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.

With the introduction of the TADpoLe library, I’m able to share an action via the ThoughtAsylum Drafts action group that I think a lot of people who write for the web may find useful. It’s a special web preview action that incorporates a number of features that I think make it pretty special. Welcome to my explanation of the “Exploded Markdown Preview”.

There was a recent discussion on the Drafts Slack group (used mainly by beta testers), about action editing and I shared a little trick I use for creating action templates that give me a quick start. In this post I’m going to outline the approach that will hopefully also save you time on creating new actions.