Obsidian properties in YAML frontmatter (v1.4 - OUT NOW!)

[@nicolevdh]

This release is out for the public now! PLUGINS MENTIONED: Dataview, Templater, Fantasy Calendar, Banners, ExcaliBrain THEME: AnupPuccin - kzbin.info/www/bejne/bV62gKqupb-EhKs

[@gfriend1]

Hmm. I have Insider Catalyst plan, but it says I'm "up to date" with v1.3.7. I guess I just wait…

[@T12321]

@@gfriend1 Open Settings. In the sidebar, select About. Under App, enable Receive insider builds.

[@gfriend1]

@@T12321 Thanks. Didn't realize it was insider only. I'll wait.

[@sunburnfm]

I've been looking high and low for this as everyone is talking about the new properties feature. Now I understand why. Thanks!

[@rileysheehan]

This is HUGE! Any Obsidian power user lives and breathes frontmatter. I love the addition of this suite of features to acknowledge and support that. Thanks for the video!

[@nicolevdh]

I can't agree more!! I've been really excited for this one!!

[@macmeister]

This is fantastic. Thanks for the sneak peek! I often search for you and my Obsidian issue first simply because you're the most thorough and helpful. Keep up the great work!

[@nicolevdh]

Awww, thank you so much for that! Comments like that make my day.

[@GaelyneGasson]

The developers have been doing some amazing things! This one will have so many quality of life changes for me I hesitate to list them all. But no more frontmatter being highlighted when I select 'all' - that's going to save me so much time daily. I write in Obsidian but often need to copy and paste the text elsewhere for submissions, etc. Not having to scroll through my writing each time will be useful. I hope one of the word count plugins I use updates so it no longer includes the frontmatter. That will be another minor annoyance out of my day. I'm so pleased I think I'll go and be an Insider. I won't be trying the 1.4 version just yet, but these folks rock and really deserve the support. Thanks, Nicole - you always explain things so well.

[@wardroef3354]

I had seen the planned Yaml improvements in the Roadmap and I was waiting for it. When my version was updated the first thing I did was looking for a KZbin video from you because you give the best explanation. Thanx for the great video. Keep up the good work. I started with Obsidian 2,5 years ago and it has been amazing what the two developers have done in this timeframe and how many video's you created.

[@balrom]

Finally an amazing addition to the Obsidian core. It would be fantastic if in the future will be implemented a custom navigation tree (in side panels) based on the new property UI.

[@mikejaydavies]

This is amazing: I could probably now re-implement the journal style that I settled on in Notion before I fully moved over to Obsidian

[@nicolevdh]

Awesome! I'm sure Notion was a definite inspiration for this.

[@DeviantRides]

I'm glad I found this video, I was soooo confused trying to learn Obsidian when this properties table kept popping up but none of the tutorial videos had it!

[@msongz]

After trying the Project plugin, I finally understand how beautiful frontmatter is, can't wait to try 1.4!

[@andrewmunro671]

Well within the first 12 minutes of your video, I had purchased catalyst, downloaded 1.4 and started migrating from inline properties to frontmatter. Thanks for the awesome walkthrough and thanks to the developers for making software actually worth spending money on.

[@ccchan1962]

I am just new to Obsidian for a month and this is great. I am looking forward for this release!

[@greenlizard812]

Wow, looks like an awesome update. Thank you Nicole for explaining this very clearly. Great video! Just subscribed for more!

[@moonlightandsunshine6875]

Thank you Nicole! finally something to sort details without a bunch of tags texts that does not relate to the content

[@dk_wala_londa]

You are inredible Nicole, thank you so much for explaining all this so nicely

[@Hive_Studios_Worldwide]

Thanks this really helped

[@santicanog_]

Yey Nicole!!! Lovely stylish hair 💖 Thanks for this update video, as you may know, all your previous videos were an enormous help to setting up my PKM system, although I'm still struggling with setting goals as you described in the video Regular Reviews /w Periodic Notes. All things considered, it is still a work in progress and I would thank you a lifespan for your insights 🌱

[@KrisRipper]

Oh wow, this is amazing! Upgraded to Catalysts for this feature (and glad I did; totally did not understand how the internal links would have worked and saved myself SO MUCH duplicated effort by paying the money today instead of using the couple of weeks before it comes out to "fix" all my YAML). I also love some features of this even more than properties in Notion, particularly the way the values auto-suggest across the vault, so you can much more easily re-use keys instead of doing relational workarounds, and that you can delete properties *specifically for files that don't need them* without it destroying them everywhere! Use case off the bat: I read some books on recommendations from folks, so I want that noted, but a lot of books I pick up randomly...and now I can just delete that field for those book notes where it isn't relevant. Small thing, but simplifies what I'm looking at. Thanks for making such clear, exciting videos!

[@fahm8924]

I appreciate it, Nicole!. I'm really looking forward to this update. :)

[@linkingyourthinking]

Really appreciate the walkthrough!

[@nicolevdh]

Hey Nick! Thank you! Glad you liked it.

[@reeseli2466]

Excellent video. Easy to follow and explained the concepts clearly.

[@marci.abraham]

Wow, this is so good!! Thanks Nicole for sharing the magic!! Can't wait!

[@mageprometheus]

Thanks, Nicole. I love metadata, like YAML and TOML (Tom's Obvious Minimal Language in Rust). What is great about Obsidian becoming strict and having dropdowns of existing keys and values is I won't need to GREP my vault anymore to keep the frontmatter consistent. It's a massive win for the majority who aren't old-school coders. Love and light.

[@keeperoflenneth]

That's so wonderful. Can't wait til we can get this for everybody. Thanks for showing this off! Very hyped.

[@hopesonhigh]

I have a totally unrelated comment, apart from the great content you make, You have such a nice way to speak to your audience. A nice voice and cadence in your speech. I work as a lead QA of voice recordings. Kudos from the UK!

[@elessar60]

Thank you for sharing your knowledge with us. Your videos are really great.

[@douglasdahlia]

Thanks for this. You are always SO Helpful! hugs.

[@papershark]

Thank you so much for this Nicole, you're the best!

[@ashbutsecret3997]

your hair so pretty here Nicole!! very full and vibrant❤

[@maurolimaok]

Here I am again, once more, but NOW I do understand. THANKS, Nicole.

[@nicolevdh]

Happy this time was the charm! :)

[@maurolimaok]

@@nicolevdh "Evolution" baby! 🤣🤣🤣

[@tynanpurdy]

This is wonderful. I just started my vault recently and was having these exact pain points today as I start using properties

[@nicolevdh]

Yay! The team is pretty responsive to issues like that. Glad this came in time for you!

[@tynanpurdy]

Makes the transition from Notion for my knowledge vault that much easier. I suspect some inspiration was taken…

[@Krein42]

Loved this feature in Notion and Tiddly, glad to see it come to Obsidian!

[@nicolevdh]

Oooh, I loved and used TiddlyWiki for a long time too!

[@jarango]

Fantastic new feature. Loving how Obsidian is evolving. Thanks for the clear explanation!

[@nicolevdh]

Hey, Jorge! I think so too! Excited about this one.

[@MatthewFawcett-np1tz]

You earned this - great job.

[@fuguefire1886]

FINALLY! I have been wrangling my frontmatter for too long, can't wait for this to be public!

[@tonyatlas5653]

Very detailed explanation. Thank you!

[@alecclews]

Nicely structured and presented. Easy to understand. Looking forward to trying it (surprised that commercial licensees don't get the early access option).

[@yellowmeeplereads]

I finally joined Catalyst to jump on this! Thanks for the video breakdown. So informative. So it seems it also breaks MetaEdit (same dev as QuickAdd) which lets you use keyboard shortcut to update yaml without needing to scroll up to top of the note. Hope all the plugins will be updated for Properties soon.

[@clair_high]

I recently moved from Evernote to Obsidian and I could never figure out how I wanted to use things like these property fields. Tags was a big one. I have waffled on whether or not I wanted the tags in the frontmatter or inline. Frontmatter tags weren’t clickable and now they are! I am digging it. I wish the display for the properties was a little more compact, but we can probably tweak that with a bit of CSS.

[@OttoVanluchene]

That is another nice thing about properties that it's way easier to edit with CSS since it has proper css classes.

[@gabrielguriencu2411]

Danke!

[@luisfelipeferreiraribeiro2412]

Loved this video Nicole. Thank you 🎉❤

[@TeambitDK]

God damn it Nicole. You're awesome. Thank you for the great insight

[@JimMendenhall]

Dang it, you're a genius, and so is this new feature!

[@zgliu8018]

Hi, thanks for the video. If you are comfortable with regex (which imo is a great tool to learn for refactoring text files in general), you might be able to batch reformat properties with the regex replace plugin.

[@Shuyinz]

I love Obsidian! Can't live without it!

[@charlesbonfante9188]

Thank you. Would love a video that shows a workflow where you use the YAML frontmatter in your notes. Just a walkthrough example. I'm not sure how to start?

[@Ryak1234]

Hi Nicole. You show at 7:28 that a link can now be clickable. Does it actually link in the graph view as well? Before, I used to link to other notes but the graph wouldn't recognize it and link them.

[@gitarremitmarkus8834]

currently i am using frontmatter only for aliases, but i love that you are now able to hide the properties, and edit them in the side pane. I use inline Yaml at the end of my notes and comment them out (e.g. %%MOC:: ) I prefer it that way at the moment, but let´s see where this is going :)

[@arthropodracer]

This is an extremely well-made video. Thank you so much for your clarity and pace. Would you be able to do a tutorial on the Tracker plugin with these updated properties? I'm trying to get my file properties going, including habit tracking in daily notes, but am unable to get Tracker to make visuals.

[@nicolevdh]

Thank you for that! These ones are always difficult to make because I try and time them with the release, so I particularly appreciate that. I did play around with Tracker, but honestly? It was too fiddly for me. I think it needs some work to be a bit more usable. I do have an idea for another solution, though, which I need to try out at some point...

[@JoelRdz]

Can't wait for this update! In your property system what are the differences between "topics", "tags" and "related" properties?

[@vandersteentim]

OMG. This is huge. This was the only thing missing in obsidian. I cannot explain how happy I am. Thanks to the developers

[@vandersteentim]

And thanks to you Nicole!

[@nicolevdh]

Happy to help! I also love this improvement!

[@vandersteentim]

@@nicolevdh I might actually use tags now since they are now popping up while typing!

[@Solstice42]

I did have one issue that I found with legacy notes that had front matter… For some reason I had a blank row before my --- and that blank row prevented the new front matter editor from recognizing the animal code. I'm having to go back and remove the blank line from every single note… The origin root cause was a template for my daily journal that had the extra blank line. Bottom line: no blank rows at the top of each note.

[@anareaty]

It looks amazing! I'm especially excited about properties in sidebar. But may I ask, can you hide these new properties in live preview? Like you could fold the old yaml block? I don't like the idea of them being visible all the time.

[@nicolevdh]

Hiding properties in live preview

[@TristanBailey]

🔥hair and good reasons for using new features

[@SurajKumar-c4g2e]

WOW, this is so much similar to notion which is awesome. Now I can implement some of my older formats from Notion.

[@adhdraw]

Edited: 1.4.2 added a toggle for "show properties in note", nevermind! Thanks for your update videos! original comment: Will every note have > Properties at the top in reading mode? Can you hide that like the YAML previously?

[@christianroth5181]

Really helpful for me. Danke und Grüße aus Berlin (I know, you speak German 🙂).

[@roncanfil]

3:20 is there a way to reuse the options for the "multi select field" so they can be used in other files? Thinking of "Obsidian Types" instead of using a template file to define those values

[@hugocast]

Love how meta that is! 2:00

[@hugocast]

Maybe it's already in the works, but I wish there was a "Tag Wrangler"-like plug-in to rename properties and merge them just like tags. It's a bit embarrassing, but I have a couple dozen notes named published_date and a couple hundred with my preferred "date_published" way. I guess I could fiddle with the Linter plug-in, but I wish there was a native way to do it from within Obsidian. Thanks again for a great video! The amount of value per minute is impressive.

[@a.awm4]

I’ve been using callouts cause they looked neater for ages gonna have to figure out a smart way to reformat 1000 notes but happy about the change.

[@nicolevdh]

I'm sort of in the same boat, except I was using comments! I think I'm just going to leave them as is and just change the templates so that new notes are fixed going forward.

[@extrajava9175]

This is mind blowing! I'm especially hyped that they've finally included support for links in frontmatter. I bought a catalyst license specifically because of this update! No more faffing around with metadata-menu! Though I like metadata-menu, it's a bit of a pain to set up and had a lot of complex features and automations that I really don't need

[@djmtype]

16:12 I think the bigger issue is that Obsidian still doesn't support nested keys which has been possible since yaml's inception.

[@SRG-Learn-Code]

10:35 How do know obsidian that an id field in frontmatter is of numeric type? How does it reflect in the md files?

[@SRG-Learn-Code]

Oh, so you can search all the properties in the all the files, but then, can you have the same name property in different files with different types? Also, most probably this means there is a file in obsidian internals that follow this, so if you move notes to a different vault you loose or potentially brake the types of the notes.

[@lpanebr]

It's like a dream come true!

[@nicolevdh]

Ikr?? I feel the same way!

[@lpanades]

What about to creat a Taxonomy model for your fields? It is the best way to retain consistance about field types, names, uses and constrains.

[@samuelitooooo]

This + the new Importer plugin that supports Notion (and more) = *chef's kiss* I've put a bunch of my database collections back into Notion because it's just easier to keep them consistent. Will definitely try having them in Obsidian again when 1.4 comes out. (Yes, I've been using Obsidian in the meantime for spontaneous notes and other notes that don't need to be in a database.)

[@Lunyaaaa]

This is amazing! I wish I could do Notion-like database views without finicky plugins, but I'll take it. If they do a revamp of tables I can finally drop Notion.

[@thek3nger]

The update made me realize how many typos I made in the frontmatter and my general lack of consistency :D Time to clean it up, I guess. Hello weekend plans!

[@nicolevdh]

IKR? You're definitely not the only one. I wasn't even consistent on casing. More proof that this change was needed!

[@xm_tech]

Thanks for sharing. I love the properties. But I found an issue after updating Obsidian. Most of the YAML metadata did not convert to properties for some reason. After digging much and testing I realized that those YAML metadata did not start right at the first line of the note. Hence they were hidden and only visible in Source Mode. Switching to Live mode didn't show anything. After removing the spaces then only the metadata converted to properties.

[@giannisozo7928]

I am irrationally excited for this update. SQUEEEEEEE!!!

[@Mr4lettres]

Thank you so much Nicole for the discovery, big change are coming, i don’t know what to think about this change, it looks to close from notion for me. I like obsidian for his third part plug’in, it’s like Cooking with secret ingrédients, thanks to you i found so many reciepes, i will wait before using templater, lucky me, I`m just a beginner in the obsidian sandbox ;)

[@KoenBunders]

Thanks! Would love to see integration with Metadata Menu (have specific properties for specific classes)

[@neverendingsummer44]

Really like the new front after it enforce consistency for dates and list type yaml. Plus it looks neater and sleeker. Waiting for the mobile app to be updated as well! ;)

[@toranshaw4029]

I never really got into using YAML, so maybe this will kick start my interest in using it. 🙂 Do you happen to know what version of YAML Obsidian is using? I went onto the official YAML site but there were so many different options to choose frome!

[@nicolevdh]

I'm not entirely sure which version they're using, actually, and it doesn't seem to say that on the help site either... I guess the new UI will help with some of that ambiguity!

[@travisdefluiter]

Thanks for the great video and helpful explanation! Does this change the way we query properties/YAML data via a dataview query? Or do I just follow your last video "How to use the Obsidian Dataview plugin"

[@BrettTheresaBoe]

What's the best way to find inconsistencies in previous notes? use a dataview query? Thanks for the video!!

[@ViianaCodes]

Hi! Fellow KZbinr here! At 12:53 you have a cool edit with math equations on the screen. How did you do it?

[@TheBeeL616]

Did they remove the "time" property type? Cause now I see only 'Date & Time' type

[@fabiano-co]

It should have a `regexp` type of property, this way we could force the consistency of the text types even more whether/when needed.

[@KingRecycle69]

This is great. I like to stick my metadata in a callout so I use :: instead of frontmatter yaml. Maybe I will convert over now with this update.

[@PaoloSantucci]

Yeah, I'm currently doing the same, but I think I'm going to convert to the standard priorities for most of my notes. 😍

[@fredrigaudeau]

I also use this syntax I found easier and more flexible than YAML. Hope I can convert all to Properties and still have the ability to use templates and the QuickAdd plugin.

[@markharris8617]

Very helpful. In Obsidian (MacOS) 1.7.3, Templater code in a template's frontmatter field value throws an error when creating a new note that uses the template. What has changed to cause this and what are the settings to enable use of Templater code in frontmatter?

[@silver_vanguard6025]

This….has basically broken everything😢Spent countless hours developing a system to keep track of my metadata,tags,template file classes,etc using db folders all for nothing because it achieves exactly the same purpose.

[@uryaar7216]

This is great. The lack of autocompletion in front matter made me keep the tags out of it, in order to have consistency. Is there an easy way I can now move the tags of old notes into the front matter as properties?

[@xyzw0]

So basically the property type "List" adds multiple dimensions of tags, if I get it right. I mean it was present before, but now it has the same usability of tags.

[@ServantStatusMinistries]

Well I should have already done this before now but I’m gonna get an insider build. I need this like yesterday!!!!

[@TrevorMayBaseball]

Wonderful video! Quick question, Did anything change with the YAML syntax from before? On updating to 1.4.1, all of my YAML templates are now showing errors and tracker will no longer parse.

[@Aimsport-video]

Fantastic video. Now we need a real schema for structured types, including mandatory field designators. So an entity like a person or client or piece of inventory can have consistent info

[@ivankudinov4153]

Hope they add an ability to add array of .md links in frontmatter, and make it a predefined default properties, like Date, for example

[@CryptoDarktrader]

Hello, I really like your content, and that's why I would like to know what you think of an application called capacities that seems to be a fusion of notion and obsidian. Maybe the change would be interesting or better to stay with obsidian?

[@RolandHesz]

Did you find a way to hide the properties when looking at the notes? It can take up a lot of space and the way I use frontmatter they are not relevant when reading the note.

[@ruiyanshi2837]

Question: How to add multiple internal links in the related property

[@duncan-mcrae]

Frustrating for me was a uuid on a templater template using the uuid plugin. It would simply copy the one from the template not creating a new uuid. You'd have to remove the id for it to get regenerated. I ended up removing this and then using templater to do it with a powershell command.

[@jasonacobb]

Is there a keyboard mechanism to launch the new UI on a new file? I'm used to starting a new file and doing the three dashes to start creating the frontmatter and then get to the content. Right now, I only see a way to right click to add the first property which launches the UI but I'm guessing I'm missing something obvious.

[@bartvandyck1629]

Did you find a way to have a property type "Last modified" and have it show last update date of the file? I used it a lot to identify stale/old notes.

[@danvonpasecky]

Thanks for this very helpful video on properties! Is there a way to identify notes that don't have properties? It would be super nice to be able to filter my graph view to identify any notes that don't currently have any properties, for example.

[@marekkrzysztofiak2583]

this is a day we've been looking forward to for 2,5 years. btw the end of Notion is closer and closer...

[@josephfkennedy5464]

Another great video Nicole. I have a question. Have you tried the plugin DataLoom? And can you do a tutorial for us in the future, Thanks.

[@douglasdahlia]

Once you have v1.4 how do you switch back to "source mode" to see the meta data as it looked before? You do it at the beginning of the video. (update: I found the command in the Cntr+p popup menu. I used the Custom Menu plugin to add this and the other two properties View pages to my right-click menu so I don't need to memorize yet new shortcut keys.) I'm fixing my metadata to work in the new 1.4v and open troublesome notes in an external editor to fix it. I had used many in-line properties in my notes, so I used the old Atom editor "Search in project" to replace my "::" for ":" etc. Atom can do search and replace throughout your vault if the vault is opened in Atom. Thanks again!

[@moonlightandsunshine6875]

looking forward to using this new power with devonthink

[@user-mfsc-2024]

How about an image property used for book, movie poster, CD cover album ?