URL Scheme

[mdbraber]

When I’m including an obsidian:// link in an Omnifocus item I’d like it to refer to a relevant item on macOS (no problem) and e.g. iOS (problem, because there’s no handler for obsidian:// links). My workaround right now is using some Shortcuts script that will ‘rewrite’ the link to open a 1writer:// link instead

[ryanjamurphy]

I hear you. In other words, you don’t want to deal with multiple URLs for the same note on iOS vs desktop.

I don’t think we’ll see a solution here until there’s a mobile app available.

(I also highly encourage you to check out the NotePlan 3 beta. )

[infovores]

Dude. How do you collaborate your OB with Devonthink? Does this work well?

[rkaplan]

Just create a Bookmark in Devonthink with the URL as described in the scheme - it works well such as:

[infovores]

Bookmark, yep. It should be worked like this. Perfect example of establishing connections between these two great apps. Thanks for inspiring me.

[xurc]

Curious question: why do you choose this approach over indexing your vault(s) with DEVONthink?

[rkaplan]

Good point of discussion

There are two reasons why I choose to use bookmarks rather than indexing my vault(s):

(1) I use Groups in Devonthink to keep multiple sources of information on a given topic - Word files, PDFs, URL links to websites, links to pertinent Google Docs or Google Sheets, Aeon Timeline files, etc etc. All of these can be viewed while in Devonthink by simply right-clicking and choosing “Open With” for files or simply double-clicking for bookmarks. Now that Obsidian has a URL scheme, I can use Obsidian as another type of information to associate with a group and I can open an Obsidian Vault by simply double-clicking the bookmark while inside Devonthink.

If I were to index Obsidian vaults, this would not work. Obsidian files are Markdown files of course, but it is not possible to designate Obsidian as a recognized MacOs app for opening Markdown files. So if I were to use indexing, I would have to open the Obsidian files some other way outside of Devonthink. That would make the workflow slower and much more inconvenient.

(2) In general, I prefer to avoid indexing with Devonthink whenever possible. There are a variety of “gotcha” situations which can occur especially when trying to copy or duplicate or replicate indexed files. I think long-term the data is more secure either (a) Imported into Devonthink [not possible with Obsidian] or (b) Kept with its native app and then bookmarked with the URL scheme.

[xurc]

Thank you for sharing your opinions, those are valid points indeed.

[d00b]

@d00b

A basic question. Will it be supported on Windows OS?

@ryanjamurphy

URL schemes tend to be universal

Hi @ryanjamurphy

As update/feedback to you: Url scheme works perfectly for me on win10, with Obs 0.8.15 released today.

[xurc]

@xurc

I too am getting excited over the potential synergy with DEVONthink. I’ll try to come up with a way to automatically fill in the URL field of every Obsidian note indexed in DT so that I can easily launch a note in Obsidian from within DEVONthink.

I put together a DEVONthink Smart Rule to automate this process:

Automation in DEVONthink: populate `URL` metadata fields with Obsidian's URL scheme

Incentive I index my Obsidian notes inside DEVONthink (DT) to take advantage of its algorithms to analyze the contents and suggest related documents to me. But when I’m viewing the indexed notes in DT, I often need to open it in Obsidian, which was cumbersome to do manually. After URL schemes were released, I realized I could reduce the friction in my workflow by somehow automatically populating the URL metadata field of the indexed notes with their URL schemes. This way, jumping from DT to Obs…

[Ejipuh]

This would directly bridge the gap between iOS Drafts and my external brain on the computer, and would open up a lot of interesting possibilities for general web linking.

Edit: silly me, I voted for feature that was already added.

[rigmarole]

Hi @Ejipuh what are you saying “+1” to? The URL Scheme feature was added in version 0.8.15. Are you referring to something else specifically?

[Ejipuh]

Thanks for pointing this out–didn’t realize. (Figuring out the time frame of a lot of these posts got confusing for me yesterday.)

I guess I’m more curious as to the current applications of the URL scheme, and its limits.

[ryanjamurphy]

Right now, only obsidian://open: https://publish.obsidian.md/help/Advanced+use/Using+obsidian+URI

If you have other ideas, post them as standalone threads for each one. But be sure to search first in case someone else already got to it, such as: URL Scheme: direct navigation to heading

Edit: @argentum the Keen has put together a meta post for existing requests already: Meta - URL Scheme Actions & Parameters

[oyvind]

It IS in the app. But you have to be a data scientist (slightly aggregated) to be able to find out the ULRs. And they often don’t work. If you have files with spaces in the file names (which is completely valid in MacOS), they often don’t work, even with %20 substitituttion. Obsidian needs a simple “Copy URL” like for example Omnifocus and Evernote has.

Without this, it’s a major road block to integrate other apps with Obsidian.

[ryanjamurphy]

We were chatting on Discord about this, but I don’t know if we concluded the conversation. The app you were using to open the link was double-encoding the %20s, which isn’t Obsidian’s fault. Otherwise Obsidian’s URL scheme conforms to the way every other URL scheme works.

I agree that more abilities to copy the URL to the note would be nice.

[luckman212]

@ryanjamurphy

more abilities to copy the URL to the note would be nice.

This would be awesome.

[JonnyBoy]

Wow. This would be a game changer!

[argentum]

Implemented for current pane in 0.9.7

@Licat

There is now a new command to copy the obsidian:// URI for a file