Attached is my Obsidian folder watching in Tinderbox. I am trying to create a Zettelkasten. In this process, I have several folders as can be seen in the attached TBX file. The nested folder notes are not coming in through the watch folder process. An example of this is the folder “Literature Notes”. I have created a sub-folder in this folder named “testforTBX” folder. It contains only one note titled “newnote testing nested folder.md”. This note didnt appear in the attached TBX folder.
I am attaching both the TBX file and that particular note as a zip file, if that matters.
Please let me know if anything else need to clarified/uploaded.
Are any of the folks here (or who come across this) working back and forth with Tinderbox and Obsidian? I’m interested in doing so and trying to wrap my head around how to think through a process. I like both programs and they factor in different ways into my workflow. Right now I’m using Tinderbox for a specific project (a book proposal/writing) and for working visually and Obsidian is more a collection of all the things I’m working on and where I’m tending to start with texts and backlinks. I’d like to be able to move fluidly back and forth and am not sure of the best way to have them work with each other – I have things in Tinderbox I might want to send to Obsidian and things in Obsidian I might want to work with in Tinderbox without breaking the original markdown files.
I would be very interested in this same project. My use case:
Utilize TBX for adding attributes and metadata and arrange and order notes according to various purposes - but NOT actually messing with the text itself (though why not?).
I have an extensive “zettelkasten” of interlinked notes of varying depths and relationships. TBX is superior in that I could “type” and create “pathways” in the relationships between notes with far more precision than in Obsidian.
Currently I just pull sub-sets into TBX for analysis and then transfer the intellectual output back to Obsidian in the form of higher order notes.
I’m in the same boat. I am cautiously optimistic, because I’ve only been using Tinderbox for 4 days now, but to me it seems to actually blow Obsidian out of the water on all fronts except the community plugins. However, if one thinks of the action scripts as a sort of community plugins, then even in that respect, Tinderbox blows Obsidian out the water.
Exploring a similar, but also different tack. I find I’m doing more of my gathering and cooking in Obsidian. Tinderbox is always going to be the mothership for both my knowledge-base and for necessary functions like analysis, output (sometimes), archival/bibliothecal, and an impossibly (in the best way) deep recall/editorial architecture… some good ideas are never really “done”, and Tbx makes generous allowances for the value of your ideas.
I find Obsidian’s strengths lie in:
universal app, with iCloud Sync
to dos and tasks, snippets that are gathered on the fly, accomplished, and then ejected
for sneaky little ideas you want around your periphery for a bit
beautiful independent file system that accepts external editing of the component.md files
If you don’t require Obsidian’s hectic tech and gazillion shortcuts, you might also examine Apple Notes - the new version looks pretty incredible, and comes with all the Apple ecosphere underlying magic - and ingest into Tbx via Watched Folders. I might dig into that workflow further, time permitting.
Importing Obsidian files. I’ve tried using watch and copy and paste - it always imports with the .md extension. Is this related to the latest version or am I missing a trick here.
Notwithstanding the md extension, the file itself should be a marked up text file. Unless heavy with markup, it should be trivial to copy the contents to a fresh Note (if you want to - personally, I only ever bring .md content in via Watch Folder, so copying over is my only way). Alternatively, you could read the file using a Markdown template to render it in Tinderbox.
Yes I realise it is just a marked up txt file, and I do use the watch folder as I want it to update when new Obsidian notes are created. However, the .md extension makes organising the outline view problematic and creating fresh notes is too time consuming. Not something I want to get into. To complicate matters, my file names are numbers - based on Nicholas Luhmans work - so with the .md extension, 6000.1.md comes before 6000.md, which of course creates problems.
For a number of reasons I use Obsidian to capture and initially organise my notes. For that task it fits my workflow better than TBX. But, when I want to use those notes to create output, Obsidian doesn’t offer much. This is where TBX reigns supreme. So, I want a watch folder that keeps updating with new Obisidian notes, which I then work on in TBX.
It does; my own Obsidian>Tbx usage scenario is similar.
Not to jostle you further down a pathway that may not work for you (for the stated and other reasons); however, a bit of action code with regex ought to allow you to completely automate the process of copying content from Watched Folder to a fresh Tbx Note, as well as renaming tasks per your guidelines. You could even have Tbx automatically re-file incoming Notes based on cues. It can get terrifying.
I was hoping, given Mark’s comment “Watched files with the .md extension should import with titles omitting the extension.” that I could get away without having to do to much action coding - not my strength and what drove me to Obsidian in the first place. However, I realise that to make TBX work at the level I want to use it, I am just going to have to get much better at it.
Maybe not July 2 — we’ve got Eric Bönisch-Voklmann from DEVONthink and this might take a little time. And I think the upcoming 9.6 may make this simpler.
But it’s not that hard to get rid of the unwanted file extension. You could do it with a stamp:
$Name=$Name.replace(".md","");
You could do it with an agent that looks for note names that end with “.md” and lops off the last three characters:
$Name=$Name.substr(0,-3);
You could let the OnAdd of your watch folder do this automatically.