Obsidian 1.0

Posted by Amontillado
Nov 23, 2022 at 05:22 PM

Here’s an interesting plugin - longform, which is for writing stuff in sections. Pardon me if this runs a little long. It’s hard to type, keep a train of thought running, and hyperventilate with childlike excitement into a paper bag, all at the same time.

Longform is a little quirky, but not bad.

You start by creating a normal folder in Obsidian. Right click on it and choose “create Longform project”. This will create a subfolder named for your project. You can apparently create as many projects as you want in a normal Obsidian folder.

There is a new Longform button on the upper toolbar. When you click it, you go into a new sidebard for the last Longform project you were in. If you click the name of the project you’ll get a dropdown list of all your Longform projects in the current vault.

There are two kinds of Longform projects. A single file, where Longform tracks your writing progress, or a multi file project, which is what has my attention.

The multi-file Longform sidebar can be reordered with drag and drop, which is great. You can also compile the project into a single Markdown document.

Each file in a Longform project is called a scene. A scene can have sub-scenes, which can in turn have their own sub-scenes. You might consider that acts, chapters, and scenes.

When you drag and drop a file/scene, you only move that one file. If you want to move its children, they have to be individually moved, and proper indentation in the hierarchy is up to you.

You delete a project in the Obsidian folder tree, but there are quirks. If you delete the project you’re currently in, Longform will revive it. You’ll lose the contents of your files, but the empty files will come back.

The rule seems to be don’t delete the project you’re currently in. If you have just one project to delete, delete the parent folder it’s in. Probably a good idea to use a Longform folder for nothing but Longform projects, and it’s probably not a good idea to put a Longform folder inside another Longform folder.

Outlining is where the hyperventilation kicks in for me. I think Longform could serve as a flexible two pane outliner.

You can use links and frontmatter however you want in Longform notes/scenes/whatever you want to call them. Excalibrain will work fine in conjuction with Longform as best I see.

Nice stuff.