Yesterday I posted some details around using Shortcuts to send a new note to Obsidian. Today, I’m going to look at a different and also popular capture option for Obsidian; using one of my favourite applications, Drafts.
Drafts, by AgileTortoise, is my ubiquitous note app. I use it for capturing ideas, drafting content, shopping lists, general note taking, and more besides. The content is often temporary, but when it isn’t, the content gets reflowed off into files (such as in one of my Obsidian vaults), social media posts, e-mails, or some other channel. Last year I also began using another note app - Tot by the IconFactory. Tot has a very different view of notes. It is a much simpler app and is opinionated in how complex it can get. But, what it gave me on the Mac was a free menu bar app that I could keep snippets on for short periods. In real world terms, I think of Drafts as my ubiquitous pocket notebook, and Tot as the pad of last few sticky notes on my desk. There is undoubtedly overlap, and I am sure I could make Drafts provide near identical functionality to Tot. However, having a distinction between them works for me, and having Tot as a separate app to fulfil a niche requirement in my workflows has stuck. The only friction that occurred is where I wanted to transfer information between the two apps. But I’ve been able to smooth that over and I’m going to explain how in the remainder of this post.
Example actions and other extensions for Drafts, the quick-capture notes app.
let inputNumber = editor.getSelectedText();
// Remove non-numeric characters
const strippedInput = inputNumber.replace(/[^\d]/g, '');
// Check if the input is empty
if (strippedInput === '') {
console.log('Input must contain numerical characters');
context.cancel();
}
else {
// Remove leading '1' if present
let formattedNumber = strippedInput;
if (formattedNumber.startsWith('1')) {
formattedNumber = formattedNumber.slice(1);
}
// Format the number
const regex = /^(\d{3})(\d{3})(\d+)$/;
formattedNumber = formattedNumber.replace(regex, '$1.$2.$3');
editor.setSelectedText(formattedNumber);
}
Last summer I created a Drafts action for a user to allow them to mark some text in IA writer’s Markdown syntax for a highlight. Now my solution was not the first solution offered, but it was a little different to the others, and I have been meaning to write it up for quite some time now to go into a bit more detail about how it works and the benefits it provides over other, existing solutions.
