Text Expansion
Some Useful TextExpander Snippets
iFrame
<iframe src="https://www.macsparky.com" width="100%" height="500px">
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Activity Log
## Activity Log
### 2023-07-17
- Today I taught how to use TextExpander
Front Matter
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aliases: []
tags: [daily]
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TextExpander App Link
Daily Plan
|The Plan|Hour|The Day|
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|Start Up|7|✓|
|FG| 8 ||
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|AM Break|11||
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|MacSparky|16||
|Shutdown|17||
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Book Notes
# Metadata
Author:
Media Type: [[Book]]
Subjects:
Status:
Recommended by:
Date Read:
Date Highlighted:
Date Summarized:
Source:
Links:
Video Transcript
Because Obsidian is text-based, text expansion type automation is really useful. Let's start with just making a simple text expansion snippet to insert a new task item in Obsidian.
I'm on Mac, I'm under the keyboard, system preference, I'm gonna go to text replacements, and I'm gonna make a new one. I'm gonna say replace TTT with a dash space, open bracket space close bracket, which is what you use in Obsidian to create a task item. That's all I need to do. I've created it now and it's built into my system. So if I'm in Obsidian, I type TTT space and I've got a task item. That's just a very easy way to do it.
Whether you're on Windows or Mac, there's always text replacement software available to you. If you want to go a step further, I would recommend TextExpander. TextExpander is a text expansion application that has some additional features that are actually quite useful with Obsidian.
I've been creating text expansion snippets and deleting them over the years as I use Obsidian. I'm gonna share some of my currently active ones with you, and I'm going to actually type them into the shared Obsidian vault so you can use them to create your own snippets whether using TextExpander or some other source.
So the first one I would like to share with you is iframe. Now iframes are an interesting feature in Obsidian, which I haven't had an opportunity to cover so far in this field guide. And it's a bit of code, HTML code in there where you can embed a portion from another webpage. And this is the text that you use right here. And you embed a clipboard item.
So to put a website there, you just put a link on your clipboard and embed it. So for example, I have the max Sparky URL saved to my clipboard right now. and if I type ob.if, which is my snippet for this, it's going to put this code in along with the clipboard contents, which is the website.
So I'm gonna do that, ob.if, and now we've got it. I'll hit return, and then we'll take a look at this. And rendered, you can see there's my website.
So the text you want here is this iframe language, but then you should place whatever's between these quotes with your intended URL. If you use any web services and you want to be able to embed them on an obsidian page, this is a great little clipboard expansion snippet you can use.
All right, next one is heading plus date. This is a real simple one, but one I use all the time. I'll actually use it with an H three, which is a heading three. So it's three hashtags and then the year, month and day. You know, there are some other text expansion tools that will insert the active date, but not many. Make sure whatever one you're using has that ability.
I'll go ahead and go ahead and type that in as well too. That's OB.3D. And now anytime I put it in, I've got a heading three, which shows up with the date attached to it right there.
I already showed you the one for a new task, which in my mind is always TTT, but I've also built it for Obsidian as well. And if you go over here, you see it's the exact same snippet, but I've got it in Obsidian.
I have another one related to tasks that puts in the little emoji that works with the tasks plugin. We covered that in an earlier video, but the code I have for that is ob.task. So I'm just going to put that one up here as well. ob.task. And then you can see it's there ready for me with all of the various emoji if I want to add specific metadata through the tasks plugin.
Activity log is something I put in a lot of notes. Anytime I create a new note and I want to track things I did on the note over time, I create what I call an activity log. This is just a real simple snippet that just types in a heading to with the word activity log. It's a silly snippet. You could do this with any text expansion tool, but I find I use this thing repeatedly. It's just like the heading three plus date. I often end up putting that under the activity log.
If I am working on the heading activity log, then I say heading three plus date, which is OB3D, OB.3D, and I can say, "Today I taught how to use TextExpander."
FrontMatter is something I've already covered in the course, but you can automate the preparation of FrontMatter. It's just FM for me, so OB.FM, and it just puts in all the language necessary to insert the FrontMatter at the top of your item. I put tags in there with a daily tag, but I don't use that all the time. You can customize this to whatever tags you want to use every time you trigger it. You can also make multiple versions of it with different sets of tags or whatever front matter you want to include.
Related is daily plan. I experimented with journaling in Obsidian. Ultimately it wasn't for me, but I did create my daily planning snippet for that. This was just a way for me to document the hours through the day is what I was doing. It was basically an interstitial journal. So I type OB.Plan and you can see it just creates a little set of pipes there for me so I can go through the day and document whatever time I spend working. This is back when I was a lawyer that I used this so I've still got legal work in there.
The last one is kind of a big one and this is Book Notes. So if I want to record notes concerning a book in Obsidian, I just type OB.Book and then I've got everything I need related to a book. Now this stuff could also be folded into a template in Obsidian which I've already covered, but you know to each his own. Maybe you want to put this stuff in through text expansion snippets.