How do you deal with tags and frontmatter?

[gonstoll]

Hello 👋! Full disclaimer, I'm a complete noob when it comes to Obsidian and its inner works. I literally just started my journey into note taking.

Sadly, it has been a bit of a bumpy road so far. I'm at a complete lost at how on earth do you add tags to an existing note. Or rather, how do you deal with tags overall. Watch me here attempt to add tags here, and fail miserably over and over again:

obsidian.mp4

This makes the tagging system (and the whole frontmatter metadata system) very unreliable, I'm scared to edit something and loose everything 😵‍💫

But I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, hence my question: How do you all deal with tags and frontmatter properties? Specially when editing. It seems to work fine when creating, but as soon as I want to add a tag to an existing note... 💥

Here's my config btw:

return {
    "obsidian-nvim/obsidian.nvim",
    version = "*",
    event = {
        "BufReadPre " .. vim.fn.expand("~") .. "/notes/obsidian/gonzalo_notes/*.md",
    },
    cmd = "Obsidian",
    keys = {
        {"<leader>on", ":Obsidian new_from_template<CR>"},
    },
    ---@module 'obsidian'
    ---@type obsidian.config
    opts = {
        legacy_commands = false,
        ui = {
            enable = false,
            ignore_conceal_warn = true,
        },
        completion = {
            blink = true,
            nvim_cmp = false,
        },
        notes_subdir = "new",
        new_notes_location = "notes_subdir",
        workspaces = {
            {
                name = "personal",
                path = "~/notes/obsidian/gonzalo_notes/",
            },
        },
        picker = {
            name = "fzf-lua",
        },
        callbacks = {
            -- Make sure I don't have any formatting (not sure if this affects frontmatter)
            enter_note = function()
                vim.cmd("ConformDisable")
            end,
            leave_note = function()
                vim.cmd("ConformEnable")
            end,
        },
        note_path_func = function(spec)
            local date = os.date("%Y_%m_%d")
            local title = spec.title and spec.title:gsub(" ", "_"):lower() or ""
            local filename = date .. "_" .. title .. ".md"
            return filename
        end,
        open_notes_in = "current",
        templates = {
            subdir = "templates",
            date_format = "%Y-%m-%d",
            time_format = "%H:%M:%S",
        },
        daily_notes = {
            folder = "dailies",
            date_format = "%Y-%m-%d",
            template = "note",
        },
    },
}

[neo451]

Hi! Welcome to the community! It is totally normal that you are lost if you come into this the first time without prior experience with obsidian app, we should do more guiding to fix that.

I will go through the points you did wrong one by one, but don't feel stupid or anything because actually some of your instincts like going for completions is what we are going towards :)

1. inline tags look like #tag, with a leading #, while tags in the frontmatter don't need it, see https://help.obsidian.md/tags for how tags in markdown works
2. so completion for inline tags is triggered by #, and completion for tags in the frontmatter is on the roadmap but not realized yet, so you just put things in like tags: [your_tag], or delete the [] and make a newline, inserting - your_tag
3. ok on second watch of your video I realize the completion is not triggered by #, actually I remember we have code preventing tag completion to be triggered in frontmatter if I remember right, but is is because you typed right after the [, which is triggering completion for a markdown link, this is precisely a thing that I want to refactor recently: refactor!: completion should only be trigger by [[. #475, only [ triggering completion can be wrong in so many contexts, and obsidian app also only trigger with [[, so that is why
4. there's also no concept of creating a tag, tags are plain text markers that work like bookmarks, except they are inline and persistent, when you ask for tags with :Obsidian tags, we just run a ripgrep search for you, so the tag (create) is actually prompting you to create a note named tag, after you accept that completion, this plugin will also write that note for you, and you can navigate to it.
5. the reason your demo's typing got completely wipe is that we use a in-complete yaml parser, that only support what is supported in an obsidian frontmatter, which don' support nested properties, see https://help.obsidian.md/properties#Not+supported once parser failed on that node, your text are just gone when we update the frontmatter, sadly, maybe need to improve that down the line, but with normal usage you should be fine

---

So to conclude, write tags like

tags:
  - tag1
  - tag2

or inline

some text #here/is/a/tag

and when inline, you get completion trigger by #, but in frontmatter it don't work for now, wait for #474 to land

[neo451]

Also in the future there will be mappable action and LSP code action to give you a prompt box and add tags https://github.com/orgs/obsidian-nvim/discussions/489