Things 3 that takes straight to that block.

13

Works perfectly, Thanks

14

@dabai There is now the Obsidian Things Link plugin that creates a deep link between the created Things task (or Project) and Obsidian. It creates links on both ends.

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