Starting out with The Archive and Obsidian
Hi, all
I’m just trying to integrate my methods of working using the above tools. I’ve been using The Archive since its inception and am delighted with it. However, I really would like a way of ‘visualizing’ clusters of notes as part of project planning, and Obsidian promises the possibility of this. But (and its’s a big ‘but’) - I have no idea how to get started with this. I open my zettelkasten as a vault from DropBox, but only a fraction of it appears. Is there a step-by-step guide, introduction or ‘how to’ out there for idiots like me? I’ve done some searches and watched a few videos but am really none the wiser.
Very grateful for any advice.
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I can't give you the step by step. But it might have something to do with the file endings. At least, this was it for me, when I tried Obsidian to open my Zettelkasten.
I am a Zettler
Thanks, Sascha. I’ll investigate that avenue.
Obsidian works with .md files by default (markdown). You can enable the option to show other filetypes in your vault view using:
Settings - Files and links - Links - Show all file types
This will show every kind of file in the vault file list. Obsidian can link to them all, but not necessarily open them, that just depends on the file type. I know from my own experience that Obsidian can open PDF's, various image formats, and embed and play MP3's and MP4's.
Obsidian doesn't recognize
.txtfiles as notes. It evaluates only files ending with.md.If your notes' filenames end with
.txt, you have to rename them to.md.You might have to update your settings in The Archive. Default Note Extension should be
.md. Plain Text File Extensions should includemd.Don't be disappointed, if the visualization doesn't work as expected, even when you can see all your files. Obsidian is a powerful tool. But it requires a lot of training and practice to make it work for you.
@jemscott You may enjoy external visualization tools as well that could work without much tweaking (but require different kind of prowesses)
zkviz https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/comment/3606
my own Ruby script https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/699/graphviz-ruby-script-to-visualize-zettel-network-starting-at-a-particular-note
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
Fantastically helpful as always, folks. Thank you. I’ll have a look at these suggestions and report back.
So I've converted some example .txt files to .md and then opened them in Obsidian. However, the links don't work. Every time I click a link, Obsidian creates a new note. I've tried the following formats:
Title of note [[ID]]
[[Title of note ID]]
[[ID | Title of note]]
What's the format that Obsidian will recognise and act on, rather than creating a new note?
When you click on a wikilink, Obsidian looks for a file that has exactly the name provided in the link. If there's no such file, it will create a new one.
If there is a file named
Hello world 123456.md, then the link[[Hello world 123456]]should open the existing file. However,Hello world [[123456]]and[[123456|Hello world]]will create a new file123456.md.The Archive doesn't really link files, it uses "links as search". See also:
Thanks, @harr - so effectively, I’d need to change the link syntax across my entire Archive to get it to work with Obsidian?
Yes. Obsidian supports only standard Markdown links and increasingly popular wikilinks.