My Obsidian Setup, Part 6: Dataview and Cards for Recent Notes and Rich Links
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My Obsidian Setup, Part 6: Dataview and Cards for Recent Notes and Rich Links
I’ve spent a good portion of my holiday break studying and playing around with Dataview. If you’re into Obsidian and its plugin ecosystem, you’ve probably heard of Dataview already and seen the examples of people who use this plugin to create all sorts of custom views in the app. But in case you’re not aware of it, here’s how I would describe it: Dataview lets you visualize notes from your Obsidian vault with tables and lists that support advanced filtering and sorting criteria. These tables are generated by Dataview snippets, which are code blocks that you drop into a note and that turn into a table when you switch to Preview mode in the Obsidian editor. Here’s what’s even more special about Dataview though: it’s based on an incredibly fast query engine that lets you find hundreds of notes with a syntax that supports all sorts of note metadata, whether they are implicit to a note or explicitly declared by you.
What I just typed above is a lot to take in, right? I totally understand, which is why I’ve put off learning about Dataview for a long time, until I had a couple of weeks to tinker and experiment with it. It’s tricky not to get too conceptual and high-level when covering Dataview, so for the next few installments of this series on MacStories Weekly, I’m going to try my best to give you practical examples and guidance on what you can achieve with this plugin.