PTPL 120: Quick Add vs Text Expansion in Obsidian

Plus a backup tip for people using apps like Tana and Notion

PTPL image by the Author

This week: Quick Add plugin vs external text expansion in Obsidian. When using apps that make it hard to leave (like Tana), make sure you're willing to do the manual backing up required to save the things you'd cry over if they were lost.

No AI here; all words, ideas, and faults 100% human made. While paid subscribers are enormously encouraging and help me to keep writing, non-subscribers are always welcome to read for free.

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Quick Add vs Text Expansion in Obsidian

If you’re on Medium, Kara Monroe has an Automation series that’s worth checking out. Her story on Quick Add in Obsidian is a good reference piece.

While the Quick Add plugin makes adding notes with complex templates easier, I favour text expansion instead.

This means creating a new note then adding a pre-defined front matter section using a text expander like Espanso or Keyboard Maestro. The Auto Note Mover plugin takes predefined headers or tags from the front matter and pops notes right where I want them.

Speaking of Espanso, I like the idea of it (being FOSS and all), but I’m having trouble getting multi-line text blocks to work. Any tips?

Keyboard Maestro is king of the heap as far as I can see, given that I can also set a keystroke shortcut to trigger opening specific apps, windows and menu items, as well as pausing between steps. Simple text expansion actions can then be inserted into more complex macros.

Beware of apps that make it hard to leave

I see nothing wrong with people with good backup habits using apps that let them cleanly export to an open format. Sadly, Tana seems to be in the category of apps that make this difficult.

liko recently cancelled their Tana subscription, and told me they didn’t export any data because Tana makes it hard (if not impossible) to do that in any kind of useful form. Sad! Tana looks like a fantastic app in many other ways. Rule 1: Keep your data portable.

Notion recently blocked access to users in Russia, which will leave thousands of people without access to their notes as of September 8. Fortunately they have a Markdown export option, amongst other formats. Sadly, people in Russia who don't hear this news in time will have their notes deleted with no way to retrieve them.

Now I'm not trying to turn anyone away from Tana or Notion; that's not my point at all. If you're enjoying the app and getting a lot out of it, I'm delighted for you! Keep up to date, manual (open format) backups of anything you'd cry over if it were lost, and you're all good.

What’s an open format backup? One that lets you read your data outside of the app that created it, and get it into other apps in a usable state, without added formatting cruft. Think plain text, Markdown, PDF, OPML. Files like .docx, .indd can only be read in Word and InDesign respectively.

And in other news…

I’ve finally signed up to Blot and am working my way through a list of all the fun things that need doing when moving one site to another. This is my last post on the Substack platform.

As of next week, the ‘read for free’ side of my articles published on Medium will redirect to my own site. So far it’s going well, and I’m loving the process! People who subscribed via Substack will continue to receive a weekly email, via Convertkit (soon to be Kit).

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