It Was Love At First Sight with This Obsidian Plugin
Obsidian Memos (now “Thino”) is a great example of Obsidian’s power to layer an elegant user experience on top of plain text.
Nearly two years ago I wrote about a way I journal in Obsidian that I can honestly say changed my life. Simply put, all you do when you have a thought is append a line to a plain text file representing your daily log.
The format of the line is a bullet point or checkbox prefixed with a timestamp and then a note of some sort.
That’s it. Let’s call this type of list entry prefixed with a timestamp a tick item. Like a second hand ‘ticks’ to mark each second, a ‘tick item’ is a list item that stamps in time a thought you want to capture.
In Obsidian, I simply append a line to my daily note and often use an iOS Shortcut to quick-capture the thought.
Fast-forward two years and I still use this method to literally capture all my thoughts as a part of a wholistic method of organizing all my thoughts and projects in plain text.
The ‘tick item’ seems to have become an unofficial, organically defined standard for taking daily notes, jotting down memos, and journaling. In Obsidian, for example, the Day Planner plugin will read these items and visualize them neatly in a daily or weekly view.
No other plugin scratches my itch for interacting with the ‘tick item’ format than Thino as described in a simple example.
It provides a very intuitive and simple way to visualize my notes across my daily log entries:
With Thino, my daily log entries are instantly transformed into a ‘me feed’ with some obviously handy UX features pointed to in the screenshot above. Thino has quickly become the one-stop way to visualize and interact with my notes throughout the day.
The beauty of using Thino in Obsidian is that it is based on a stupidly simple plain text format. I didn’t have to change the way I store and format my notes at all. It all just worked ‘out of the box’. This is why Thino was love at first site for me.
I have been using this plugin for a couple of months now and it has been a trusty companion both in Desktop mode for Obsidian and mobile. It is such a pleasure to see everything sync up seamlessly across my devices and to have so many options on how to quick capture notes in a very portable and simple format.
I also think there’s a lot of potential for extending Thino with different visual layouts and features that might be useful beyond what it currently supports (eg. add custom background color tick items, more powerful fliters and ways to group items, etc). For example, I often write tick items in the form of ‘doodles’: a set of around 4 comma separated words or phrases.
Obsidian is simple and powerful enough for me to quickly experiment with a way to visualize these doodles and that will be the subject of a subsequent post. More on the ‘working memory’ motivation of a ‘doodle tick item’ can be found here:
I’d say if you haven’t given this type of logging/journaling a shot, it’s definitely worth a try and very easy to get started.