As I’m sure you can tell this will be my first post in the community. I’m developing some Python code to help make using the Johnny.Decimal system easier to manage, plus some extra features if using Obsidian. Code is meant to be shared, imho, so that’s why I’m here
Some background:
I am currently half way through migrating my notes from Notion into Obsidian – the impetus behind this was to move away from cloud-hosted, proprietary stores for my data.
While doing this, I felt like I needed a better way to store my notes – I did not have a method before and, as you can imagine, things got real hairy, real quickly.
Thus bringing me to Johnny.Decimal. However, I don’t want to maintain the index manually and I wanted to give myself a usable framework to manage my note organization programmatically.
The code
I am still very much developing this project – however I would love input from anyone who happens to be interested. Suggestions for features from more seasoned folks are always welcome.
The examples provided in the Repo are from my Obsidian Vault. The examples for the folder structure and corresponding index items have been modified slightly for privacy reasons However, I did my best to ensure all of the different cases were present.
Apart from saving yourself a lot of typing out of your index in Obsidian, I think that what you are doing is solving a problem that I see in the Johnny Decimal system:
That visually you cannot see a picture your entire index in your notes app as an overview picture, but need to use the search bar. It is why people like Method 2 of JD system. It gives them the overview.
Does Obsidian solve this problem?
Would Dendron solve this problem?
Did you consider using Dendron?
Also, how come you are not able to use the decimal for your obsidian?
I’m glad to hear it’s solving a problem for other people! I agree, that it helps to see an overview.
I did not know about Dendron, thank you for introducing me to it. What do you think about it?
In Obsidian, it has fairly basic search functionality. I find myself usually going through my directory tree to find notes though.
I’ve been experimenting with the Waypoint plugin for Obsidian which creates an MOC for the subdirectories within a designated Waypoint.
Having the two different levels of the index I think is really helpful. When I have time I’m going to add an automatic linking to be able to navigate from the Vault index to an Area index.
Also! I’ve been using the Obsidian Python Scripter to call the script from within Obsidian which has felt really smooth.
