Obsidian tips and tricks

List of not-so-obvious features and use-cases I discovered using Obsidian.

Graph view

• Search for book-related notes to see how books/highlights are interconnected
  • Filter: tag:#books OR path:"Resources/Book notes"
• Pin local graph to the sidebar
  • Command: Open local graph
  • Drag the tab to any sidebar pane. It becomes a linked pane and changes based on the currently focused note
• Local graph depth setting: the local graph has one more option compared to the regular graph view. Depth=2 shows notes with a distance of 2 from the active note.

Bookmarks

• Bookmarking more than just notes
  • Searches
    • All canvases: file:.canvas
    • Important stuff: tag: #prio
  • Graphs: any preset applied to the graph view

Hotkeys

• Bind Cmd + [ to Navigate back and Cmd + ] to Navigate forward
• Bind Option + Up to Move line up and Option + Down to Move line down to match VSCode’s hotkeys

Links

• Obsidian has a weird bug about internal links when moving the linked file around. Even though most links are created [[In/This/Pretty/Format|Format]], some links end up [[Like/this/without/a/label]]. The following regex finds links like the latter: \[\[([^\]\[\n|:#\\]+\/([\w ]+))\]\] and captures (1) the full path, (2) the last segment
  • I’m using VSCode to periodically fix broken links:
    • Open Replace in Files
    • Use the regex above for the search field
    • Enable the regex and whole word matching options
    • Use this for the replace field: [[$1|$2]]

Dataview

See Dataview playground