I have been using vimwiki for a good number of years and find Obsidian very practical for navigating my 3K markdown files. Though, as a feature request, may I reuse :tag: as tags in Obsidian?
It is good for chaining things up, as :tag1:tag2:tag3:
It does not introduce the # sign, which can confuse Vim when the tag is placed at the beginning of a new line. (By confusing Vim, at least two things can happen: syntax coloring will be off (not as a tag), and the TOC will have this intrusive “tag-entry”).
That would also be a practical use for those that have org-mode data, which uses the same syntax (maybe where vimwiki got it from!).
To take this in a slightly different direction—tagging nomenclature seems to me a very personal thing, and one person’s approach may not make much sense to another. I don’t really understand the use of the hash mark for example, because to me I associate that with syntax used in links, which point to one very specific, unique element. A keyword, or tag, is a clustering mechanism and thus by definition points to any number of elements collectively.
So personally I would find it very difficult to use Obsidian’s tagging features at a logical level, but furthermore I have decades of material using my own personal tagging system, hundreds of thousands of entries, there is no way I’m changing for one program! My approach is idiosyncratic and has a higher level of information density than typical linear-sequence keyword practices, but it has a pattern to it. If tagging were something the user could define a pattern for, in general, then both of our unique tagging approaches would be a possibility in the software.
The customisation field could be something like the following:
Prefix
Delimiter
Suffix
For you it would be a : in each field. For me it would be { and } with the delimiter blank. For a GTD veteran, they might fill in a @ prefix and leave it at that. Someone else might integrate with CSV-based tool output, and want comma-delineated keywords with some kind of bracket to denote the lot.
I could see a valid input being any one field, where if all three are left empty, it reverts to software defaults, and prints the hash mark into the prefix field in ghosted-grey.
I would also love this feature! I have been using vimwiki for a while now, and it was great to see that it was so easy to transfer my vault to obsidian - except for the tags. It would be so nice to be able to use vimwiki and obsidian on the same vault!
I’d also like to see some customisation of tags. The thing that would most help me would be to allow full stops/periods within tags. I use a number of Dewey Decimal-based tags, so #211.6_secularism is not recognised by Obsidian though I need to continue using it in Devonthink etc.