Obsidian was originally built for the desktop, and only later ported to mobile. That’s why, even though the mobile app works, you can tell it was meant for a big screen and a keyboard.
The mobile app doesn’t have a quick capture window for jotting things down without opening the full app. There is no easy way to clip web pages. Navigation and search are incredibly stiff.
There are no autocomplete suggestions when typing. You have to type dates and timestamps because there is no built-in feature for that.
You can technically get a sort of quick capture system going with Obsidian widgets. It has a New Note widget in the selection. Load it using your default mobile launcher.
To get the rest of the missing features, I have been using these five community plugins.
Pocket’s shutdown didn’t hurt my workflow, thanks to this free Chrome extension
I found a superior alternative to Pocket
Slurp
Transforms web pages into Obsidian notes
Slurp automatically converts web pages into neat Obsidian notes.
Instead of copy-pasting an article into a new note and then formatting it by hand, you can let this plug-in “slurp” it up and create a Markdown file from it.
To “slurp” a web page, tap the three dots in your browser and tap Share. Look for the Obsidian app icon in the list and tap it.
The Obsidian Share menu should pop up with Slurp at the bottom. Tap Slurp and wait for the new note to load.
The plugin will grab the note title from the web page along with metadata, including:
- Title
- Byline
- Excerpt
- Social handles
- Tags (searchable in the Obsidian search bar)
- Website link
Slurp formatted it beautifully. The subheadings, links, image thumbnails, and bullet points are where they should be, minus the distracting web elements.
After the note is created, you can edit it, add your own tags, or build backlinks within the vault.
Slurp is great for research projects because you can collect your research in one place and create linked mentions between them.
The same logic works for something simpler, like a recipe collection.
It’s also an excellent alternative to Pocket because you can create local copies to read later.
That way, if the website takes the article down or makes changes to it, you’ll still have a copy on your device.
The formatting breaks for pages with too many images or icons and not enough text, so watch out for that.
Recent Files
For easier navigation on small screens
As your Obsidian vault grows, you’ll notice that you’re spending time scrolling through the file explorer menu to look for your notes.
Most of the time, at least for me, I need to switch back and forth between a handful of notes I’ve already opened recently. That’s what the Recent Files plugin is for.
By default, you can filter the Obsidian side menu with Files, Search, Tags, Bookmarks, and Properties.
The Recent Files plugin adds a new filter to this menu that shows files you created or opened in your recent sessions.
To use it, swipe left to reveal the Obsidian main menu, tap the default Files filter, and select Recent Files.
Since this list is shorter, it saves you the trouble of scrolling through the main file menu over and over.
Omnisearch
An intelligent search engine for your vault
The default Obsidian search, located on the sticky panel at the bottom, only queries file names.
It can only help you look for a note if you already know what it has in the title. It doesn’t have any tolerance for typos either.
There’s also a second search bar, which you can access by swiping right and tapping the Files button.
This search bar can search through file contents, but it does not rank them in any order.
Here, too, you have to type the exact search terms with correct spellings to get the results.
Omnisearch gives you a smarter alternative to both.
First, it searches not only the note titles but also the contents of your notes in one place. So even if you can only remember what you put inside your target note, Omnisearch can help you retrieve it.
On top of that, it ranks those results by relevance. So, for example, if a keyword appears more often in one note than another, it ranks higher.
You don’t have to be literal with your search terms either. It uses smart fuzzy matching, so it works even if you misspell words (which happens to me often on a phone keyboard).
Think of Omnisearch as Google search for your Obsidian vault.
To use it, pull up the Omnisearch bar by tapping the hamburger icon on the sticky menu and selecting Omnisearch.
The results show up as you type, and tapping a result takes you to the relevant note.
If the menu launcher is too slow for you, add Omnisearch to the mobile toolbar. Tap the gear icon, look for Omnisearch in the list, and add it to the toolbar.
Now you have a permanent quick toggle to query Omnisearch.
Omnisearch isn’t limited to the Markdown files in your vault. It can also use Optical Character Recognition, or OCR technology, to read the contents of PDF files and search inside them like regular text files.
The feature is disabled by default because it requires the Text Extractor plugin to work.
If you turn it on, keep an eye on your battery life. It may chew through the battery while it builds the database.
Various Complements
Saves typing effort and time
A mobile app like Obsidian is the perfect candidate for an autocomplete feature.
For one, you frequently create internal links between notes that already exist within the vault.
So if the app could autocomplete those link entries or provide suggestions as you type, it would save you a lot of typing and time.
Second, you’re bound to repeat things like long words, phrases, jargon, or certain text patterns as the vault grows.
If the app could suggest words you’ve already written within the current, or even the entire vault, as you type, it would make typing on the phone much easier.
The Various Complements plugin does both those things and more.
After you install it, you’ll see suggestions to insert links to your existing notes as you type. You can tap a suggestion to create a linked mention to that note. No need to type [[.
It also learns from your typing activity, as well as the contents of your current note, to make word or phrase suggestions.
You can also create custom dictionaries and add them to Various Complements.
If you’re typing in a second language or frequently using industry jargon that’s not in your vault, a dictionary like that can speed up your typing. The dictionary is a plain text file.
If you’ve used an Integrated Development Environment (or IDE, which is software that developers use to write and test programs), you can see that Various Complements works kind of like that.
It gives you suggestions based on what’s in the text file, plus any relevant links it can find inside the “project” directory.
Natural Language Dates
For easy timestamps
One thing that consistently annoys me when typing in Obsidian is its limited date and time-stamping features.
I like to keep time-stamped logs to track when I start and finish tasks.
Obsidian can stamp the current time or the current date, but only one at a time. For that, open the command palette and look for the Insert current time command. It breaks the flow.
With Natural Language Dates, instead of typing the exact date and time, I can just type the @ symbol, followed by the date or time in plain language. It could look like:
- @now
- @today
- @yesterday
- @next sunday
- @in two hours
- @five weeks from now
- @this friday between 1 and 2 PM
As soon as you tap Enter or tap a suggestion, it will convert the natural language into the correctly formatted numerical date and time. Very handy.
Obsidian should implement these features natively
The mobile app needs a lot more love from the Obsidian team, and native implementation of at least some of these features would be a great starting point.
A polished, quick-capture workflow, combined with suggestions (time-stamps, other notes in the vault, and words) for easier typing on mobile screens, alone will make a huge difference.
Right now, there are two search buttons in the mobile app, one on the main toolbar and the other tucked into the side menu.
One is for searching for note titles and the other for the contents of those notes.
That’s why the mobile app could use a unified, more streamlined, and, perhaps, a mode-based search.
