Example: You have a large note with a part that you want to return to (to explore further, to analyze, to compile into another note – or just because you really liked what you wrote there).
You can highlight it… but highlighting is generally for marking out key points or thesis statements, so it is not completely appropriate for this use case. You can perhaps use a different highlighting color (via plugins).
You can add a todo tag… but this might not be visually distinctive enough if you use tags often. Also these are not really “serious” enough to warrant a #todo.
You can use callouts… but callouts are clunky for this purpose.
I’m curious, what strategy do my fellow obsidian users use?
I use a #FIXME or #TODO tag with an explanatory comment. (Most of my tags are concentrated at the tops of notes, so ones elsewhere stand out.) If the file is a text meant to be published, I just use comments without the tags, because that’s something that has a defined end state that I expect to change before then.
(I linked to Obsidian’s comment syntax but I don’t actually use that because it doesn’t work in other apps. Until recently I used HTML comments because they are widely recognized. But recently I started using JavaScript style comments — // at start of line — because another app I use chose that and I prefer the way it looks feels. I use the Regex Mark plugin to make them look and behave properly in Obsidian.)
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I’m using a similar approach as @CawlinTeffid mentioned, just that I wrap it into this plugin: GitHub - ycnmhd/obsidian-enhanced-annotations
Agree on your thinking …
… so I’m very careful to highlight something really relevant to that part. And using the plugin feature:
Assign custom styles to different types of comments/highlights based on their label (e.g., <!--title: ...--> , <!--todo: ...--> )
Cheers, Marko 
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I don’t use classic highlight formatting, so using CSS I changed the highlight to just turquoise text color (I have the default colors of my interface changed as well).
I also don’t use classic strikethrough formatting, so I changed it to a red text color.
I often have a situation where I need to mark which part of the document, or which file I need to continue from.
In that case I just write “< continue here” or “continue here v”, and formatting with highlight or strikethrough.
If it’s appropriate at the point where I need to continue, I can also make it a header to make it more visible.
I also don’t use the classic italics formatting, and so I replaced it with green text color.
So if I need to make some working note to myself in a document, or some temporary comment, I just write it next to it, and apply my colored formatting.
I might have green checkmarks, red crosses or “wip”, turquoise “continue here” among the text and file links.
Overall it’s a pretty minimalistic approach, it looks visually good, and from a practical point of view such marks are highly visible.
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If the part is mostly the whole note, I use a follow up checkbox property.
However, I suck at getting back to stuff:)
If the part is a quote or sentence or paragraph … some named thing and I keep track of them as a category, I embed a link either in line or below the part … [[quote]] or [[sentence]] or [[paragraph]]
and
I make an “index” note with that name… quote or sentence or paragraph. Then at the bottom of each note is a list of linked mentions and unlinked mentions. This is built in core functionality for all notes, it searchable as well.
For my darlings … “because I really liked what I wrote", I keep them around for re-use by doing the above as well. In recent years I’ve also started sub categorizing darlings depending on why & how & where I’ve used them in the past; noteably where they did not work and reason.
With the bases functionality, you can filter thru the whole lot of methods for all of this.
There is a new plugin called Obsidian Sidebar Highlights the offers a way to search and display all manner of annotations… it is very cool and the developer open to suggestions for what annotation type to fish for. and is responsive in developing and delivering… I had no idea how many different ways we use footnotes in Obsidian:)
Also, let us know what you end up doing.
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Thanks for suggesting that plugin, it looks like it could potentially be useful.
For myself, I probably need a solution that satisfies the conditions:
- easy to use without much thought
- highly visible when examining the note in context
- doesn’t overlap with other strategies (italics, highlighting, etc)
- visually elegant and unobtrusive (not callouts etc)
#Todos don’t really fit my purpose unfortunately. If I was writing about, for instance, scottish folk songs, and a certain lyric seemed odd, I would use the tag for that “This seems odd #todo” and certainly todos would be appropriate in that case.
But when during the act of writing it feels like I’m writing something consequential or important (even if this feeling is purely illusory), I want to capture this somehow, because otherwise I am highly probable to miss it when I scan the note.
Yellow highlighting sort of works depending on the context of the note. But I will have notes where I’m yellow highlighting as a summary…
So personally I am leaning towards adopting colored highlights as the solution. However…I am honestly not a fan of the way colored highlights mess up the markdown. ex: “==” is fine, but “<mark style=background” is very ugly… So in the end I don’t know.
If you are leaning towards ==highlights==, you could take it a step further and try combining bold + highlights. Of course it depends on the person, but that that doesn’t seem like a combination that’s used often. Along the lines of what @untitled mentioned, we can style bold highlights using a CSS snippet (the styling can be changed, of course).
/* Bold + Hightlight -- written as **==check this==** */
span.cm-highlight.cm-strong,
.markdown-rendered :is(mark strong, strong mark),
.markdown-rendered mark:has(> strong) {
color: purple;
background: orange;
font-weight: bold;
padding: 2px 1px;
border-radius: 2px;
}
And it's written as **==check this section==** in your note.
Live Preview | Reading view
**== doesn’t seem like a set of characters that will come up often so are easy to Search for (see Search tab above).
A community plugin like Templater, Wrap with shortcuts, or a text expander could help inserting the characters or wrapping selected text with them.
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For anyone interested, I’m currently using the plugin “keyword highlighter” for solving this little problem.
I reserve the keywords ‘<-’ and ‘( )’ to mark out parts of text.
