Obsidian Tutorial - Making & Using Templates
God I love templates. Consistent layouts of notes AND less typing? I’m a simple man with simple pleasures. There are a lot of things you can do with templates, and with certain plugins they can get quite complicated, but the basics are pretty straightforward.
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Head to the settings menu and find core plugins. Toggle on the Templates plugin.
[ID - a screenshot of the Obsidian settings menu, in the Core Plugins section. The ‘templates’ plugin is highlighted and toggled on.]
Under the core plugins section in the settings menu, head to ‘Templates’ to set up a few basics
The most important one is your template folder location - this is the place you’ll save all your templates. I have one in my Meta folder just called ‘Templates’ - I recommend making a similar, clearly named folder so it’s easy to find
The date and time format options are slightly more complicated additions: there are certain formats you can use in basic templates to automatically fill in date and time, and this is where you set how you want that format to look. Don’t worry about it too much - you’re safe to leave it as the default if you want.
[ID - a screenshot of the Template plugin settings in Obsidian. At the top, the template folder location is filled out as ‘00 Meta/Templates’.]
Once you have your folder location set up, you can start making templates!
A simple example might be a character profile: create a new note, and lay out the text the way you’d like it to look, but without any specific details in.
Make sure the note is in your template folder
You can now use that note as a template! You can insert it into a new note either by using the command palette and the ‘insert template’ command, or you can assign a hotkey (I use Ctrl+T) and use that
Congratulations, you have now saved yourself approximately a million years of repetitive typing, and the stress of remembering how you want to lay out character profiles, journals, blog posts, and any number of other things
Bonus - free templates!
I have a handful of templates I’ve made, and you can grab them for free here:
character profile
country
fictional organisation
fic
scene yaml
RPG NPC template (requires dataview & metadata menu plugins for full automation, but you can delete those parts and use it manually as well)
RPG location template
Monthly planner (requires dataview)
Note: some of these make use of the ITS infobox custom CSS - i wrote a rough guide to installing it here
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