My Obsidian setup

publish Related to Obsidian callout cheatsheet.

Semi-related to Obsidian setup at work and Obsidian art project.

File sync

I keep Obsidian files in sync via Google Drive on 2 devices: my PC and my Pixel.

I created a folder on Google Drive called Obsidian Vaults, and placed this vault, Waulter, inside.

On my PC:

• I downloaded the Google Drive sync app. This required some messing around with. I think what I did was make the GDrive folder “available offline” on my PC. Then I opened Obsidian, and pointed it at the special GDrive directory that the sync app had created. Any file I mess with in there gets mirrored instantly to GDrive. Notably, the app is so good that this happens instantly in real-time. I sync my phone, it updates on my computer. Pretty cool.

On my Android:

• I have DriveSync installed and configured to sync my phone’s Waulter directory to GDrive every 2 hours. I originally had it sync “on file change”, but that proved to be glitchy and cause a lot of tedious merge conflicts. DriveSync only lets you sync one folder which is all I need.
  • V-Day was triggered by a SNAFU combination of factors. Overall takeaway: be aware that Google Drive modifies your file names and slices up your vault into tiny .zip files instead of a big .zip.
• Also, disabled battery optimization for the Android app on 2023-09-26; otherwise it’ll force the app to fully restart each time. Hopefully this doesn’t annihilate my battery.
  • Ongoing issue as of 2024-09-13. Still unsure how to fix.

Community Plugins

These need to be installed and configured on both PC and mobile separately.

• Advanced URI by Vinzent
  • Lets me set up Tasker macros on my phone to access today’s journal entry.
  • … But it’s not all sunshine and roses, see the Advanced URI for Tasker section for why
• Templater by SilentVoid
  • Lets me set up a basic note template. I use this for my daily note and for generic notes that just have the H1 at the top.
  • Note: I needed to set up mappings in the plugin settings.
• Files & Links by Obsidian
  • This is a core plugin but worth a mention because I needed to configure where new notes and attachments should go.

Themes

These will probably change as I find ones that work better.

• Sanctum by jdanielmourao
  • Really nice dark theme overall.
  • On mobile, header sizes get a bit messed up because headers are smaller than the text underneath them.
  • Also on mobile, the “edit/view” button is a floating action button right under my thumb. Not my fave.
• Yin and Yang by Chetachi E.
  • Not bad dark theme. I don’t love the color theming but I could theoretically overwrite that.
• Things by Colin Eckert
  • Not bad dark theme. I like the colors a bit more than Yin and Yang but the text size slider is broken on mobile so the text is too small.
• Primary by Cecilia May
  • Atrocious default setup but the sizing on all the headers is perfect. Maybe with some editing this will be perfect.
  • This was the one I ended up using until I switched phones around 2023-10-18. The last commit was October 2022 and this theme doesn’t seem like it’s getting 1.0 compatibility. Sad. Maybe I can check in on it later. https://github.com/ceciliamay/obsidianmd-theme-primary
  • In the meantime I’ve copied the legacy CSS file over.
• Obsidian You by Joschua
  • I don’t love the fonts but this is pretty great.
  • It’s mobile-first which is probably why.
• Claire de Lune
  • Not bad.

Advanced URI for Tasker

I use Tasker to configure little buttons for Obsidian shortcuts.

The setups I have now are:

Search for todos Browse URL: obsidian://search?vault=Waulter&query=todo (This one doesn’t require advanced URI)

Open daily note Browse URL: obsidian://advanced-uri?vault=Waulter&daily=true&heading=wololo&viewmode=source This one was annoying to set up. The &heading=wololo wasn’t necessary until something changed in mid 2022 causing this to happen whenever I’d open my daily note while having the same page open from a previous session:

Not sure what’s going on here; it’s not quite a search UI nor is it a backlinks page (if I had to guess, it looks like Obsidian is performing a search for the current date, 04/21). Weird. Anyways, it turns out Advanced URIs opens all pages like this if you previously had a session opened to the same page. Adding a bogus header like wololo overrides whatever special logic gets triggered for “open the same file that was open in a previous session,” so that’s what I’m doing.

Daily Template

I’ll post an example if anyone reads this far.

Daily journal template

It uses Anchors.

Appendix

If I ever need clickable graphs, mermaid seems really cool