Tutorial: How to Get Text into Obsidian Without Opening the App

And always have the text that matters in the places that count

Photo by Katerina Pavlyuchkova on Unsplash

As promised in my last Plain Text, Paper-Less Digest, here’s the nitty-gritty on how to interact with your Obsidian vault in iCloud, without opening the Obsidian app.

You might want to do this if —

• You store your vault in iCloud, but don’t use Obsidian Sync
• Obsidian takes too long to start up on your iPhone
• You don’t want to switch focus within your vault (on any device) just to take a quick note

This adjustment to my workflow has wiped out a significant pain point! Like, really. This was something that felt crippling until I found the answer. I’m delighted to have found an input workflow that greases my productivity wheels nicely, making idea capture so much more fluid and natural.

Here are two solutions; one free, one paid. I happily use both—read on to learn why.

While you can follow this guide in Shortcuts or Drafts on any device, these instructions refer to the iPhone.

Solution 1: Shortcuts (free)

These instructions are for creating a shortcut that appends text to a date-based file…