+1. Really valuable idea.
+1
This is a critical feature in order for our team to fully take advantage of the linking and graph capabilities. We trying to adopt Obsidian as an editor for our documentation website which is hosted on a git repo and runs a build process to output a static site.
The challenge is that default HTML looks for an index file in a directory. This forces us to name the primary file within the directory index. As you can imagine, the graph view (while beautiful) is mostly unusable as over 80% of nodes return index.
Additionally, the unlinked mentions become wildly inaccurate as it returns so many instances of unrelated index files.
Given that this is the #2 most requested feature and viewed thread, has this been added to the product roadmap?
2 Likes
+1
All my file names are like:
covid-vaccination-card-2021.md
But my H1 title is ‘prettier’:
COVID Vaccination Card 2021
I would love a function that would create a markdown link automatically with the H1 title as the link display text. This would finally low me to start using Zettelkasten IDs.
1 Like
Hi, I don’t know why you guys need an UID, I think it useless if you only make note within an obsidian vault , but if I want to give my note obsidian url to other app, an UID will be essential to make a unbreakable link.
Here is my solution: have the plugin called “advanced obsidian url”，it can give and generate an link based on UID written in your note’s YAML date.
The plugin can generate an UID for you, or you can generate based on date or sth else.
+1
filenames are for organizing and linking while titles are for humans. I would rather not mix these two.
I’d also find this really helpful 
I’ve been trying to make my mind up about the common question of IDs vs titles as filenames. I currently use the naming convention YYYY-MM-DD-HHMM-hyphenated-title.md and am considering removing the text portion of this to avoid having to change the filename each time I want to change the title of the note. If link auto-complete worked by typing a title as an alternative to filename, this would allow me to connect concepts much more easily.
Having said that, because Obsidian makes it really easy to change links when renaming files, I’ve been trying out using descriptive filenames, which has made the writing experience much smoother because I can just link any [[concept]] as I go, and auto-complete makes this pretty seamless. (This post seems to describe a similar experience.) The problem I keep coming across is that I prefer not to have spaces in filenames (which makes scripting easier) but if I use [[hyphenated-links]], the unlinked mentions feature won’t work 
I think this is probably a separate issue (any thoughts welcome), but being able to search by H1 or title for link autocomplete would get me close to this kind of workflow.
I currently use my notes across mac, windows, iOS and Android 
so would rather avoid using Obsidian-specific or less widely accepted formatting like the [[this-is-a-link|pipe]] for link display. I’ve considered moving to standard markdown links but they don’t really serve the same function when it comes to this kind of workflow and they tend to break my train of thought and having to switch to the preview pane to click them is annoying.
(First post, so do let me know if this is a helpful contribution or better taken elsewhere.)
1 Like
The latest version of the Embedded Note Titles plugin allows you display the front-matter title as a H1 at the top of the page. Though it requires obsidian 0.13.8, which is currently an insider’s release.
Quick Switcher++ might allow you to search these.
I am new to the Obsidian app, but I agree that showing Markdown headers alongside file names could be genuinely helpful. Especially in the Zettelkasten workflows.
Thanks to the former posts I found file-explorer-markdown-titles quite handy, and I modified it a bit to show both MD header (essentially, the first one in the document) aside with filename in the file explorer. And this is a preview (the detected header on the left, while the file name on the right, dimmed & italic).
The plugin is just a straightforward demo now. Since it is just about rendering the title, it will not affect document contents and could work well with other plugins. Open to any kind of comments & suggestions!
Here is the link to this tiny project obsidian-md-title-sidecar. I have not figured out how to upload it to the marketplace, so it could only be downloaded via Github Release and installed manually. I will do it when I got more time😌
5 Likes
Thanks for the plugin. Unfortunately my Obsidian refuses to load the plugin after restarting.
1 Like
Hey! Thank you for the plugin! Is it possible to remove indents in the name if the name of the file is long?
1 Like
Is it possible to make the title display in the search bar? (The search for the file name is displayed)
Are there any promotion on this request?
1 Like
You can use this plugin GitHub - darlal/obsidian-switcher-plus: Enhanced Quick Switcher plugin for Obsidian.md
Just open its search window, type # and then the title. It will only search in the first heading level of notes.
1 Like
Yes, I am actively using it! Great plugin. But there are problems with the search for the contained note
I’m glad to find this great plugin may solve this requirement!!! Snezhig/obsidian-meta-title-filename (github.com)
3 Likes
Yeah!! at last we have the ability to use boring filenames (who said YYYYMMDDHHMM for Zettel IDs?) within our Obsidian graphs and file explorer!!!
Kudos to Snezhig !!! 
+1
using the graph view with zettelkasten notes is challenging without this
Looks like a useful plugin!
It would be nice to have the plugin / Obsidian core check the H1 heading though. I don’t want to create extra YAML front matter if I can avoid it.
Thanks sam for creating this feature request!
I am curious about your suggestion though. If I have proper Zettelkasten IDs then they are already unique right? Can you elaborate please?
For my use-case, I have an existing Zettelkasten that I want to port to Obsidian. My Zettelkasten IDs are of the form YYYY-MM-DD-hhmmss with file names like YYYY-MM-DD-hhmmss.md.
This allows me to easily refer to notes from outside my Zettelkasten system like my TODO list manager, my Bullet Journal etc.
The most difficult part is autocomplete for wikilinks / internal links. Right now I have a simple python autokey (TextExpander like software) script that takes a title as input and spits out:
Note Title [[Zettelkasten ID]]
as output wherever my cursor is at.
I am not sure how big of a system this script can scale to. It would be nice for Obsidian to offer autocomplete wikilinks by searching H1 titles and not just the file names.
It sounds like you would want to convert those to [[Zettelkasten ID|Note Title]].
This would allow you to use the note title as your display text for the link.