Obsidian tip: link directly to a header
When I'm working on project-level stuff (which is larger than task-level stuff; see upcoming JDU course) I typically (~always) have a task in Things, serving as the reminder, and notes in Obsidian, because it's a notes app and Things isn't.
I always cross-link the two. When you're in one place, you should make it obvious to yourself that there's relevant stuff in another place; otherwise you have notes over there that you'll forget to look at. Links make it trivial to switch between these two places. They're worth the ~minute it takes to set up.
Deep-linking to an Obsidian header
This didn't work with the native Obsidian URL scheme, but the Advanced URI community plugin [Obsidian|GitHub] by Vinzent does the job.
You need to add a block to the header you want to link to. These don't seem very well documented on the Obsidian site (am I missing something?). But they're simple: just add ^xyzabc to the end of your header (or any paragraph).
It must appear as the last text on the line, and xyzabc can be any string of, it seems, arbitrary length. They can start with a number, which is nice. So I have a subheader within JDex entry 21.41:
### +WP1 Map out the course structure ^2141wp1
– and you can see how natural it is to create a block ID to link to that. The block ID represents the header's location within my system.
Creating the link in Things
I make these 'cross-links' look the same every time, using a dash (i.e. Markdown bullet list) and the unicode ⇄ 'rightwards arrow over leftwards arrow'. Raycast's Search Unicode Symbol, bound to Ctrl+Opt+U, enables me to type that easily.1 (Hopefully it does the same for you Windows users?)
If you use the Advanced URI plugin to Copy URI for current block you'll get the full path to the file:
obsidian://adv-uri?vault=D25%20JDex&filepath=20-29%20Products%2C%20suppliers%2C%20equipment%2C%20processes%2C%20%26%20inventory%2F21%20Products%20%26%20services%20%F0%9F%92%88%2F21.41%20JDU%20-%20Task%20%26%20project%20management%20with%20Things%20%26%20Obsidian.md&block=2141wp1
🤮 Long URLs are ugly.2 I wonder what happens if we just delete the filepath part...
- ⇄ obsidian://adv-uri?vault=D25%20JDex&block=2141wp1
Works. Nice.
Linking back to Things
This is much easier. Right-click the Things task > Share… > Copy Link.3
- ⇄ things:///show?id=HRZD78hvnWd3zW24vruy22
- Tags for this post (that aren't really tags yet but let's just pretend for now):
- Apps/Obsidian
- Apps/Things
- Content/Tips 'n tricks
100% human. 0% AI. Always.
Footnotes
-
Fuck AI for making use of proper typographic symbols some sort of indicator of slop. On a Mac it's trivial to type these symbols, and you should be using them all the time. An en-dash, for example, is just Opt+-; for the em-, also hold Shift. I've used it 20 times a day for the last decade (though I've never liked the em-dash in my own writing – just feels way heavy. I go with space-en-space.).
(Also FWIW I have Ctrl+Opt+I bound to the emoji palette and Ctrl+Opt+C to the clipboard history. I use all 3 many, many times a day.) ↩
-
And Things' Markdown support is a bit lazy in that it 'supports' Markdown, but does nothing with it; that is, a long link is always displayed, and never replaced by the
[text of the link](uri://…). ↩ -
On a Mac, the
…ellipsis is Opt+;. ↩