Obsidian: Building the Meta-Templater from Scratch

Obsidian users can automate note creation so the right template, metadata, and structure appear based purely on a trigger phrase typed into the new note’s title—eliminating repeated manual steps like inserting templates. The approach centers on a “meta template picker” built with the Templater plugin plus a small JavaScript helper that cleans titles, renames files, and routes creation to the correct template.

The workflow begins with the idea behind “meta templating”: Brian Jenks popularized a symbol-based convention where characters placed in front of links tell Obsidian what kind of note to create (for example, a curly bracket for book sources, an at sign for people, and an exclamation mark for tweets). Pamela Wang’s version avoids remembering symbols and instead uses trigger phrases placed before a dash in the filename. Typing something like “vid - Moonlander keyboard” (or “end - Project updates” for meetings) causes the file to be renamed according to the vault’s naming convention, while metadata fields and the note’s standard sections (task lists, IDs, headings, thumbnails, etc.) are filled in automatically.

To make this reliable, the system relies on consistent tagging and templated metadata. Notes are organized primarily through tags rather than folders, which pairs well with Obsidian’s graph view and DataView. The transcript describes how “uncreated” notes can still appear in the graph when they’re linked, and how filtering in the graph helps surface notes that exist only as links until they’re actually created. Supercharged links can also reflect note status (e.g., turning green when a note is marked complete), reinforcing the tag-driven organization.

Building the system from scratch starts with creating a few base templates in a Templates folder—such as a default note template that stamps the current date and sets a blank status, plus weekly and monthly review templates. A “simple zettel template” is then created with Templater code that runs JavaScript to: (1) extract the trigger phrase from the title, (2) clean the remaining title text, (3) rename the new file accordingly, and (4) insert structured content and metadata (including mode tags and aliases). Because the title-cleaning logic needs to handle edge cases (like missing dashes or extra dashes), the setup uses a user script function stored in Templater’s user script functions area.

With the individual templates working, the meta template picker template is added as the default creation handler for new notes created in a chosen vault location. The picker runs only on the first file creation, then checks the new note’s title: if it contains a dash, it extracts the trigger (lowercased and trimmed) and uses conditional logic to include the correct template (e.g., “z” for zettel, “s” for source book, “vid” for video source). Additional branches handle other naming patterns like “weekly review” and “monthly review,” and even “template” notes that should be moved into a templates folder automatically.

The final layer connects the automation to discovery. With tags like mode and kind, DataView can generate tables and “processing lists” (e.g., a list of book source notes filtered by tags and sorted by modified time). The result is a repeatable system where typing a short trigger phrase produces a fully formed note ready for writing, and later search and dashboards work off the metadata that was inserted automatically.