My Obsidian Setup, Part 8: Simplifying Thought Capture with 'On My Mind'
THE EXTENSION
Exploring topics beyond our day-to-day coverage.
My Obsidian Setup, Part 8: Simplifying Thought Capture with 'On My Mind'
The last time I wrote about appending text to my Dashboard note in Obsidian in November 2021, I shared two distinct methods to do so, both based on shortcuts. The first one relied on the QuickAdd plugin and its ability to insert text into specific sections of notes in Obsidian; QuickAdd doesn’t support passing text to its input field from Shortcuts via, say, a URL scheme, so my shortcut worked by asking you to type some text first, which it then copied to the clipboard so you could paste it into QuickAdd’s UI. An ingenious workaround, but not an elegant one.
The second method was based on Shortcuts’ native Files actions in iOS 15, and it worked by directly inserting text into the Dashboard.md document stored in the Files app (I keep my Obsidian vault in local storage and use the Obsidian Sync service). Over time, I’ve grown to prefer this method of appending text to my Dashboard: it’s faster, I don’t see the QuickAdd interface when Obsidian launches, and, more importantly, I don’t have to tap ‘Paste’ in the QuickAdd input UI.