Items

An obsidian plugin that adds a variety of ways to graphically edit metadata, with the aim of improving obsidian for storing and editing data in general.

This hopes to eventually provide the same database-esque functionality and intuitive editing you may be familiar with from productivity or collaborative services such as notion, airtable, trello, etc.

⚠️ This is a work in progress, and there are no releases available yet.

This plugin is a sister project to the items browser extension, a WebExtension implementing the same ideas in a browser, and items service, a node.js web server implementation

Features

• Easily edit & add metadata (such as yaml fields in a markdown note) via the Metadata Pane

Whats an Item?

An item as defined by this plugin is anything that can have data associated with it. In other words, they are akin to your markdown notes, database records, kanban cards with custom fields, json objects, and so on.

They are an abstraction for the purpose of enhancing obsidian with new ways to access, edit, and display your notes.

On a technical level, the following things may be individual items:

• Markdown notes
• JSON and YAML Files

More are planned.

Why?

Nothing quite like this exists yet, to the best of my knowledge. I've tried too many applications and services to count, and while a handful came close, none were suitable for me or what I needed from them.

Obsidian's philosophy and design is very appealing, and it's community is wonderful. Being able to extend obsidian in a way that's suitable for the individual is one of it's goals, and I'm not the only person to want this or similar things (1, 2, 3, etc), so I feel this is worth making.

Credits & Attributions

• I want to commend and thank the incredible plugins Dataview, Templater, Kanban, Metatable, Folder Note Plugin, MetaEdit, and Supercharged Links for building on and expanding how the obsidian community uses metadata

• Inspiration is being taken from many pre-existing things to make this plugin happen:

  • Productivity software
  • Collaborative software
  • Browser bookmarks
  • Reference management software
  • Wikis
  • Password managers
  • Tag editors

• More specifically, I give my thanks to Notion.so, Trello, Airtable, Keepass 2, Google Sheets, tiddlywiki, Zotero, Firefox, and Pinboard for inspiration and providing real world examples of design choices

Ideas & Questions

This section may be moved out of the readme to the repository's discussions forum or wiki in the imminent future

• Goals

  • Things should be designed for and integrated within obsidian itself, and with a user's potential workflows in mind. As opposed to implementing an entire app within a modal or view and causing tension switching back/forth
  • Everything within the plugin should be designed as simple and practical as possible
  • Speed and optimization is of great importance. The plugin should never cause obsidian to have worse performance

• Metadata Pane, renders the currently focused item's metadata as GUI editable fields

  • Would be fully capable of airtable and notion's typed fields, though less static/defined. The types would be parsed from the data itself, and could be easily switched (conversion of data to other structures)
  • Would fully support linking items inside fields, including arrays/"multiple item" fields

• How are items referenced? Ideally, it would be as easy as linking markdown notes and feature the same autocompletion capabilities.

  • If you wanted to have a gallery view for all items with a tag, or 4 specific items without nesting those items directly, how would you go about that?
    • This simply doesn't make sense in some contexts. For example, a csv item. It's much harder to make sense of items originating external locations than if it restricted sub items to the csv's rows or forwent the capabilities to do this entirely
  • Obsidian has settings for how links are auto generated, it should be respected if its possible to link items from markdown notes
  • How would wikilinks vs markdown links be different?
  • Obsidian already disallows * " \ / < > : | ? from markdown note names, It's not a stretch that if csv has a Name column, you could nest items like Item B under Item A via naming it Item A/Item B

• Item Templates, populates your item with a set of user defined fields so you don't have to manually add each, would also support default values

• Dunno how feasible is it to add non-markdown file items to core obsidian features like graph view and search. Right now I'm thinking the more concentrated and integrated into obsidian's normal functionality, rather than creating new panes or windows, the better.

• Pane equivalents for the File Explorer, Search, and Tag Panes

  • Offering too many new panes is not ideal and would be cluttered, functionality should make sense for obsidian instead of building a new app ontop of it

  • Item Explorer Pane

    • Shows all items within your vault in a nested fashion, based upon the File Explorer

    • Would support opening any item with left click or ctrl + left click, including folders

    • Items containing items would shown in collapsible tree view, with nesting working the same way tags do in the Tag Pane with arrows

    • Airtable and notion both have powerful filters and sorts, which are relevant here. You should, for example, be able to use search items by way of filtering them with obsidian's search syntax

    • In the normal File Explorer or elsewhere in obsidian, you would be able to right click a file, folder, note, etc. and open it as an item via context menu

      • Keep in mind for some things, like folders and some file types, using them as an item will create a JSON file. Clicking that in the regular File Explorer would be a method of opening it as an item as well

  • For a tag pane that supports items, I'm going to expose methods and use them within Tag Explorer as optional integration

• A new kind of preview/edit mode or a model dubbed the Item Editor?

  • Would behave similar to viewing a specific card in trello, page in notion, or record in airtable

  • May display items in a variety of graphically editable and interactive "views"

    • These behave similar to notion's blocks, and include things such as a table, kanban board, gallery, list, calendar, timeline, etc

    • A kanban plugin already exists, and I want to interface with it or other plugins that provide similar views instead of reinventing the wheel, though I have no idea how that would work for items which aren't markdown notes

    • Airtable and notion both have powerful filters and sorts

    • Markdown files for example could have metadata graphically editable at the top and their body editable below, but I'm not sure if it the latter part is worth/I don't want to recreate or replace obsidian's regular edit mode. The better way to go about this would be the Metadata Pane, I think.

• Functional equivalence: The idea that items, although they may be stored in very different ways, may interacted with as though they were the same thing. For example, compare a JSON Object such as { "name": "Example", "body": "hello world" } to a markdown note named Example containing hello world

  • Obsidian already does this, since it revolves around markdown notes and not markdown files, omitting things like the .md extension from the name

• Exploring obsidian tag + item linking, inspired by tiddlywiki's behavior and ability to make pages of the same name correspond to tags

Code Of Conduct

This project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in its development, you're expected to abide by its terms. Please report unacceptable behavior to [email protected]