Maintaining Tables of Contents in Obsidian with a Bash Script When viewing longer Markdown notes in Obsidian, tables of content (TOC) help a lot with navigation. There is a handful of community plugins to help with TOC generation, but I have two issues with them:
It creates a dependency on code whose developer may lose interest and eventually abandon the project. At least one dynamic TOC plugin has suffered this fate.
Hazel is a centrepiece of my automation suite on macOS. I rely on it to watch directories and take complex actions on files contained within them. Recently I discovered an issue with files that are locked in the Finder. If files that otherwise match all the rules are locked, then Hazel will attempt to execute the rules. But the locked status may preclude execution. For example, I began seeing frequent Hazel notifications popups such as:
Obsidian is pretty reckless with file creation dates. If you modify a note in Obsidian, it updates the file creation date. This renders Dataview queries that rely on it useless. For an introduction to this issue, see this lengthy thread on the Obsidian forums.
Workarounds There are a several solutions to this problem.
- YAML-based dates One can include a cdate (or similar) field in the note’s front matter and just direct the Dataview query against that, e.
I use Hazel extensively for automating file management tasks on my macOS systems. Recently I found that Hazel aggressively matches an invisible system file that appears whenever you use a custom file or folder icon. I’ll describe the problem and present a workaround.
In a handful of directories, I have a rule that prevents users (me) from adding certain file types. So the rule just matches any file that is not an image, for example, and deletes it.
As its name implies, the AwesomeTTS Anki add-on is awesome. It’s nearly indispensable for language learners.
You can use it in one of two ways:
Subscribe on your own to the text-to-speech services that you plan to use and add those credentials to AwesomeTTS. (à la carte) Subscribe to the AwesomeTTS+ service and gain access to these services. (prix fixe) Because I had already subscribed to Google and Azure TTS before AwesomeTTS+ came on the scene, there was no reason for me to pay for the comprehensive prix fixe option.
I make a lot of Anki cards, so I’m on a constant quest to make the process more efficient. Like a lot of language-learners, I use images on my cards where possible in order to make the word or sentence more memorable.
Process When I find an image online that I want to use on the card, I download it to ~/Documents/ankibound. A Hazel rule then grabs the image file and converts it to a .
A few years ago, I wrote about my problems with HTML in Anki fields. If you check out that previous post you’ll get the backstory about my objection.
The gist is this: If you copy something from the web, Anki tries to maintain the formatting. Basically it just pastes the HTML off the clipboard. Supposedly, Anki offers to strip the formatting with Shift-paste, but I’ve point out to the developer specific examples where this fails.
I was using a REST API at
https://textance.herokuapp.com/title but it seems awfully fragile. Sure enough this morning, the entire application is down. It’s also not open-source and I have no idea who actually runs this thing.
Here’s the solution:
#!/bin/bash url=$(pbpaste) curl $url -so - | pup 'meta[property=og:title] attr{content}' It does require pup. On macOS, you can install via brew install pup.
There are other ways using regular expressions but no dependency on pup but parsing HTML with regex is not such a good idea.
I alluded to this nuance involving variable scope in my post on automating pdf processing, but I wanted to expand on it a bit.
Consider this little snippet:
i=0 printf "foo:bar:baz:quux" | grep -o '[^:]+' | while read -r line ; do printf "Inner scope: %d - %s\n" $i $line ((i++)) [ $i -eq 3 ] && break; done printf "====\nOuter scope\ni = %d\n" $i; If you run this script - not in interactive mode in the shell - but as a script, what will i be in the outer scope?
In my perpetual effort to get out of work, I’ve developed a suite of automation tools to help file statements that I download from banks, credit cards and others. While my setup described here is tuned to my specific needs, any of the ideas should be adaptable for your particular circumstances. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume you already have Hazel. None of what follows will be of much use to you without it.