How Dynalist and Obsidian could be merged [fantasy]

The following is not how Obsidian works. This is how I wish it worked, to replace the workflow that I use in Dynalist. And given that Obsidian supports 3rd party plugins, perhaps some day these will all come true, and I would not need Dynalist any more.

  • Move Item hotkey
    In obsidian, think of lines of text (text between \n or \r) as nodes. And think of all the other lines of text in the document, and all the other document titles, as destinations. So essentially, it works the same as dynalist (except you can’t use lines in other documents as destinations, since I assume they aren’t in RAM). I cannot work without the ability to teleport lines of text underneath destination texts. It’s become the core of my productivity workflow.

  • Inbox & Send to Inbox API
    Set a document as you inbox. It either appends a new line of text to the start or end. Obviously this requires cloud storage. Maybe it’s just a IFTTT recipe that appends text to the text file in your Google Drive. But it needs some way to triage in ideas as they occur effortlessly, without booking up a laptop and opening Obsidian to the right place.

  • Google Calendar sync and dates
    Render dynalist format dates and sync the text of the line they appear on to Google Calendar automatically.

Honestly, that’s all I use Dynalist for. If Obsidian or another app had those three functions I’d consider switching.

Interesting. Wouldn’t do it for me. I don’t even use the second and third items on your list. For the first , i think the Obsidian style would be to move to the end of a section or block as indicated by the markdown.

What is “block”? I was just thinking how .md files are “a line of text\n another line of text EOF” so parsing lines seemed the natural parallel to nodes, since dynalist splits lines to nodes when you import things.

I’m still trying to figure obsidian out. I’m having a lot of trouble since it’s such a different paradigm. I tried thinking of document titles as nodes and then nesting folders into a tree hierarchy, but that seemed a pain too.

I don’t know how the developers shifted their thinking so much product to product, I would have thought they would be more similar.

I use the second thing on my list constantly. How else do you triage your inbox which is full of jotted down notes you spoke into your smartwatch and stuff from the day? You sit down at your laptop you open the inbox, move move move to teleport every item into the correct categorization/priority node.

The paradigm is WIKI. (Wikipedia is merely an example; the original was the c2 wiki and
WIKI evolved lots.)

I just open my phone to my DL Inbox and start typing. :slight_smile: Later I move things, yes using the one essential feature of DL: Move Item Hotkey.

I never speak notes using my smartwatch.

Ah, so what obsidian calls blocks are identical to lines in the .md text file. And then, any line you hyperlink to gets appended with a ^identifier code.
So it has all the functions necessary to parse lines and search them in a popup box, seems like they could modify block linking UI, into a move block under other block UI, without much code, and enable all of what the Dynalist move function enables.

First step in asking good questions is learning the vocabulary lol. I asked Obsidian about it and I think referring to “lines” and “nodes” was klingon to them, and “blocks” was klingon to me. Turns out there is zero difference (at the text file level at least).