Accessing Obsidian Vaults from DT3

You’re welcome.

If Obsidian is your Markdown editor du jour, you could change the association of .md files in the Finder.

You actually can’t do this with Obsidian. It’s a requested feature, but implementation is not as straightforward as it may seem.

Obsidian is actually more a “Vault editor” than a “markdown editor.” An Obsidian vault is a folder of markdown files (and other file types). Vaults are composed of these files, and you can’t have a file that is not part of a vault.

For folks in this thread: I made an Obsidian plugin and DEVONthink toolbar script that together provide a sorta soft integration between the two apps.

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Ryan,

Thanks very much for this. In fact I bookmarked it a few days ago. Now I shall download and experiment with this two scripts.

I came to Obsidian after reading this from Macsparky.

Now I think I may adopt Obsidian for all my note-taking… there is a bug (which seems to have been introduced in Big Sur) in TextEdit (I have used BBEdit since version 6, and Scrivener for longer such docs) whereby deleting a text-selection which includes a heading backwards (‘delete’ key/Cmnd-X) crashes TextEdit.

So I can see Obsidian becoming pretty much my default for simple texts. Because (new to DT) I have decided to import as much as I can into DT, the more seamless the workflow the better.

Appreciated: do you have a ‘Buy me a coffee’ etc link, please, Ryan?

Hah, no, and deliberately so. But it’s the thought that counts, thanks. Glad I could help!

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Truly grateful! Take care… :slight_smile: .

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Use Obsidian and DEVONthink Together! - Effective Remote Work - YouTube is a pretty cool overview of that use-case

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Thanks, @jooz !

hi @ryanjamurphy, thanks for this - quick question, in the script is the name of the obsidian database just it’s path location? or how should i be formatting that? thanks so much this is a huge help.

Just the exact name of your vault. No path or ID needed.

do you know of a way for files under a folder in obsidian to automatically inherit tags when placed under that specific folder? im trying to achieve this with devonthink. if not possible I can get a Mac app that does it

DEVONthink’s Smart Rules should work. For any document in the folder, add the tags you want.

@ryanjmurphy this script isn’t working for me, i think because my documents are in nested folders under the main vault name. Is there anything i should do?

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If the script “isn’t working”, it might actually help in what way it is not working. Do you see an error message? Is simply nothing happening at all? Is there something reported in the logs of Obsidian and/or DT? Do you see white or black smoke coming out of your computer?

Also, @ryanjamurphy said on the web page for this script (see one of the posts above) that issues should be posted in the github repository for the script.

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IIRC, the script just uses the Obsidian URL scheme to open the note by its title. You may have to add in your vault variable, so if you didn’t customize it when you downloaded it, that’s probably the problem. I can’t check at the moment as I’m not at my desk.

i ended up jsut using the json 16 digit code! thanks!

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thank you. i agree i was not clear enough! got it to work anyway.

Question on the usage of the block-links aka embedded blocks in Obsidian which is: [[noteTitle#^blockid]].

Quick experiment shows that unfortunately DT3 does not render them:

I understand that is specific implementation of Obsidian … but still it would be amazing to interworking of these two apps aka DT<>Obsidian combo which many people use.

Are there any ways to make this work and/or plans to support this in DT3? Or maybe I missed it somewhere on the forums and there is hack to make this work.

No such plans right now, I’m afraid.

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Thanks for the feedback! Maybe one day in the future!

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I have read through this thread – maybe my question is answered, but if it is I missed it. But if so, I apologize for the redundancy.

I have just started using Obsidian. I indexed an Obsidian folder in DT3. When in DT3 I click on the item nothing appears in the preview pane. If I double click it takes me to my eBook reader (Calibre) which of course has nothing to do with matter. I guess DT3 does not recognize my Obsidian note as a markdown file. Anybody understand what (probably obvious) mistake I am making?

Harold