Oh man, no joke - you do incredible work with your videos on Obsidian! I’ve watched quite a lot of other videos on it but you somehow manage to get right into the deeper meat of its capabilities without going straight into the weeds. It’s a pretty remarkable skill that not many people have. You are fantastic!
I definitely don't share your use-cases, but this video is still massively inspiring for me to set up templates that work for me personally. Thank you so much for sharing this!
Oh, I'm so glad you still got some use out of it! I was afraid the TTRPG use case in particular would turn people off, but I figured I'd show it anyway because it does showcase what you CAN do with Templater. Thanks for the comment and for watching! :)
@@nicolevdh No way. Even though this particular use case isn’t useful for me (for now), there is still A LOT that I can learn from seeing how you’ve done it, because it is very applicable to many other use cases!
OMG! I had read 2-3 articles and couldn't figure out how to get this to work. I then watched two other videos before coming to your's. The way you explain things clicks with me and I finally got Templater to work. Thank you!! Subscribed!!
Oh, I'm glad! :) I also wondered about that for the longest time, so I wanted to make sure to address it. It's funny, I always think I'm the only one wondering something, but then I get a comment like this and I realize I wasn't! :D
The theme I used in this video was Sanctum (light mode). The theme had an unintended side effect for this video-- Sanctum makes links appear in uppercase even when they're not typed that way. If the templates I showed aren't working for you, please check that they are in LOWERcase. Also: Check that your Templater settings have "Trigger Templater on new file creation" enabled.
I wish I read this before I spent 30+ minutes trying to figure out why I was getting errors -_-;; Regardless, you are super helpful!! Love your videos.
I am already practicing many of your drills shown here! I use Obsidian primarily for book outlining and Bible Study. Loved all the possibilities with the TTRPG set-up! Unfortunately, I don't have all these script skills (I have none, actually!). It would be nice to have a step-by-step series of videos teaching script usage. Much love from Brazil!
Wow, I had no idea how powerful templater is! Thanks for the overview. Your TTRPG set-up is insane! For my humble one session a week it's definitely a bit much for me, but a lot of the suggestions are helpful for other notes. Thank you for sharing!
Ikr?? It's so cool! I can totally get that my setup is too much though. I have a low tolerance for manual tasks so I automated it pretty early on. 225 sessions later and it's definitely worth it. :D
Hey Laura! I'm glad you think that! I was also overwhelmed initially. Let me know if you have any suggestions for future videos too... I want to cover all of those overwhelming topics. :)
IMMEDIATE subscribe! You’re a great teacher. I just started using Obsidian and I love it. But I wanted to try to automate my note templates since I plan to use it a lot, this is so perfect! Your Dataview plug-in video is also really great.
I didn't understand how to use Templater before, but now I'm more confident after watching how you applied it in your worklfow. Thanks again for your help.
Holy moley Nicole, I've only recently picked up Obsidian and started moving all my stuff away from notion (after I couldn't get to my notes when my internet went out). Seeing all the stuff you can do & have already done within Obsidian is amazing, your videos have helped tremendously with learning the ropes (and some advanced cool things that made me light up) Keep up the great work! *goes to watch another Nicole tutorial*
Oh wow, that's great to hear. I'm really glad I could help you and that I didn't overwhelm you! Since you just picked it up, I can imagine all this might be daunting. :) Welcome to the Obsidian community, and thanks so much for the support!
I chose your video on templater because you explain things very well. Thank you for explaining the basic language with one liners for templater. Your video has made this plugin less scary and complicated. Other creators have gone first to the scripting which I have no knowledge of.
Oh my goodness, thank you so much Nicole! I'm running Obsidian on an old computer where Ubuntu was recently installed, and templater never worked for me until just now when I learned about the replacement shortcut! I will FINALLY access a new world from here on! Hahaha thank you again! Your videos ROCK!
Hi Nicole, I've been learning about obsidian for a couple of weeks now and your videos are the best. The way to explain and your pace have no match. Thanks a lot for your teachings. By the way, I was following along with this specific video and the system was not pulling the templates as you explained. After a few hours of researching and trying things, I realized that trying to pull the titles in UPPERCASE was the issue (at least for me). Once I changed the uppercase to lowercase it worked as you described. Again, thanks for taking the time to put up all this fantastic material. Muito Obrigado
Hi Diego! I just added a pinned comment to this video-- the theme I used, Sanctum, makes all links appear to be in uppercase even when they're not. All templates should actually be in lowercase, and that's how I typed them. I've stopped using this theme when demonstrating code! :) Happy you figured it out! Thanks for watching!
This is so helpful!! All of your stuff has been so helpful actually. I love seeing Mork Borj and Knave in among the 5e and Pathfinder games 🙂 My group is just now exploring non-5e ttrpgs.
Yay! Glad you liked it, Johnathan! Yeah, I am pretty new to OSR games but I'm enjoying them just as much! I'm a sucker for theme, so Mörk Borg is an insta-buy for me!
mind blowing. After watching many of your video tutorial about Obsidian especially Dataview, TemplateR with R, etc.... now there is no time for Notion. Welcome home Obsidian......
Thanks! New Obsidian user here - I'm moving from Joplin to Obsidian and was looking for replacement plugins. This pretty much makes it like moving from plain old notepad to moving to Visual Studio, haha
New Obsidian user here. You are absolutely brilliant. What I learned in this video is a game changer for me. Thank you for sharing! Now it's time for me to brush up on my Javascript...
Thank you very much! I used this to create a template for Lab Notes for my lab notebook. Putting in metadata is so important for reproducible research but it's such a drag and this makes it a lot easier! :D
This plugin is gold, thanks! For for those who can write scripts, I recommend the shabegom script tutorial (can be found in the official Templater github page).
I have a suggestion for you, but first. thank you. This is really useful. I have only DM'd one RPG session, and i used obsidian for it. I'm looking forward to trying out some of this to help me. The main thing that I was concerned with was keeping track of NPC information. Descriptions, voice, things that they had said. I created a bunch of NPCs inside obsidian. I used the sound recorder plugin to record a voice sample for each one. I had shortcuts set up so that i could play the voice snippets with a single keystroke and i could also record a voice snippet for a new character on the fly during a game with a subdue keystroke. I found it so much easier to keep track of characters with that audio cue that not only helped me remember the character's voice but also was just a good memory aid to help me remember the character in general. Also i created a bunch of "off the shelf NPCs" with personal information and voice recordings but no specific place in the world. This meant that if i needed a new charterer. Say, a shopkeeper, i could grab one with interesting personal quirks that i probably wouldn't manage to improvise on the spot. As a bonus, the time spent creating these characters was really fun: just making up a bunch of random names and voices and physical descriptions is somehow much more fun and freeing than trying to Invent specific characters to fit specific roles
hi, first off love your video!! top notch!! improvement/update : you mention in your template [[]] as in fact this causes a parsing error. This should be in "lower-case" to work properly. Just wanted to mention this for people facing the same issue
Hi! The title you mention is actually in lowercase, but the theme that I was using always displayed titles in uppercase. I addressed it in the pinned comment just to prevent confusion. :) Glad you liked the video though!
OH MY GOD-what in invaluable resource!! Was just trying to find out why my daily template wouldn't work with templater instructions (hint: `Trigger Templater on new file creation` was missing...)-but learnt soooo much more awesome stuff that you can do with templater. Great video, thanks a lot!
Thanks for sharing your notes/templates, for someone who's essentially when it comes to coding, having examples to work out from makes things a lot easier!
You caught me with D&D. I am getting started with Obsidian as a way to organize quests, at least for now. I think I will use it to take notes during my games too, as I have been terrible at this.
Hi Kristin! Really happy to have helped you rediscover Obsidian! I try to make my videos accessible for everyone. I don't always succeed, but I'm glad I did with you. :) Welcome to the Obsidian community!
Thank you! This video is a blessing. I'm currently developing a world for a illustrated adventure that I want to turn into either a p&c video game or an ttrpg and creating templates for characters, locations and events is just what I needed. I'm curious to see how you create homebrew dnd sessions.
Haha, glad you found that other video. Obsidian is so freaking perfect for TTRPGs or just fantasy worlds in general. It wasn't why I started using Obsidian, but I'd be lying if I said it's not one of my main use cases for it today. :D
@@nicolevdh I've been using obsidian before for random notes and gathering links and remembering things but your videos have giving me some extra ideas on how to use it. Again, thanks!
This is very helpful. I am glad I found your channel. I will have to watch a few more time to practice all the techniques you show. Thanks for the nutrient-dense content. :D
@@nicolevdh Hi Nicole! I was wondering if you have looked at an little app called Hook. It can make markdown links, and they're permanent somehow, perhaps tied to the hash (rather than the filename). I thought it a bit pricey and I tried to write my own, but I couldn't figure it out. Anyway, I was surprised that I could make a new bookmark in Cyberduck and Hook-copy that, and paste it into Obsidian. So when I write out my workflow-recipe in Obsidian, I can click right there and go to the sftp server to do the edit(s).
I also use the templater plugin to run own scripts I wrote in Python or bash (my Javascript skills are not the best). That's another option for me to automate some things and keep the workflow consistent
Cool! I'm actually better in Python than in JavaScript, but with Dataview also accepting JavaScript, I wanted to be consistent since I use them together a lot. But yeah, I love that Obsidian gives us that option!
Hey! Fantasy Calendar is great! I have actually made a few videos about it already: Here's one about my general D&D usage of Obsidian: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-3pt6_srUZ7U.html Here's one where I interviewed Jeremy Valentine, who makes a lot of the TTRPG-related plugins for Obsidian, including Fantasy Calendar: And here's how I use Fantasy Calendar as a content calendar (not related to D&D): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-iU60ItemuDo.html
This was just the video that I needed. I knew of templater and it's capabilities but I was unsettled whether it would be worth the hassle. It seems that it can be straight forward by using js files directly. The inline syntax is horrible when you want to do complex tasks. I would love to have a code block for templater in which you just have to escape for markdown instead of having to escape the markdown to use templater. Thank you for your great work, you've already taught me a lot about Obsidian. :)
Yeah, I agree with the code block comment! Being able to use js directly is the best part of the plugin, and really opens it up in terms of what it can do. Thanks for watching, and I'm glad you're enjoying the videos! :)
Love your videos. Just started fiddling with obsidian so you are very helpfull. I don't seem to get the meeting template to load into a new note like you do.
Hey Nicole! Thank you so much for the video! There is so comparatively little learning material or use cases on Templater; this is really helpful! One thing I want to do but can’t get to work, maybe somebody in the comment section can help: The top headline of my Daily Note template currently looks like this # - but what I would prefer is not the "current date", but that this line gets the date from the file name (which does contain the date, in the format: YYYY-MM-DD, as automatically created by the build-in Obsidian plugin for daily notes). The reason: If I create a past or future Daily Notes, for example for tomorrow, in order to note a task there, then "date.now" naturally draws the date of today, instead of the date of tomorrow. It would be perfect if the command not only gets the date from the title of the created file, but also converts it to the format "dddd, Do MMMM", because it is just nicer to have a written out date as a heading. Does anyone here know - without to research it, I don't want to cause any trouble - what the command should be? Or alternatively, whether this is possible at all, with Templater? (Would motivate me in my further research ;-))
Hey! If I understood your question correctly, the real problem is the headline of your daily note. should do that for you. (Glad you enjoyed the video, btw! Happy it was helpful.)
@@nicolevdh одного только нет в вашем видео и это речь о том, что нужно активировать использование плагина (command -Templater: Replace templates in th active file) после того как новая заметка была создана, а иначе код шаблона так и остается кодом. Может быть у меня неправильные настройки плагина или действительно надо открывать палитру команд и активировать команду или применять вручную сочетание клавиш?
Thank you for making this easy to follow. Q how do you stop obsidian from Inserting a horizontal line when you insert the dashes - - - in the front matter
Thank you, Russell, it's SO nice to hear you say that. I'm very happy to have helped you get into the Obsidian community. Welcome! :) The theme I'm using here is Sanctum, light mode.
Glad you liked it! Which folder thing was that? Moving the note into a folder with the single-line template? Or the button macro that creates a new folder in the TTRPG part?
@@nicolevdh The folder templates, for some reason I thought it meant that it organized folders a certain way with sub-folders, rather than any note placed into it was a certain template by default. Pretty spiffy!
@@trickstur5994 Oh, I see! Right, now that you've mentioned it, it totally makes sense that you would interpret it that way. :) Thanks for the clarification!
I've been following your guides as I start using Obsidian more to help me keep track of my TTRPG games as well. The only part that I keep finding extremely frustrating is the hotkeys on Mac using Option + [single key], which inserts a special character instead. Do you have any workarounds for this? Or did you just have to set all of your hotkeys to something more complex to make it work?
when I type out the three dashes it just bring up the "properties" interface. Also when I write "type" it doesn't turn green like how you have it in yours
Hello! This is amazing! Makes it so easier to understand XD though of all the things discussed here, I really want to know how to automatically increment numbers... Do I need to learn deeper coding to do so? Anyway, this is very inspiring. Your TTRPG templates make me want to use it for writing stories. Still developing that. Thank you for sharing!
Hi Clare! The way that I use to increment numbers IS through using code - JavaScript to be precise. Hmmm, I think there is a way to do it with the Quick Add plugin though? I haven't tried it that way yet, but maybe it's something to explore! Playing TTRPGs has so much overlap with writing stories. You basically ARE telling one big story, except you don't plan out everything and other people write it with you. :) You could absolutely use the same principle for writing as well! I'm really happy this made things easier to understand. Thanks for watching!
Hey Nicole, thanks for the video. Been using espanso since I started with Obsidian but gonna move to templater eventually lol. That's cool how you called dataview api from a templater function. BTW - check list has been working. Now my only problem is that I'm undecided on tags lol. The '#code/linux/low' looks good in core plugin tags but funky in checklist. The '#low #code/linux' looks good in check list but then I have lots of low priorities for all topics lol. Guess Ill have to save a filter or something.
Ah, I get that. Hmmm, maybe you could consider using Dataview for task management instead of/in addition to Checklist? Dataview lets you control so much about what gets displayed and how - it might give you the flexibility you're looking for!
@@nicolevdh Yea, I have been using dataview for a while now thanks. Sometimes I get too caught up in dataviewjs, I'm like you're complicating this just do a simple dataview query lol.
Hi Nicole, love your vids, just started obsidian, just wanna ask how did you create your icons in folders & notes? is this settings to shows up? or plugin?
Thanks its very very useful. I use templater on every day base but I after watching this is learned many new cool things! But I have a one question. In you meetings workflow file name is just meeting title. But what if you have many many meetings with same name. "Project daily" for example...
Nicole, I have been searching high and low on how to create a button that copies note YAML and uses some of those variables in the newly created note. Do you have any of the scripts for your buttons available anywhere? your create sessions does exactly what I have been trying to figure out.
Hi Marco! Unfortunately, that's not exactly what they do. My create session button actually just takes the folder it's in as the world, so it doesn't read the parameters and pass them. I have not had a need to do what you've said, but I'm certain it could be done! Probably the easiest way would be to use a QuickAdd macro to pass information back and forth between "steps"? Good luck!
I am new user and I am struggling to understand how to create templates and I am following along but I am doing something wrong.... haven't grocked it yet
Hey! If you're still stuck, I would recommend using the core plugin Templates instead. I think Templater can be a bit finicky and more complex than most people need.
Hi! How did you get your button to prompt you to enter a file name when you clicked it (11:03)? I've made a button that will make a new note, but I cannot enter a name at the time of creation. Thanks for making such great videos!
While I am using the same syntax introduced here, I get a "template error: template parsing error, aborting. Template syntax error: Unexpected token `.` "
Again, awesome video! Had to watch it a couple times to get the gist of it, but I am a little step closer to somewhat automated notetaking I believe. Even though the last part isn't for me, due to different form of usage and lack of proficiency, it was really interesting to see how far you could take it when needed. Right now (as a non-coder) I'm struggling to figure out how to create my own functions with the given toolset, maybe a video about the functions and how to modify in particular would be helpful. (In my case the tp.file.create_new one) Thank you very much, Cheers ^^
Hi Fynn! Thanks so much for the feedback! It's useful to know you'd like me to dig into creating scripts. And that I didn't completely lose you with the TTRPG stuff. :) What exactly did you want your custom function to do?
@@nicolevdh My intent already "resolved itself" after the classic restart, but I'd really like to see in depth videos of some plugins in general (Templater, Readwise, etc.) or maybe about something like the internal plugins or settings (?). I think it might be interesting because I sense that with many things I scratch on the surface, but, proven by this very video, I can't even fathom the possibilities I might have with a certain function, since the toolbox (code) is like a foreign language to me, I guess. I hope I could explain myself well :)
You are an amazing teacher. I loved your meeting and people template use case. One small problem, when adding people, then ctrl (click link) the note is created in the People folder but the people template is not applied to the note. I 2x checked to ensure that the folder template mapping is in place and enable folder templates enabled. What am I doing wrong?
Hey Deborah! Did you also add a folder template for that particular folder? You'll need to select the folder and click "Add" within the settings for Templater.
I've watched this video over and over and no matter how many times I try and make sure everything is right I can't create a note with the template that I specified in the settings to have on there. It's just blank no matter what I change and even when I have it exactly like in the video.
Hey Nicole, what is your monospace font called? It's gorgeous. EDIT: I just realized there's more than one. I'm thinking specifically of the ones used in your front matter / metadata and in your editor codeblocks (```)
Thank you for your tuto. I have a question, when you "replace templates in the active file" how you go back to see the templater syntax again ? without using undo
Nicole, I have been watching your videos for about a year and implementing very little. I finally learned to spell your name, so I must be getting serious. I joined your Patreon support group, but I am lost looking for code that you mention. How can I find it? I am 75 years old so I am probably the age of your mom, learning to find her essential info in Obsidian (now about 1500 md). Ho ho ho! Links and tags are clearly not enough. I can get as far as Dataview. I looked on Patreon but do not see the pot of gold. Thank you for all your videos. Now I need enogh help to impliment.
Quick question, on the person template, I am getting an error on , I am wondering what is occuring. It seems like it is going hinky for me at the + sign. Any suggestions?
Absolutely love your style of teaching! I noticed in your templates that you have fields for both a tag and an alias. Do you have any plans to cover tags vs. aliases and when/how you use these? I haven’t figured out how to integrate aliases with my notes yet but feel like I see people often say they are game changers!
Hi, I really appreciate that! I'm glad you liked the video. :) Good question about tags and aliases. Tags are like categories, whereas aliases are like nicknames. If you had a note named "Robert Smith", every time you link to that note, you'd have to type his full name into your notes (or select it from the dropdown menu). But if you give him the alias of "Rob", then you just have to type out "Rob" and you'll still link to the full note. You can do this with notes not for people as well. Maybe you have a note on "Personal Knowledge Management", but you want to refer to it as "PKM" instead. PKM would be the alias. Or if you take notes in other languages, maybe "Books" could have the alias "Libros" so that they are the same note and you don't end up creating two different ones. Hope that helps!
