#1

Hello Obsidian community,

I would like to reference a file located within my local obsidian vault in an external file (like a Google doc) for quick lookup.

I expected “Obsidian URLs” to do the trick, but I find no easy way in Obsidian to retrieve a file from this URL (pasting it in the search tab yields no result).

How are Obsidian URL files supposed to be used ? Is there another option that could do the trick ?

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#2

What do you mean by “paste it in the search tab”? What search tab are you referring to?

The URL is a link that can open a vault or a specific file. But you have to click it in an app that supports those kinds of app URLs.

If you are in an app that supports the URL, then clicking on the URL link will trigger Obsidian to open the note you point to.

I am quite certain Google Docs does not support this kind of link. Strangely, neither does Obsidian as a bare text link. In Obsidian, you would have to format it as a link, like this:

[Your Link Text](obsidian://open?vault=TestVault&file=Test%20Note)

#3

What I meant is to use the search bar in obisidian to find the file directly by pasting the URL (which doesnt work)

What you suggest seems the best solution for now :+1:

I would expect the search bar to recognise obsidian URLs (starts with ‘obsidian://’) and yield that file. Do other people share this expectation ? (in which case I’ll submit a feature request)

#4

The obsidian search bar searches for content of your text files, including file names. What would be the added value of a feature that can search for obsidian URLs? :thinking:

#5

Sometimes it is nice to access a file via a link (like you can do on Notion for example or any web-based application). You copy the link, paste it anywhere, then can retrieve the file by using that link.

You could search by name, but you should not forget the “commas”, and there can be duplicated file names in your vault.

This isn’t a big deal, but could add a little more convenience I believe

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#6

I didn’t share that expectation. But the more I think about it, the more it seems like a neat idea. Or perhaps a “Jump to Link” modal plugin/command or something. So if you had a URL, you could have a quick place to trigger it somehow, without having to add it to a note.

As for finding duplicate names, I don’t agree that this sounds like a useful use case for URLs. If you have multiple notes with the same name, the URL will only find one. (As far as I can tell it will match the shortest path match first. And then any deeper in the hierarchy will need to have the path encoded in the name.) So using the URL as a method of finding duplicate notes doesn’t seem like a good solution.

A simple name search will be better suited to that.

file:YourName

#7

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