Use H1 or YAML property "title" instead of or in addition to filename as display name

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.

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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)

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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 !!! :clap: :clap: :clap:

+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.

That’s a neat idea.

I have debated with myself over this, but in the end my requirements for portability stopped me:

  1. I am not sure if the wikilinks alias syntax is portable. Seems like Zettlr doesn’t support them.
  2. I want the source Markdown “look good” / be readable by itself too, in case the software I am using doesn’t have a nice live preview mode (like Obsidian has).

But I am not fully convinced with my own arguments :frowning: I am kind of new to the networked note taking space, and have already had to switch 3 tools because of various deal breaking issues I encountered with them - and hence my emphasis on portability.

@Holden Thanks for the plugin. But why did you disable the Issues tab Pull requests · hodlen/obsidian-md-title-sidecar · GitHub ?

Can it read from the frontmatter title property and not just the first H1? Perhaps an option.

Also I suggest removing the -md from the Github project name. It’s just not conventional.

would also be useful if you’ve just arrived from evernote-land via an abalasko yarle conversion, then the option use the first h1 (which yarle adds to the top of the note and contains the evernote note title) is intuitive.

then presumably the ability to easily identify and edit the physical file name. dunno - maybe hover-show or append the filesystem name to the logical note title in file tree.

i personally like this suggestion because the evernote note titles were long-ish and descriptive and i find long and complex filenames visually offensive. b/c the evernote note titles contained a number of illegal characters wrt allowable windows filenames the yarle conversion also created some ugly filenames, in addition to being long.

but also i had an experience in the past with a different filesystem-based personal knowledge-base setup in which a restore from backup after ssd corruption resulted in plenty of headaches because getting a backup back into a (different) windows filesystem in a restore situation contains some surprises for noobs when the backed-up filesystem paths were long. the fact that you can backup your windows filesystem doesn’t mean you can easily restore it. i’d like to keep my obsidian filenames and paths crisp.

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Much of the functionality described in this thread now works with plugins like Front Matter Title. However, the one missing piece is the ability to have the link text part of a Markdown URL: [Link Text](some-path.md) automatically updated when the title changes.

I am working on a plugin that supports this functionality, see: Title As Link Text plugin. I would appreciate some help testing it if anyone has time.

Please do not run it on your main Vault without a backup yet! I am new to Obsidian plugins (and Typescript) and expect many bugs.

I will submit it to Obsidian Community Plugins once I have tested it a bit more thoroughly.

Let me know what you think.

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yes, plugin Front Matter Title should be in the Core…

but what about Obsidian Publish?
(i got here because now i need a similar plugin for the online published site!)

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rcsaquino/obsidian-auto-filename: Auto Filename is an Obsidian.md plugin that automatically renames files in Obsidian based on the first x characters of the file, saving you time and effort. (github.com)
[[obsidian picgo-plugin-rename-file]]
自动文件名:根据文件内容自动重命名文件:ObsidianMD — Auto Filename: Automatically rename files based on the file content : ObsidianMD (reddit.com)

This discussion falls into product (feature request) and tech (implementation).
I think the discussion is clear that all agree this is a good feature to have.

With the prevalence of meta information with YAML frontmatter and the title property, I think we also have the best-case implementation set.

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What’s the current status on displaying the title from the first H1 heading? An optional feature like this would be quite useful. No I don’t want to write yaml frontmatter and install extra plugins, and I don’t want my titles to be forcibly linked to the file name.

@developers

A similar app called Notable uses a nifty solution of this (other than using YAML for title):

  1. Instead of “:” it uses “꞉” (Wikipedia) in the actual file name, but interprets it inside the app (e.g. in header/title) as a regular colon.
  2. Instead of “?” it uses “ʔ”.
  3. etc

As far as the user is concerned, no character is disallowed, and the OS is happy.

1 Like
  • 1 for using YAML title as the title of the note at the very top. I suppose that’s what title means, a filename should be used for other purposes. If that would be a core option that would be really great. Anyway good job from the team!