Obsidian Bases

On a side note, the docs don't seem to mention if this is possible but does anyone know how to use a template or set a default frontmatter (like created date) when using the "new" button in a Base?

The solution I used before bases is eh... pretty hacky.

```meta-bind-js-view {memory^inputText} as title --- const toShow = context.bound.title || "TKTK"; const str = `\`\`\`meta-bind-button label: New Project Idea - ${toShow} icon: "" hidden: false class: "" tooltip: "" id: "" style: primary actions: - type: templaterCreateNote templateFile: Templates/Project.md folderPath: Project Ideas fileName: ${toShow} openNote: true \`\`\``; return engine.markdown.create(str) ```

It's not you, it's the productivity influencers making you think it's "supposed to be" more than what it is: a nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files.

I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing).

Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative links and weird plugins that break the premise of having universal markdown files. Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.

There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them.

Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.

But don't install Obsidian and then spend hours adding addons. You'll get overwhelmed, confused and wondering why all the Influenzers are saying it's CHANGED THEIR LIFE. It hasn't.

I was kinda similar when I first started using it. I watched heaps of videos and had so many plugins installed but I was never really sure if I was doing it "right". Then one day I got annoyed and uninstalled every plugin and just went back to basics. I only reach for plugins when I feel something is missing, but honestly the only plugins I use are Style Settings which let's me customize the theme a bit more and Calendar so I can have... well... a calendar.

I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!

Start with the problem you're trying to solve and use the features to solve it. Don't just try to cram its features into your life

I highly recommend Siyuan as an alternative, it has many the best features from obsidian plugins included by default

You’re not the only one. I invested months on Obsidian before walking away and returning to OneNote. It’s advertised as a ‘second brain’ but at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer. You can’t even manually sort notes and folders. Directory Opus can do that and more.

Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.

I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be.

A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch".

Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy.

Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two.

Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be.

Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear.

Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way?

I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile.

I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this.

Edit- To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.

I just use it as a personal wiki, so plugins are overkill for me. I was basically using it as a way to basically have txt files with latex and it fits the bill.

The first sentence of the documentation already says it: "turn any set of notes into a powerful database". It's really just that, basically. It's a database-view, where the vault is the database and the rows are your files. There is a fancy GUI for creating views, and it seems there is the ability for live-editing data from within the view. Basically a more user-friendly replacement for the very popular dataview-plugin.

Maybe it's a bit harder to understand, as it's a more mushy than the usual relational database.

Another one: "Bases provides filtered and sortable table and card views of note Properties and Tags."

(May 2025 was from when the donor-only beta was announced, the current thread is the official release many changes later)

The rows are individual Markdown files and the columns are YAML frontmatter properties in those files.

There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension.

The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to a Markdown table or CSV.

See also: https://help.obsidian.md/bases/syntax

You can embed a base in a canvas, and you can list canvases in a base.

I am curious about how this compares to dataview. As a dataview user, I'm not immediately seeing something bases does that dataview doesn't, but I am not a power user.

Yes and no. It's not meant to be as "kitchen sink" comprehensive yet, but it's a like 90% replacement and it's a ton faster and more responsive. (And I suspect once extension support comes in the dataview team will fully change over)

For the grammar: Lezer For the editor: CodeMirror

Everything else is custom as we generally don't use existing frameworks and the large amount of baggage they carry. CodeMirror and Lezer we already used before Bases.

This is beyond slick.

I'm finally able to kill Notion (good riddance - I never liked it!), and if it can handle larger tables then I'll stop using Google Suite as well.

My last request of the Obsidian team is a better git plugin. Their official built-in sync product is fine, but I'd still like to manage my own versioning so I can use automations.

The currently available git plugin is extremely dangerous (!!!) if set up incorrectly. I would consider myself an advanced user of git, and Obsidian's git plugin has on several occasions blown away my history and notes. It has frustrating and opaque behavior for how it consolidates change sets and diffs.

If I were in their position I’d use TanStack Table.