Why isn't the : character allowed in note titles?

[jacoblinney]

Hello,

I’m a recent convert from Roam Research, and a very large number of my notes (~1k) include the : character in the title. After importing those notes into my Obsidian database, the : character still appears in the title, however I can’t use the : character for new notes.

I took a look at the settings but couldn’t find an option to configure this (artificial?) limitation, is there a way to disable this check?

[jacoblinney]

I’ve also installed the mobile app, and it fails to sync any files with a : in the name. Is the solution to this just to rename the files?

[bdillahu]

Pretty sure it’s because Obsidian uses the note title as the file name of the underlying markdown file and the : character is a path separator on MacOSX, thus an illegal file name character.