Starting with a Confession: I started working with Obsidian a year ago as it seemed that the sync from my MBPro to iOS was a real boon. But not only did it not, after all, gel with me, but I found I rarely used the iOS option. I returned to Tinderbox and my trivial but daily uses of it a couple of weeks ago with great relief.
The issue now is moving material from Obsidian back. I have a lot of notes and prose sections that I want to bring into Tinderbox and the Watched Folder option works well. I move the notes from the Watched into other Tinderbox sections and delete from the Obsidian vault. Links are lost, but as I want an active re-incorporation that’s not a huge deal. But is there a friendlier way for me to have the notes from O arrive in the Watched Folder and not have to be reformatted. Many have an obvious place and I’d like simply to drag them to it rather than having to reformat as well. Can the watched folder default formatting be changed?
What do you mean by re-formatted. What to you get vs what you expect. My understanding is Obsidian is a plaintext wiki written in Markdown. If you’re expecting the Markdown to be auto-parsed into rich text, that won’t happen, nor is there a means to do so. However, if you want to read/use your document in Preview mode, then you can set the app to use Markdown for export (think if preview as export but without making any files) and then Markdown heads, bolding , etc will show up.
Building on the above, there is no ‘default’ to change. You see the text of the source note (if Tinderbox can find any). No ‘formatting’ is applied. although some PKM app, particularly, use Markdown is isn’t a text ‘norm’ †. Markdown use pre-supposes a Markdown renderer being run on all text.
†. Nor is Markdown even a consistent standard, with several competing version of Markdown around with differing feature sets and conflicting method of feature implementation…
On reflection (and though I non’t know exactly how) you might be able to use AppleScript to get an Markdown-rendered rich text of your raw Obsidian note and paste that back over the original as the new $Text.
Oh, and I think the Marked 2 app can Markdown render the current Tinderbox note: see. If you want to review notes before moving out of the source Markdown—e.g. you mentioned removing/ignoring Markdown links—this might be a method to review, edit then paste the rendered version back into the note as the ‘cleaned’ $Text for future use.
These sorts of one-off problems are hard to generalise as an acceptable solution as it’s a blend of how many items, expertise with available options and a personal level of what’s too much effort.
Thanks Mark - I also use Bear for occasional notes and dragging a note from Bear (which I thought was Markdown) to a Tinderbox map gives me a note with the title, the text formatting as set for the document (Optima 16 pt) with margins the same as all of the other notes. In fact selecting a number of notes in Bear and dragging them to Tinderbox works as well.
I had been hoping that dragging a note from the Watched Folder of Obsidian notes could do the same (dragging from Obsidian itself does nothing). I’ll look into the Marked option: I used to have a license - but maybe going via Bear (which will import a whole folder from Obsidian) will work too.
New info: the route via Bear (import folder of notes, drag to Tinderbox) worked well; as did dragging directly from a folder of Obsidian .md notes in Finder. So one way or another I think II’ll get things sorted.
Happy to help and thanks for the feedback re Bear. These tasks are pain when you need to do volume and once or very infrequently.
I’ve not used Bear so can’t speak from experience. But, docs Ive found online suggests the files are plain text Markdown.
I’m also reminded I wrote this article on Dropping Text files into Tinderbox a while back. Perhaps ‘.md’ files get a different treatment from ‘.txt.’
Aside: for later readers I’ve tweaked the thread title here as were using Watched Finder folders not Watched Notes.app notes. Not an exercise in pedantry but i figure it might help others later searching on this topic.
Watched folders are chiefly meant for situations where you’re exchanging information between applications for an extended time. That’s why we need to watch: tomorrow, there might be new stuff. Otherwise, import is really all you need.
So, I might simply drag the folder of Obsidian notes from the vault to a Tinderbox document.
is there a friendlier way for me to have the notes from Obsidian arrive in the Watched Folder and not have to be reformatted?
Just to be sure I’m on the same page: you have some .md files made with Obsidian. They import as Markdown text
Yes - dragging bunches of the Obsidian notes worked well, as did notes from Bear - both of which were perfectly styled- except for hash-tag headings, which really is a minor concern for me - requiring no more fiddling from me to fit the existing notes. For some reason I had it in my head that dragging onto a Tinderbox view only worked for one note at a time, hence the original dead-end thought I had about using watched folders.
I should mention, it’s very good to be working fully in Tinderbox again: there’s no functionality loss, everything seems to run smoother, and the interface it seems much less crowded than Obsidian - not quite sure how, but it makes an appreciable difference with the MacBook Pro.
