Update to this post: I’m now using Obsidian all day every day on my desktop, laptop and mobile devices and I love it very much. I was forced to rename all of my random-id-zettelkaten-filenames with human-readable names in order to do so, but it has been worth it…
That said, I still use a simpler or more descriptive first H1 as a note’s “title” which will be considerably different than the filename. For instance, for a “literature note” about a book:
filename: ref_anarchist-handbook-malice
First H1: # The Anarchist Handbook, Michael Malice (book, essay compilation)
While I can make sense of seeing “ref_anarchist-handbook-malice” appearing in other notes that reference it, or I can do something like [[ref_anarchist-handbook-malice | The Anarchist Handbook]] every single time I want to link to it, it would be much lovelier to merely link to it and have the display text appear as “The Anarchist Handbook, Michael Malice (book, essay compilation)”.
This includes the Graph view.
A syntax suggestion for this: [[note-filename-here | ]] - use the “Display text” syntax but leave the space empty. When a blank display text is detected, use the first H1 in the file as the display text.
edit: One problem with this is if you try to make multiple Zettelkasten notes at the same time. The plugin “Zettelkasten prefixer” is smart enough to change the name. For example creating a note at 2021-08-23 04:40, gives you a file 202108230440, creating another note immediately creates 202108230441. But both are still created at 2021-08-23 04:40, so the template still adds the same alias aliases: ["202108230440"] in the YAML front matter.
People who zettel, can you leave the filename as the title and put the zettelkasten code as a first line or perhaps an alias or metadata in the text?
I like the neatness of titles being filenames. Part of the point of Obsidian is dealing with bare text files. This FR seems like it complicates that structure.
Isn’t that my proposed solution? “Zettelkasten prefixer” plugin creates a file with name YYYYMMDDHHmm, which you can edit. You can designate a template for the note creation. Adding
But as I have warned, if you try to create multiple Zettelkasten notes at the same time/minute, they will share different Zettelkasten ID but the same alias.
For example, you create the 2 notes at 2021-08-23 04:40, the plugin will title them 202108230440 and 202108230441 (auto +1 the ID for uniqueness). But my proposed solution will create the alias to 202108230440 for both notes. Which is wrong.
Basically we can only wait until one of the Zettelkasten plugins implement this correctly. Until then you can use my proposed solution, either by not creating multiple notes at the same time/minute, or by extra manual editing. Or perhaps understanding the Templater plugin.
edit: As mentioned on another thread, just add the seconds. So YYYYMMDDHHmmss and "{{date:YYYYMMDD}}{{time:HHmmss}}" as alias.
The Switcher++ plugin might be able help here. It allows you search by headings contained in the note instead of only filename from the quick switcher, which gets us a step closer.
An enthusiastic +1 for this. After I started using Obsidian, I was surprised to discover this functionality didn’t already exist, especially given the number of users who are creating Zettelkasten in Obsidian.
