My Quick Capture Workflow in Obsidian

Capture fleeting thoughts in Obsidian using a unique combination of the Templater and Commander plugins. Simple, straight-forward, powerful.

My Quick Capture Workflow in Obsidian

While Obsidian Mobile is set to add some form of Quick Capture in a future update, it's still unclear as to whether the integration will be available for both Mobile and Desktop. In light of this, I've been searching for a viable alternative that I can use right now.

I believe that everyone has a slightly different usecase for what a "quick capture" implies– for me, it's usually when something comes to mind unbidden, typically when I'm concentrating on something else. When this happens, I need to get these thoughts down without resorting to context switching. The desired outcome was therefore pretty simple.

  1. I needed Obsidian to prompt me for what I want to capture.
  2. I wanted to be prompted for optional tags for further categorization.
    1. I needed a #capture tag to be added regardless, so that I can use a bookmarked search in order to locate all of my quick captures.

So, how do we go about this? Well, we'll need a few things. Namely, the Templater and Commander plugins. The latter is optional, but allows you to run templates without using a hotkey. Instead, they'll run off a separate button click within the Obsidian interface. These buttons can live in the Ribbon, the Tab Bar, the Status Bar, etc. For this example, we'll be keeping these in the Status Bar to keep things minimal and out of the way.

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