Get Inspired with Obsidian and Napkin
Obsidian is a great long-form writing and research Tool. Napkin is an innovative tool for capturing, connecting, and visualizing ideas.
If only the two of them could work together!
Well, they can now with a simple tool that a few of us have put together.
This tool can be found on GitHub in the following repository and this article provides a brief overview of this tool.
What does this tool do? Check out this video:
After viewing this video, you have seen what the tool does, you have the link to access the GitHub repository, and this means you basically have all you need to get started.
But if you want some more background, please continue reading. Otherwise, go to the repository and start playing with this tool.
What is Napkin?
Some of you might be new to Napkin. Consider it a unique tool you should have in your toolbox of Tools for Thought.
In August of 2022, I wrote a full review of Napkin. You can read this review here:
The Dance of Great Two Tools
I do most of my daily writing and then copy interesting thoughts and ideas from my notes into Napkin.
Why do I do this? While Obsidian is great for research and long notes, Napkin offers a really unique way to explore your thoughts and ideas, discover connections, and mostly get inspired by resurfacing thoughts you forgot.
Napkin is one of those tools you start working with and you might reason with yourself that you don’t need it, but then after some time, you find your mind tugging at you, pulling on you to return to Napkin’s unique and refreshing visual interface.
Napkin does inspire. A few minutes of digging around in my reservoir of ideas in Napkin, while other ideas visually pop up and resurface often gives me the motivation or creative juice that was lacking to finish something I am writing or to push one of my projects to the next level.
We need to make this easy
For this reason, a few of us wanted an easy way to send ideas from Obsidian to Napkin.
Why? The truth is we all have a bit of a lazy side. While we would like to add a thought to Napkin, there is some kind of friction when you are already working in Obsidian. Your mind says: this would be helpful to do, but it means you need to open your browser, go to Napkin’s website, create a note, and so on. Friction equals not doing what you know you should do.
Let us remove that friction.
A simple tool: the Obsidian to Napkin script
If you use Obsidian, you are likely familiar with the Templater plugin. This plugin is used by many of us to automate common tasks in Obsidian.
We used Templater to create a script that anyone can install into their vault that will send text from your Obsidian notes to Napkin.
The script takes just a few minutes to get installed and configured and you are off to sending ideas from your Obsidian notes to Napkin.
Visit the GitHub repository mentioned at the beginning of this article for all the instructions you need to use this tool.
If you appreciate tools like this one, or you like my writing and would like to help support it, please consider signing up for a Medium membership using my referral link: https://bit.ly/o42-medium or buy me a coffee at: https://bit.ly/o42-kofi.
