Obsidian - Moving a note breaks the hook link

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Wow, that was a quick response! Don’t you, you know, celebrate the weekend? :wink:

Anyway: I just updated to the latest Hook and examined the “Get Address” for Obsidian (I can read AppleScript; just not write it). That’s some impressive bit of coding! Unfortunately it does not work for me though. It doesn’t actually change the implementation of the 3 modes that were described earlier in the article.

For now I think I want to settle on obsidian:// links, but using URLs that are a bit more stable than the default.

My script is a small improvement (IMHO) over the default (obsidian://) implementation in two ways:

  1. It doesn’t use the clipboard (by not using the default Obsidian URL handler)
  2. It uses just the name of the file in the URL, not the full path. As it happens Obsidian can actually handle that just fine. (So: obsidian://open?vault=a&file=/path/to/name.md becomes obsidian://open?vault=a&file=name).

This obviously doesn’t work if multiple documents in the same vault have the same name. But, I can live with that.

As for the “Hook to New”: I can’t make that work I’m afraid. I would need to know in which vault the file should be created, if any. Because the vault is part of the obsidian:// URL.

I believe there are two ways to really solve this:

  1. Not use Obsidian. I like Obsidian a lot, but I would definitely prefer an app that behaves better on macOS. I haven’t found one yet. I’m guess I’m still waiting for nvUltra to be released… Or for iA Writer to provide support for WikiLinks (basically that’s all I need).
  2. Find a way to use the much more stable hook://file/ links with Obsidian.

One of my professors used to say: “Every problem can be solved with an indirection”. Over the years I’ve learned that to be true.

What I think we need is something like what “Choosy” is for web browsers: a file handler for Markdown files that, when triggered (e.g. from Hook) implements a bit of fairly simple logic:

  • Is the file path inside an existing Obsidian vault?
  • If yes: transform the path to an Obsidian URL and open that.
  • If no: open the file in the preferred Markdown editor (e.g. iA Writer)

If we’d have that, most issues would be fixed, I think… Unfortunately this requires native macOS coding (in Swift) or something, which I do not master at the moment. Otherwise I would do it myself and stick it on GitHub.

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