Thank you all for your helpful posts.
I wanted to implement a JD system for academics using Obsidian.
I’m an academic looking to organise my files and emails with JD. It seems more suited to my needs than PARA since many of the ‘projects’ are quite fixed in time and I believe I can benefit greatly from a numbered system. I am also a recent Obsidian user and have been looking at how to organise my Obsidian vault as well and ideally this follows the file/email JD system.
For the JD structure itself, I’ve based it mostly off of Al-Khwarizmi’s second post.
I’ve read through the website and forum on why/how to maintain an index and it seems to be doable in Obsidian. However there are some limitations.
Issue 1
File and folder names cannot contain square brackets, e.g. [25.02], in either the folder or note name. This may increase false positive rate when searching, however Obsidian does allow for a useful filter, e.g. file:25.02, to look only at filenames.
Issue 2
Obsidian sorts folders first. so if 25.01 is a note but 25.02 is a folder, 25.02 will appear at the top. See the discussion here.
Fortunately, there is an easy plugin to fix this: The plugin is here, and a discussion is here. You will want to create a sortspec.md file somewhere inside our outside your vault, and it must contain the following YAML text at the top:
---
sorting-spec: |
target-folder: /
< a-z
---
Issue 3
Folders in Obsidian are just folders - you will need to separately create a note to keep some folder level information (e.g. an index), you will need to create a note inside that folder and, for example, give it the same name as the folder. Fortunately there are plugins to automate this.
- AidenLX’s folder note: This helps to create a note within each folder that also has the same name as the folder and is automatically hidden such that the folder itself appears in Obsidian as a note.
Issue 4
If on iOS, an iCloud Obsidian Vault may only be created in the root iCloud folder. This may be a limitation if you want to use one JD structure for both files and notes and do not want to put everything inside iCloud / Obsidian. I personally think having a single folder for both notes and files is an interesting approach:
- You avoid creating and maintaining two identical folder structures (one for .md notes, the other for files)
- It’s much easier to see where your numbering is at (without looking at the index) because there are no blanks
- It’s perhaps faster to switch between notes and files (e.g. you can open PDFs from within Obsidian and take notes right there)
This approach does not seem possible right now and does point to an iOS file system limitation. I have decided to go for the ‘two identical folders’ approach and maintain order using the index in Obsidian. My reasoning for this:
- I was not eager to place the entirety of my files in an iCloud / Obsidian root folder (not that it makes much difference)
- I still need to maintain an index as there will still be files that are shared / generated by others that would be stored on other cloud services beyond my control
Automatic Index generation
I’m using zoottelkeeper-obsidian-plugin to automatically generate an index and sub-index files within each folder. Note that this works perfectly with AidenLX’s folder note so that the same note that Aiden’s plugin creates is also then populated by the index of zoottelkeeper. Zoottelkeeper is also nice in that the index is enclosed within an auto-generated area, so you may also add your custom notes and details.
See the forum post here.