A better plug-in for this, assuming the note has an identical name to the folder containing it, is Obsidian folder notes.
It makes the note ‘disappear’. Clicking the folder title now reveals the note. Real nice.
Will come back to Windows issues in a sec @torbengb, just making toast!
So, yes, this is the right place, and thanks for the feedback. I’ll tell the story.
None of this is me complaining! I might sound like I’m complaining. I’m not. It’s just fun to explain how this sort of thing explodes in complexity; I find this fascinating.
This is the first Quick Start, so there’s a lot of figuring out that you do. It sounds simple right? Create a folder full of markdown files. LOL no. It’s funny how these things just become complex like they have a mind of their own. You birth this idea and then it runs off and becomes a toddler and you have to try to control it.
We really liked the emoji when we were building this system. The audience I had in mind was not your well-established JD nerd. (Hi, that’s you.) So we wanted to make it friendly and, personally, I find that the emoji really help my brain ‘anchor’ to a category or a header. Especially when you ‘zoom out’, e.g. the system map.
And computers are boring enough. I knew the emoji might cause some discussion but we just decided. Emoji: helpful, and fun. They’re in.
Oh, but it turns out they look like shit on Windows! Because Windows is boring![1] (I do have a Windows VM that I test all this in.) I tried to get a screenshot but my VM isn’t booting. Trust me … emoji in Windows Explorer is like being an auditor at Deloitte.
Update: it booted. I mean look at this. Come on.
So we created the without-emoji folders, and tested those. Turns out some services (Dropbox, and probably others) don’t even support the Unicode ‘black square’ ■ that we use in headers. Oof. So we created a variant without those.
Alright, are we done with variants? Nope. As you’ll see there are a bunch of text/markdown files for your JDex. So there’s a version that plays nice with Bear, which has #Tags with/spaces, and &, allowed# as long as you close the tag. And one with Obsidian’s tags that don’t allow any spaces, or an ampersand, or a comma. And a plain text version with no tags. And each of these files has different content.
Because there’s no such thing as a [[wiki link]] in a text file, so why would I put them in there? They just clutter the text, so I delete those. Oh and then I learn that Obsidian doesn’t need the # Level 1 markdown header at the top of the file, because in the default configuration it uses the name of the file as the header, so I delete those.
And then I learn that most Obsidian users don’t use #tags for this structure anyway, so we create a version with folders, that has your JDex files in those folders.
And then I learn that it is possible to import to Apple Notes, as long as you feed it a very dumb version of HTML. So we create those. That was painful, let me tell you.[2]
At every point when I’m modifying ~160 markdown files I have to be very, very careful not to mess something up. Because I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but we are meticulous. It would kill me to release something with a lazy mistake.
And I’m not modifying them all by hand, that’s impossible. I’m usually doing it with a regex in VSCode. So I check and double check everything, always sure I’ve introduced a mistake.[3]
Okay, so let’s do some really unscientific maths. Here’s our possible permutations:
That’ll do. That’s ~24 possible permutations; 24 × 160 markdown files.
3,840 markdown files. Ouch.
So obviously it’s impossible to give everyone all the combinations. And nor would I want to — I’m already concerned that the folder structure is too complicated. Remember, I’m pitching this at people who have stumbled by my site, people who aren’t necessarily nerds at all. So a folder with 24 permutations that you have to choose from is a nightmare.
Oh and don’t forget I copy the system manual.pdf to each instance of the 11.02 folder. And version.txt. As soon as I mailed everyone to say that the update was available I realised I’d forgotten to do that, so I frantically updated it and re-zipped and uploaded the files. But someone out there has a v1.1.0 system with v1.0.2 manual and that kills me to know.
Oh and when I zipped everything up for v1.1.0, using the same method that I did for v1.0.2, the zip file didn’t work on Windows. I have to compress it with special software otherwise non-Mac users see the Mac’s ‘resource fork’ files. Zip is the only natively cross-platform format. Windows can do 7z, and Mac can do gzip, but neither can do the other out of the box.
So now there are two compressed files available for download.
7,680.
And that’s why you get what you get. 
It turns out that the cook emoji 
is a ZWJ sequence combining 
Person, Zero Width Joiner and 
Cooking (links to Emojipedia which has gone to the dogs, but I couldn’t find anything better).
A bunch of other emoji will also be combinations, but for some reason, some systems — Windows — really don’t like this one. And so you just see a person and a frying pan. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So that’s great.
This has been an interesting experiment. Here’s what I’ve learned, and what I’ll be doing for the Quick Start: Small business pack.
Phew. That was cathartic. I hope it was helpful? Doesn’t solve your problem! 
But at least you know why.
Don’t write me if you love Windows. I’m just joking … kinda. 
↩︎
There is zero information online about the format of HTML that Notes will accept. Nothing. This was all trial-and-error. ↩︎
In creating v1.1.0 I had the brilliant idea to check this whole folder in to git. That saved my ass a few times. ↩︎
Wow this was a journey!
Thank you for this fascinating peek behind the scenes![1] I regret my comment about suggesting working with Windows, and I sincerely apologize for it, because clearly you’re like a duck![2]
While checking with the manual, I also realized that the two-emoji problem wasn’t intentional, because your screenshot had a cook and my system doesn’t. Ah. It dawned on me what was going on.
I then spent some time to modify my folder names and edit the notes to be “just right” for me, and I am certain that is going to bite me as soon as your next cool version arrives. That’s a tomorrow problem because my names must be compatible with cmd batch files that don’t like Unicode nor emojis; so plaintext for me, please 
Thank you also for the excellent Obsidian plugin – I’m new to that tool and there’s so much to learn.
Again, thank you for taking the time to write all that. It is tremendously interesting to read!!
While I don’t have any children, my wife will almost certainly be sharing a system with me (in agreement with Personal AND a shared system?) so I’m trying to future proof it so it includes her and any future kids. Duplicating 11 🙋 Me & other living things for each person makes sense, where anything that could be in more than one person’s Category (11.60 ■ Pets & other animals 🐓 and marriage related documents for a married couple are what come to mind) follows the rule to put it in the first place it matches, being Category 11 (as you said). Families with more than five members are going to find themselves out of categories in the 10-19 Life admin area though. Does it expand to become 10-29 Become Life & Family admin in that case, or do family members 2-10 go in 20-29 Family Member Admin while family member 1 stays in 11?
The travel, finances, and where we live categories could probably be shared without too much trouble, at least until children/adolescents start having finances of their own (At which point it’s probably time to start helping them get organized with their own system, but that will include overlap between parents and kids systems. Another problem for another day year). One issue I see do is 14 💻 My online life. Does this get duplicated for each person as well or shared with everyone? 14.10 ■ Computers & other devices 🖥️ would be simple enough to just have all together (other than maybe accessories), but 14.20 ■ Software & accounts 🔑 could get messy fast, and possibly 14.30 ■ My online presence 🌏 as well. Any thoughts on how to deal with that?
Yeah that’d work okay if you knew ahead of time that there were going to be 6+ of you.
(Good lord that’s unimaginable to me! Haha. But I knew a girl who was one of six sisters. Her poor dad…)
Hmm it depends … my instinct is to keep it simple and just keep one. Otherwise are you really going to remember whose folder that thing was in?
The other way you could expand this is ‘from the back’, which is a new website page that is currently 80% written on this laptop here. Give us a couple of days and the whole 13 Multiple systems category on the site is going to be updated to 13 Expanded systems, which should give you lots more options.
I’ll pop up a blog post when that goes live and cross-post that to the forum.
Hello,
I’m starting to use the Quick Start guide. I’m completly new at this.
I would like to put my index in workflowy. The index text file looks great, but would be super with the “explaination”. It would look somehow like this:
10-19 Life admin
11 
Me & other living things
11.00 ■ System management
This category is all about you, and other things that have a beating heart: your family, friends, and pets.
If you have a lot going on in this category you might need to expand your system (see the website, workbook, or workshop).
e.g. your health situation is complicated, managing your children’s care, schooling, and activities takes a lot of effort.
11.01 Inbox 
Do you have a file like that? Or a workaround?
Thank you in advance,
Marie
Hi Marie.
So to clarify (as I don’t use Workflowy), you’re looking for a single file with the structure and descriptive text for all items? I should be able to put that together pretty easily … then does Workflowy have an import feature?
I just tried copy/pasting the text from your note there (I just signed up for Workflowy) and it appeared as a single thing, I assume that’s not what we’re after. Also doesn’t look like it handles emoji?
If you have a ‘proof of concept’ screenshot that you could show me that’d help enormously.
I’ve been thinking about using Workflowy too for my JDex. I’ve used it before but not for a long time.
I used the .txt JDex file in the pack, copy and pasted it into Workflowy and its gone over perfectly.
One of the things I like about Workflowy is that you can zoom into each bullet point so you only see what you need to if you are focussing
Is there a way to copy/paste including having the notes for each thing underneath the thing?.. without doing them each individually?
@Marie, you can simply copy the contents of the file Variants - only use these if you know you need to\Files to create your JDex\00.00 Index\index.txt into your Workflowy. You don’t even have to manually indent it after the paste.
@johnnydecimal, Workflowy is basically a glorified outliner, so you can have nodes within nodes within nodes. You can add a memo text within each node, and the first line is always shown; all lines are shown if you click into the memo.
Workflowy is not a file storage tool, but it works excellently as an index, and I have built the folder structure in my file system to match this, which I then use for file storage.
I was having a look at it yesterday, it looks amazing.
@marie let me know if that works for you…
I would like to get the whole JDex – descriptive text & all – in to Workflowy, but I haven’t found a nicer way other than copy/pasting the rich text from Bear. That gives me this, which I’ll be filling out over the next few days.
Update: Workflowy is nice eh! I’ve never used it. I’ve pasted the structure in. See how this works, feedback welcome.
I’m happy that you like it; I hope this doesn’t upset all your nicely laid plans for the week 
and as I mentioned, I’m a veteran user so would be happy to answer any questions.
31 Apps, to keep this one on the topic of Life admin?Nice one, I’ll see you there.
I think I’ve found a gap.
Booze. So I’m about to order a case of wine. Nothing fancy, but I want to make a quick note.
The more likely scenario is that you have a cellar full of nice wine that you want to track. Or maybe you brew beer. @Alex has both so, even though he doesn’t use LA, I’ll ping him.
This feels naturally close to food:
10-19 Life admin
12 Where I live and how I get around 🏡
12.40 ■ My kitchen & garden 🪴
The last ID there is 12.44 Meals & recipes. Thoughts on 12.45 Alcohol or something like it?
Alcohol feels too specific because it could also be specialty coffee, for instance. How about Beverages as a generic term?
Maybe that’s still not generic enough? What about specialty tobacco, or liquorice, or your collection of vintage soda cans?
I have a slight advantage here, because my wine is a collection, and I brew beer. These both fit nicely into hobbies and have their own categories.
So wherever your hobbies go, you can put all these things. If you don’t brew the simplest solution is to start brewing and you can use 11.82. If not you’ll have to keep beer and wine in your closest food-related category, which could be somewhere in 12.40 if you expand it to include drinking as well as eating.
I do regular things with my youngest, for example on a Monday we go to soft play and have dinner at the soft play place and we have to reserve a table well in advance.
There are one off parties and activities such as halloween parties, messy church, discos etc. Specific events to when children are off of school. Soon it will be Christmas parties and events.
School break activities, camps, just general days out. I know this goes into 15 but not sure where. I see them as sanity saving events tbh LOL.