Obsidian-Templates for Zettelkasten

A repository containing templates and scripts for #Obsidian to support the #Zettelkasten method for note-taking.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a note-taking and knowledge management app from Shida Li and Erica Xu. It works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files and lets you turn a collection of plain text files into a rich network of linked thought.

More about: https://obsidian.md

Zettelkasten

Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing created by Niklas Luhmann. It has hypertextual features to make a web of thought possible. The difference to other systems is that you create a web of thoughts instead of notes of arbitrary size and form, and emphasize connection, not a collection.

More about: https://www.soenkeahrens.de/en/takesmartnotes

Usage

Copy templates to your Obsidian template folder location to make them available as templates within Obsidian. More about: https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Templates

Or use it as part of the Obsidian-Zettelkasten-Starter-Kit.

Mandatory Obsidian Plugins

• Book Search - Easily creates book notes from Google Books API.
• Calendar - Creates a simple Calendar view for visualizing and navigating between your daily notes.
• Frontmatter Tag Suggest - Autocompletes tags in the YAML frontmatter.
• DataView - Provides a query language for filtering, sorting, and extracting data from Markdown pages.
• Periodic Notes - Expands on the idea of daily notes and introduces weekly and monthly notes.
• Update Time on Edit - Saves the metadata of the file with the time it was updated.
• Wikipedia - Gets the first section of Wikipedia and pastes it into your active note.

Optional Obsidian Plugin

• Banners - Adds banner images to your notes.
• Better Word Count - When you select text, it will count the selected words instead of the whole document.
• Auto Link Title - Fetches the webpage to extract link titles when they're pasted, creating a markdown link with the correct title set.
• Table-to-CSV-Exporter - Exports table data from reading mode into a CSV file.

Basic Template Structure

List of Templates

You first may have a look at my note examples created from these templates: EXAMPLES.

2_Literature + 3_Permanent Notes

• Note Template
• Sketchnote Template
• Question Template

4_Bibliographical Notes

• Book Template -> needs plugin: Book Search
• Expert Template
• Quote Template
• Term Template -> needs plugin: Wikipedia

5_Structure Notes

• Structure Template
• Bullet Journal - Daily Log
• Bullet Journal - Future Log
• Bullet Journal - Monthly Log
• Bullet Journal - Weekly Log
• Meeting Notes Template

6_Project Notes

• Outline E-book Template -> needs plugin: Better Word Count
• Outline Instagram Template
• Outline LinkedIn Template

Special Notes

• Recipe Template
• Tool Template

Template Snippets

• Back Matter Snippet
• Dataview Table Snippet
• Frontmatter Book Snippet
• Frontmatter Snippet
• Table Snippet

How to Use Links

More about: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-to-use-links/

How to Use Tags

More about: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-to-use-tags/

How to Search Notes

More about: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/search-and-retrieve-notes-how-do-you-search-in-zettelkasten/65386

FAQ

• Where can I discuss my own experiences with these templates?
• What are the rules for using Properties with YAML Frontmatter?
• How to use Tags and Nested Tags in Obsidian?
• How can I learn more about Obsidian and Zettelkasten?

Creative Commons License

Obsidian Templates © 2023 by Edmund Gröpl is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Contact

Please leave feedback here in the GitHub discussions or file a new issue if you found a bug or have a feature request. You can reach me via Mastodon too: https://darmstadt.social/@groepl