- The Obsidian Gems of the Year is a list of the best of the best from the Obsidian community
rather than its core developers. And in 2021, the plugin that won second
place in the plugins category is called Templater by SilentVoid. Templater has changed
the way that I take notes and that's by capitalizing on something that we wouldn't typically
associate with note taking-- automation. In this video, I'm gonna
talk about what Templater is and how I use it to take meeting notes, maintain a database of people that I know and even play tabletop
role-playing games like D&D. Templater is a community plugin that allows you to define
a structure or a format that you can then apply
to your other notes so you're not doing the
same thing each time. Don't get confused, though,
with Templates and Templater. Templates is a core plugin
that ships with Obsidian that you don't have to download, but you do have to
enable it if you use it. And Templater is a community plugin that you do have to download and enable. In this video, I'm gonna talk
about Templater in particular, but in general, the
difference between the two is one of complexity. Templates is more like a copy paste, so you define the structure
and then you paste it, kind of, into a note. And the only things that
are dynamic about that are gonna be like the date
or the time or the title, so very limited amount of things that you can change on the fly. Other than that, it's mostly
a direct copy and paste. Templater though is way different because you can programmatically
change almost anything. So you could have Templater
put different things in your notes, depending
on certain conditions, like what day of the week it is or what folder the note is in. This will make a little bit more sense when we get to the specific use cases, so let's get right into that. I see three main use
cases for using Templater and you can use any or all of them depending on what you're trying to do. The first is using single line templates. The second is applying entire templates according to certain conditions. And the third one is using
your own user scripts. First, let's talk about
using single line templates. I'm going to create a new note here. I'm hitting Command + O just
to go to the Quick Switcher and I'm going to call it Test Note. This is an entirely new note, so I'm going to have a
heading called Test Note. And every template using Templater starts and ends with the same format. It is the left arrow and then percentage and then it ends with
percentage then the right arrow. And in between them is where
you put the instructions for what to replace this entire line with. One of the most common things
that I use this for is TP, that means Templater,
file and then the title. This is kind of equivalent
to the Templates syntax. Templates, the core plugin uses the two brackets opening
and closing and then title. So this might be simpler, but
Templater has more of those, which is why it's a
little bit more complex. When I apply the template using Templater, this entire line should then
be replaced with this title. So let's see how this
actually gets replaced. Hit Command + P or Control
+ P if you're on Windows to open up the Command Palette and then start typing replace templates and select Templater, replace
templates in the active file. You'll notice that I've
also added a hotkey to it so that I can do this on the fly. I'm on a Mac, so I'm using CTRL OPTION R but you can change it
to whatever you'd like. In this case, I'm just going
to click on it to run it. And you can see that this,
where the template used to be now you see the title, which is Test Note. If we go back a step and
have the full template here, I'm going to add to that, this time I'm going to
put in the date as well. Date now and then I'm going
to specify the format for it, which I want to be YYYY-MM-DD, all in numbers. I'm going to end the template. But another single line template
that I use in my templates is the one that retrieves the
value for a parameter I've set in the frontmatter. So let's say we have the frontmatter here and let's say that I've got
type, and this is a meeting. As the single line template, I'm going to put in tp.frontmatter and you'll notice that as I'm typing, there are these options here. This is also a cool way to explore. These are all the default variables that Templater has already set up so you just have to
select them and use them rather than creating your own. In this case, I want frontmatter and then I type in the
name of the parameter, which in this case is type. Then I'm going to end this one and this time I'm going to hit the hotkey rather than going through
the command pallet. But I'm still just replacing the templates in the active file. Now I've got, as expected,
the title, the date and also the value of the type here. So that's how you would use Templater to replace those strings with metadata from the file in question. But typically, you would build from this and put it in a template. So let me show you that. Instead of this, I'm going
to create a meeting template. Let me delete this file and let me show you that I've
got a templates folder here and I have a meeting note
within that templates folder. In this meeting note, I have everything that I
want to appear in a meeting. Once I've decided that I'm
taking notes on a meeting, I want this metadata in there. So you can see here that I'm
using that tp.date null format and also the title. Now you'll notice that the
title is within these brackets and I could have it without that. It is the value inside
that's going to be replaced with the title of the meeting. But having them within the
brackets turns it into a link. The reason that I like to do
that, and this is optional is that I found that if I
just type out the heading then if I change the name of that file, then the name of the file and the heading title no longer
match and I don't like that. So I've just defined it as a link too. Then I have a bunch of sections here that I expect myself to fill out and I would type out the
actual meeting notes here. And aside from the meeting template, I also have created a person template. So I create a note on
people that I speak to, especially those that I have meetings with and I want this template applied whenever I create a new person note. Within the person note,
we've got some metadata still and I'm using the same trick here to create a link as the heading. So this is a little bit different from the one that I showed you. It is still a single line, but instead of just
pulling out a value for, in this case, the title, I'm also saying that I
want this entire note to be moved into the people folder so that if I make a note for a person and it's not in the people folder yet, and then I apply the
template for a person, not only will it apply that template, but it'll also
automatically move that note to the people folder. And then under meetings here,
I do have a data view query that has a template inside it. This is just going to bring
up all of the meetings that I have with this
person automatically. So now I've got a template
but I haven't yet specified when exactly this template
should be applied. So for that, I'm going to go
into the settings for Templater and I'm going to specify
that template's folder so that Obsidian knows
that all of my templates are gonna be stored there. I'm also going to click
enable on trigger Templater on new file creation. What that is doing is giving
Templater the permission to replace any templates in
new files that are created. In this section, folder templates you can specify default
templates that are applied to every note that are
created in different folders. Since I already have a meeting template, I'm going to choose the folder meetings because I put all my meetings there and I'm going to choose
the meeting template in the templates folder. And then I'm going to add the same thing, but for the person template. So now all of the people
that I have notes on are in the people folder and the name of the template
that I want applied is person. So I'm going to add both of those. We'll exit out of that. To start with, I would hit Command + O, that's the quick switcher again. And let's say I want a new
meeting, meeting today. I'm going to hit Enter
and that creates that. And as you can see, the meeting template was
automatically applied, it already took the date. It has the file name as
a link in the heading, but I don't have any attendees yet. Let's say I have a meeting
with Jonathan Archer. Since this is a person
I'm going to say people and then a slash, that means I wanna put
it in the people folder and then I'm going to type
out his name, Jonathan Archer. I don't have a page for this yet but I'm going to create it right now. We should see a new
note for Jonathan Archer that follows the person template. So I'm holding down Command
here and I'm gonna click on it so that it opens up in a new pane. And that looks like it's been created. These are the ones that were
specifically for people. The data view query has also been updated so that now it says Jonathan Archer, instead of the template that was there. So I've already shown two use cases, one is how to use those
single line templates and then the second one was using those single line templates
as building blocks to create a bigger template
that is automatically applied when you create a note
in a specific folder. Now the third use case is
a little bit more complex, but I wanted to include it as an example of how you can do very complex things and distill them down
to a few button clicks just by using Templates and other plugins. This use case hinges on the fact that Templater allows you
to create user functions, which means that if you
can write JavaScript or copy code from somebody else then Templater can actually run those. What that means is that
you can make your templates a lot more dynamic. Now this is going to be my TTRPG workflow that I'm demonstrating here, but it is using quite a few
scripts that I've written and also quite a few plugins. Specifically, I'm using Templater but also Buttons, QuickAdd,
Callouts, Fantasy Calendar and Dataview. So definitely not something
that's for everybody, but I just think this is
a cool way to show you of how deep you can get into Templater. So my TTRPG workflow starts
with the games index, which is a list of all of the campaigns that I'm currently running or playing in. To create a new game, I'd
click on Add New World here and let's say that this is a demo world. And you'll see that there's another page that's been created. This is using a specific world template and that the data view
query on the games index has been updated to
include that demo world. Now I could put in the
system here for example and have that be updated
in the data view query. Let me exit out of this games index. And within the world, I can
have a list of sessions, except I don't have any sessions
for this world right now. So let me add one right now. So I'm gonna click that and
now it's added a session according to, you've probably
guessed, a session template. Now this session has pulled in
a whole bunch of parameters. It's pulled in the fact
that it's a session. It's taken the campaign and
world from the World page. It's counted the number of
sessions that I currently have and it increments them automatically. So this is the first, so it's
named it like that as well. So it starts with 001
and then an underscore and then today's date. I do use the plugin
Obsidian Fantasy Calendar for many of my games. I haven't set it up for
this one, but if I did, I would name it the same as the world and it would automatically
populate what today's date is or today in game. Scrolling down to this session
here, I'm also using Callouts to have a little session summary page. Now this is saying no games were found because this is the recap section and there were no previous games. But we'll look at what that
looks like in a second. So I would put the log in
here, lots of stuff happened. And then at the end of the session, I would typically put in a
longer summary in this part. And there's also a one liner here in case I just want a quick overview of the main things that
happened in this section. So let me put the adventure begins just to see that that
summary has been updated in the date view query
in the world as well. Now I'm going to exit out of this, go back to the World page and let's say I have another session. So when we click Add Session again and now it's automatically incremented to the second session for this game. And by the way, all of these
things are being created in the TTRPG's folder within
that folder for the world. I do this because sometimes
I play in the same system or the same published worlds, so I want to keep every campaign
and every group separate. Within that demo world,
I have the sessions here and the World page. Let me exit out of this World page and look at this second
session more closely. It's very similar to the first one, except that now it's
automatically pulling in the session summary of the
first session within the recap. Now what if in this
session we meet somebody? We met in a tavern and met the bartender. Let's say that that is an NPC, again, I'm going to hit
Command and then click on it to open that note up in a different pane. Now because this is a note that is neither a
session nor a world note, Templater has automatically applied my TTRPG frontmatter template. Then I would go in and say
that this one is an NPC and maybe I met this person in the tavern called the Crossed Pikes. If you're curious about how I set this up, I'm basically using a few templates. This is the TTRPG frontmatter one for adding in NPCs or locations. This is my world template. I have two session templates depending on whether I'm a GM or a player. The GM one has some more sections in it that have secrets that
characters might discover, loot and so on. But it works on pretty
much the same principles with the same templates
here that get pre-populated. You might have noticed that some of these templates have tp.user, those are the user
scripts that I've created. So in Templater, when you
go through the settings here and scroll the way down, you can have a section where you specify what folder you're
putting your scripts in. Now these are all JavaScripts. So it looks like it's
detecting seven of mine. Create world session, get campaign list, Now these are very specific to me. But let me show you what that looks like. This is what one of those
scripts looks like in my IDE, which is VS code. The vault that I've been
using is a test vault so that I can show you
how to set things up, but let me show you what it looks like in my actual main vault. This is my Games Index page, and these are the campaigns
that I've played in or run. I still have the same
Add New World button here and each one of these
follows the same format. So for example, in this
game which I am running, I have the sessions here that I can add and they are automatically incremented in the way that I showed you. As you can see, I play a lot of RPGs, I think I'm up to five
weekly ones right now, which is a little bit too much honestly. But that's why I needed
something like this. I know that this can be very daunting, but the reason that I did it was because I really need
something that I can just click on and everything is done for me. It did take an initial
amount of time to set it up, but afterwards it's a
lot easier from there. Is this approach for everybody? Definitely not. This is a niche use case and
a niche way to use Obsidian but I just thought I'd show it off since I've already made it. I've been hesitant to share my templates because there's no one
right way to do note taking and I feel like my
templates are so specific for my use cases. However, I get enough comments asking about the code that I use and the templates that I use that maybe there are more of you out there with similar use cases. So if you do just want
to download everything that I've shown you here, then
consider joining my Patreon and you'll get a copy of
the vault that I showed with all the plugins and
templates and settings and even shortcuts that I've shown for the goals and reviews,
for meetings and people and also for the TTRPG workflows that I've demonstrated in this video. Automating my notes with
Templater helps me do two things. One, it saves me time by
allowing me to populate my notes with predefined fields. And two, it helps me keep my notes more
consistent with each other by providing me a repeatable
structure that I can work from. I said earlier that
Templater won second place. Any guesses as to which plugin won the Obsidian Gems of the Year in 2021? That would be Dataview. It is also a very powerful plugin, but also a little
daunting and overwhelming. So check that video out if
you wanna know more about it. Thank you for watching. (speaking in foreign language)
