Obsidian Properties in YAML Frontmatter  ## Metadata - Author: [[Nicole van der Hoeven]] - Full Title: Obsidian Properties in YAML Frontmatter - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: [#obsidian, #yaml, #pkm] - #obsidian - #yaml - #pkm Author: Unknown (YouTube creator of Obsidian tutorial) Source: Obsidian properties in YAML frontmatter (v1.4 - OUT NOW!) Reference: [YouTube Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxqkIhh9L8) date created: 2025-08-23 20:15 --- # Title: Obsidian v1.4 YAML Properties & Frontmatter UI Overhaul ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-diversity-equity-inclusion-and-belonging-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis-prompt) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) --- ## 📝 Summary: Obsidian 1.4 introduces a robust new UI for YAML frontmatter and properties, solving long-standing issues with syntax errors, broken links, and lack of property consistency. The release adds property types (text, list, number, checkbox, date, time), auto-suggestions, real-time updating, and clickable links. While some plugins (Fantasy Calendar, Banners) currently face compatibility issues, core integrations like Dataview remain intact. The update enforces data consistency and reduces reliance on external “data model” notes, marking a major step toward structured metadata in personal knowledge management (PKM). --- ## 📖 Main Content: The update replaces YAML frontmatter’s hidden text structure with a dedicated UI pane. Users can now: - Assign property types that enforce valid input. - Click directly on links and URLs inside properties. - Use auto-suggestions for consistent values. - Switch between Source mode (raw text) and UI mode. - View properties globally across the entire vault. This change prioritizes structure and data integrity, though it creates a learning curve for those accustomed to YAML text editing. ### 🗒️ Notes - **Problems with old YAML frontmatter** - Syntax errors invisible to users. - Links broke when notes were renamed. - No enforcement of consistent property naming. - **New Features (⏲️ [02:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxqkIhh9L8&t=174))** - Property types: list, number, checkbox, date, time. - Strong typing prevents errors (e.g., text vs. number). - Clickable links/URLs within the UI. - **Core Plugin "Properties" (⏲️ [08:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxqkIhh9L8&t=519))** - Dedicated pane for metadata management. - Real-time updates between text/UI modes. - Supports filtering across vault for consistency checks. - **Caveats (⏲️ [14:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxqkIhh9L8&t=859))** - Changing property types can break templates. - Some community plugins require updates. - Nested keys no longer supported in YAML. - **Plugin Compatibility (⏲️ [17:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxqkIhh9L8&t=1038))** - Fantasy Calendar & Banners: partially broken. - Excalibrain & Dataview: still functional. - **Takeaway (⏲️ [19:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrxqkIhh9L8&t=1194))** - Auto-suggest reduces human error. - Data model notes no longer required. - Biggest value: enforced consistency across PKM. --- ## 📖 References: - Obsidian v1.4 Insider Release Notes - Obsidian Community Plugins Docs - PKM workflows integrating Dataview --- ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. Original: "Obsidian 1.4 introduces property types like number and checkbox, enforcing correct values." **Paraphrase**: The update allows properties to be strictly typed, ensuring only valid data entries—like forcing numbers where numbers belong. 2. Original: "Auto-suggest replaces the need for a data model page." **Paraphrase**: Instead of manually tracking field names and values, Obsidian now offers intelligent suggestions that streamline metadata creation. --- ## 📰 Newsletter: 🛠️ **Obsidian’s New Metadata Superpowers** Obsidian just leveled up. Version 1.4 gives YAML frontmatter a proper UI, fixing years of “hidden errors” in note metadata. You can now set property types (number, date, list), click links directly in metadata, and rely on auto-suggest for consistent tagging. ⚠️ Heads up: Some plugins (Fantasy Calendar, Banners) need updates. But fan favorites like Dataview still work flawlessly. For WordPress and open-source builders, this is a clear sign: structured metadata + usability wins. It’s like finally getting a proper custom fields UI in WordPress core—game changer. --- ## ✅ Action Items: - Explore how Obsidian’s metadata UI mirrors **WordPress custom fields**—potential blog topic. - Advocate structured metadata in OSS governance docs. - Test workflows: identity YAML properties vs. contributor profiles. - Teach contributors YAML best practices via analogies with WordPress schema. - Frame OSPO proposals around **structured metadata for sustainable collaboration**. --- ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - Enforced metadata types improve PKM system reliability. - Metadata UI lowers barrier for non-technical users. - OSS projects adopting structured metadata see higher long-term contributor retention. ### 📊 Methodology: - Compare error rates in vaults pre/post-update. - User surveys on YAML usability before/after. - Case studies of OSS projects integrating metadata standards. ### ❓ Questions: - Will enforcing property types cause resistance among power users? - Can metadata UI adoption inspire schema governance in OSS? - How does consistency in personal notes mirror team documentation? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Longitudinal study on metadata-driven PKM adoption. - Plugin compatibility tracking post-1.4 rollout. ### 💡 Implications: - Could standardize data handling across PKM → enterprise knowledge management. - Lessons apply to WordPress custom fields, block schema, and contributor dashboards. --- ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: - **Visual**: Strong (icons for property types). - **Aural**: Weak—no audio alternatives. - **Verbal**: Clear explanations in video. - **Kinesthetic**: Strong (hands-on demo of UI). - **Logical**: Very strong (property enforcement logic). - **Social**: Weak—solo demo, no collaboration. - **Solitary**: Strong—fits personal note workflows. - **Naturalistic**: Absent. --- ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - Needs alt-text for demo visuals. - UI should be tested with screen readers. - Ensure keyboard navigation in properties pane. - Contrast readable, but themes may vary. --- ## 🌍 DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) Assessment: - Neutral, technical content—few cultural perspectives. - Inclusive language overall. - Could improve by featuring workflows from diverse PKM users (students, neurodiverse, global). - Add community voices to ensure equity in tool design. --- ## ✅ Logical Validity: - **Strong reasoning**: - Causal chain: typed properties → fewer errors. - Analogy: UI vs. source mode like live preview vs. markdown text. - **Weaknesses**: - Occasional generalization (“everyone will prefer UI”). - **Tone**: Practical, explanatory, slightly enthusiastic. --- ## 🔍 DARVO Analysis Prompt: - No DARVO tactics present. - Speaker is transparent about bugs and limitations. - Tone: candid, acknowledges learning curve without deflection. --- ## 🔍 SEO Evaluation: - **Keywords**: “Obsidian YAML frontmatter,” “Obsidian properties,” “Obsidian 1.4.” - **Meta**: Lacks formal description—add summary with target keywords. - **Headers**: Video lacks, article version should use H2/H3. - **Links**: Could cross-link to Obsidian docs + plugin repos. - **Length**: Adequate for SEO if transcribed. - **Engagement**: Video - Summary: Obsidian has introduced version 1.4, which includes a new UI for frontmatter and properties. The new UI makes it easier to add and manage properties in YAML frontmatter. Users can now select different property types, such as text, list, number, checkbox, date, and time. The properties are still translated into pure text in the source mode, ensuring future compatibility. Additionally, Obsidian has added a new core plugin called Properties, which provides a separate properties pane for viewing and managing file metadata. - URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RrxqkIhh9L8&si=pW-ZhJ9zlMt-yoT7 - The YAML frontmatter support in Obsidian is one of the best things about Obsidian, but there have always been a few niggling little details about its implementation that have rubbed me the wrong way. The first is that most people don't know YAML and so they might not know when something's broken because it's easy to get the syntax wrong. You leave a dash out or you might forget how to define keys and values, or you might forget that the frontmatter has to be put at the top of the note and the thing just breaks, and you might not even know that it's broken or how to fix it. The second thing is that while you can define links in the frontmatter, when you link to a note and then you rename that note, the link isn't updated. So you're now referring to a note that doesn't exist. So a lot of people, including myself, have taken to putting these links in comments within the body of the note, but then it's kind of like you're doubling up. You have the frontmatter and then you have comments when really you should be able to do it using one or the other. And the third thing is that there's really nothing about Obsidian that enforces consistency. You might start out with just the basic properties, but trust me, you'll eventually add more and more of your custom properties, then you forget how you spelled it the last time or what you called it. And nothing in Obsidian really tells you to stick to those properties or the values that you've selected to use. And the way that I've solved this is by having a data model page, but that isn't really pretty either, until now. Version 1.4 in Obsidian is out and with it come a lot of changes including a new UI for frontmatter and properties. In this video, I'm gonna show you everything that's new. So this is my note on this video that I'm making right now. It's very meta, and you might see that there is a brand new properties UI section here. Now you can always switch back to how it looked before by going back into source mode, and this is what it used to look like. The eagle eyed among you have left comments in a previous video talking about this very section and asking, what brand new plugin I was using? It wasn't a plugin, I was testing this release. So now the secret's out and I can officially talk about it. The first thing you'll notice is that there are different icons next to these properties and that corresponds to the type of the properties. So you can click on them and you can select among a variety of property types. So the default is going to be Text if you have a string. However, there are some smarts behind this so then it automatically tries to infer the data type. So if you have a date, for example, it might already choose the date property type for you. Text is what you might expect and it's probably going to be your most common one. So let's go over here, click Add property and we can do that now by the UI. So I'm going to type topics for example, but I'm also going to change this to a property type of List so that I can type out multiple things. So a list is kind of like a multi-select field. So I can say PKM and I'll hit Enter and you'll see that that was added as a separate thing. So this is the type that you would use if you wanted to be able to choose different values at the same time. I might also say Obsidian, for example and then maybe frontmatter and maybe YAML. I'm going to add a property here and I'm going to say this one is video ID, all right? And then I'm going to change that to a number and maybe I'll say that this one is 001. Now if I tried to type anything else it won't actually let me do that because I've said that this field is a number. So this is very good for enforcing the types of the values that you're typing in. Let's add another property and this time it's going to be a Checkbox. Let's say this one is edited and I'm going to change it to a Checkbox. This is a Boolean value, meaning it's either true or false and that's why there's a checkbox there. Right now it's set to false and when I click on it, it's set to true. Now two more things, date and time, they're kind of related. So let's say filming date and then I'll change that to a Date. And now I can't even type freely into this and that's a good thing, because now I can click on this and there's a nice little date picker. So I'm going to select today, which is July 20th. And then let's look at time. I wouldn't really go to this length for this video but I just thought it would be a cool way to show you the different property types. So I'll say filming time and I will change this to a Time, and now this, this one has a date and a time so it's just a little bit more specific. So I can select the date here. So I tend to film pretty late so let's say I started at 11:55. So those were the different types. Now let's flip back over into source mode to see what that looks like. When you do, you'll see that this is actually still pretty recognizable. So what you're doing in the UI is still being translated into pure text. It's still going to be very future proof, you can still open this in some IDE or whatever you wanted a text editor, and it'll still make sense. You just won't have the UI, you'll only have that in Obsidian. But I think it's cool to have this layer, kind of like the live preview renders the markdown but you can always fall back to the source mode. In addition to being able to set the property type of new properties, you can also change the property types of existing ones, but you might run into some issues depending on how your data is set up. For example, if you click on the No Value field here, you can see that I have put a bunch of different things in this ID column. It should really just be a number but I've also put things like none, I've put kLO2, I mean, this is a template. And so it's just a little bit all over the place. Unfortunately that means that when I click on Property type and I try to change it, it's going to give me an error that says, some of the data associated with this property key is incompatible. So, I'm going to go ahead and click that. From now on, everything that I put in here is going to have to be a number. Now that's actually a good thing in the long run. However, right now, if you have a bunch of different values where you haven't always been so consistent like me, then maybe you'll have to do some rejigging of previous notes to get them to fall in line with the new standard going forward. Let's also create a new property here that is called related and we're just going to leave this as text. Now I can show you what a link to a page looks like. So just by hitting the brackets, it brings up the auto complete dialogue and then I can put whatever I wanted to link. So let's say I wanted to link to Obsidian. Let's make a link to PKM. Now this link is clickable, so just by clicking on it here it goes to the page right away. So it didn't use to be clickable in the frontmatter before. So even in source mode we can see that, see it, it just looks like that and it doesn't really serve any purpose by just being there. But in the new default UI, it is clickable. And when we click on it and let's just change this to something else like test. After that updates you can see that it also updated on the left here. This is huge. Like I said earlier, what I used to do is put things within these comments here and this is where I would've put the link to PKM, solely so that it could be clickable and so that it would update when I renamed the file, but I don't have to do that anymore. So let's go ahead and remove this and see it update again. In the same way the links to notes are automatically parsed and clickable, you can also add URLs. So I'm going to call this video URL and I'm gonna leave it as a text property type. And then let's say I want a link here. This is just my video to Anuppucin. I've done a video on that, check it out up there if you wanna see that. And now this is clickable. If I click on that, so it actually opened up my arc browser and is beginning to play that video. You can also click on these icons to remove the properties that you no longer need. So I'm just going to be cleaning these ones up because I don't actually need them. So that's the major part of the release that there's now a new UI for frontmatter that we can use to just make adding and managing properties a little bit easier. However, there's another part that I haven't shown you yet. While the whole properties UI is going to be standard, it's a core feature of Obsidian and it's going to be the default going forward. There is also an additional part to this puzzle and that's a new core plugin called Properties. If we go into settings here and go down to Core plugins, there's going to be a new properties plugin that is going to be enabled by default. This might be a little bit confusing because you might think that this is going to turn off the UI, it's not going to. What this is actually controlling is a separate properties pane that you can enable and disable. I would suggest that you leave it enabled for now. Now let's have a look at it. You can access it by hitting the command palette shortcut, Command or Control+ P and then you can type properties. You can show all file properties and you can also show all properties. So let's see the show file properties. This is another way of seeing this information but in another pane. So it's really cool because you can be scrolling down somewhere here and still be able to see the metadata of that file. I kind of like this view of seeing the metadata on the right side. It's kind of like in Finder or in a File Explorer view where you have the thing that you're actually looking at, and then the metadata on the side. You can also do all the things that we were talking about changing the property types, removing properties, and adding new properties all from this panel. You can also switch to source mode here and still see the properties for the file in the UI mode. So you can actually have the best of both worlds if you want to. They'll also update in real time so when you change something in one, the other one will update, because it's really pointing to the same thing. Now the other part of the properties pane, you can go to by going to the command pane again and going to show all properties. And by the way, these two you can already just have hot keys for. I can tell that I'm going to be using these quite a bit so I'm gonna have to think of some hot keys because I've got a lot already. So when you click on show all properties, now this is showing all of the properties that you have within your entire vault. So it can be a bit overwhelming, like this date one, I've got 3,971. It's kind of hard to see with this theme right now but there is also like a bit of a different icon here that corresponds with these ones that are here, and that gives you a clue as to what they are. Now when you right click on something here, you can change the property type of that property. So this is really good because then you can change it to anything. So if I hit text, then it's saying that some of the data associated with the property key are incompatible unfortunately. I don't actually want to do that but it is cool to be able to force different types. If you were looking for consistency, this is a great start. It's kind of embarrassing how many different types of frontmatter I've already managed to collect. So there's int here and intellect, I probably could have combined them into one and made that into a number. This is a cool thing that I could only have noticed in this show all properties view. Now just like with any release, this one comes with a bit of a learning curve as we readjust our workflows to figure out how we need to do things now, what plugins may have been broken or need to be updated to be able to continue using them. And I'm gonna call out those things that I noticed while I've been playing with it. The first is that you're going to have to get used to not seeing the frontmatter in source mode all the time. Now, maybe this is just a me thing, but it was really hard for me to get used to having the UI rather than the text. Maybe it's like an engineer thing, I just got used to it a certain way. So one thing that you can do for that is make sure that you hotkey the switch to source mode, and that's what I've done. So now when I want to flip back and just see the text, like the pure text so that I know what the UI is doing under the hood, then I can just switch to that easily, which you saw me do. Now another thing is that when you hit Command+ A or Control+ A to select everything, you might be used to that selecting the frontmatter. It does not. So you will first have to switch to source mode like I just did with a shortcut and then hit Select+ All. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are still some protected keys. These are the ones that Obsidian recognize by default without any community plugins like Dataview. So these are things like CSS class and tags, aliases and publish. So you can see that even though there's no property type called tags, it does sort of get its own property type that can only be applied to that protected key. So you're not going to be able to add a property that is going to be a tag one. Looks like it's still going to let you create a property called tags, but it's not actually going to be a tag. And anything that you put in there is not going to show up as a tag in the tags pane. So I just wanted to call that out. Now let's talk about plugins that I have noticed don't work or might need some rejigging. The first is Templater. Earlier I was showing you that I changed the property type of this ID property to number, and it did ask me if I was sure about it and that there were some data that was incompatible. Now, I did see that one of the things that was in the values field used to be a Templater string. That's because I have Templater enabled. And what it used to be was like a prompt so that every time I create a new note with this template, then it would ask me what the video ID was. So let's go ahead and look at that template. It looks like this, but if I go into source mode, uh-oh, it now says that the ID is empty. And that's because I made that change in property type to every instance of this property including the template. So there's no way right now to exclude certain folders like templates. So just be aware that if you have things like this where you're using a Templater string, and this also holds true for the templates core plugin, that you maybe don't want to change that property type just yet, maybe just leave it as a string for now. I'm sure that the developers are going to add this functionality in the future, at least so that it works with the templates plugin. Just be a little bit careful when you're messing with types especially if you get that message that says that there are some things that are incompatible. There is going to be a bit of a period where you're going back over your notes probably just to make sure that all of the values are what you would expect. You can also click on the values field to see what else is there, and maybe you can see at a glance what this needs to be. Like I can see from here that this definitely needs to be a text field. You may also have noticed here that there is a question mark icon here and that's because this is not valid according to the new rules for properties. So if I go to source mode, this is actually using the plugin Fantasy Calendar, which is a community plugin. It was originally intended for TTRPGs, but I use it for other things as well, like my content calendar. So these are the fields that are required by Fantasy Calendar, and you'll see that especially for this FC-date one, the month, day and year are nested keys. However, the new frontmatter model no longer supports these nested keys, they would have to be arrays instead which are defined in this way. So you have the property here and then the keys are defined like this. So you could have another one that has another element there. So that's how the UI knows that there's more than one element for that field, and so this just leaves it cold. Now instead of like deleting it or throwing an error, instead, it just shows this question mark. And it'll still show the contents of it, but for example, if you wanted all of these to be numbers or dates, then you still won't get anything from changing it because it would also change that nested key structure. So just be aware that if you're using Fantasy Calendar that you're going to have to put up with not having a nice date picker, at least until Jeremy, the developer fixes that as well. The good news is Fantasy Calendar still works, still parses all of this. It's just that you won't be able to interact with it on this UI. The other one that I noticed didn't work is probably a bit of a niche plugin, but it works on the frontmatter as well. So if I go to twc here, this is the banners plugin. Now, if I go into source mode, this is what it actually should look like. So I'm not entirely sure how the plugin works but I believe that there's something wrong with the parsing of the frontmatter. It is expecting the source mode rather than the UI mode. So now I kind of have to stay in source mode to see this but because I have Dataview plugins and the leaflet plugin, then I probably realistically would want to stick to the rendered live preview version, which means I can't use the banner. So maybe we just have to wait a little bit longer until that is updated as well. And some plugins that aren't affected are ExcaliBrain. ExcaliBrain is still able to parse relationships even though that's set in the frontmatter, and you're still going to be able to traverse your graph this way. You'll be happy to know that Dataview still works well. It still parses all of the frontmatter. So just be aware that if you have something like this where I had separated them by comma but that isn't parsed as separate elements, now it's showing if I flip back to the UI, it's actually showing the entire location as one thing even when I needed this to be three separate things. So the way that I would fix that is I would just add them like this so that they're elements in an array, and then flip back to the UI mode and now there are three different ones. This is good because this is of type list which is what I wanted. You might have to be careful of some of those interactions because of the way that you might have defined different elements before. The main takeaway here is consistency. Property types are now enforced. Not only that, but both properties and values have auto suggest so that when you start to type or even when you just click on that field, you get to see a dropdown of the different things that you typed in the properties or in the values. So while it still won't stop you from creating something that's entirely new, it doesn't restrict you from creating new properties or new values that are similar to the old ones. It does make it a lot easier if you get into the habit of just checking to see what you've created before. So I used to keep a data model page for this but honestly it was a pain to keep updated and I never did, and it is already very, very long. I'm gonna be happy not to need to have that data model page going forward. The last few releases of Obsidian have been slam dunks. The very last one, 1.3 introduced a new improved PDF viewer and PDF deep links, which I have yet to cover because it's changing a lot of the way that I used to process PDFs. 1.2 brought us Bookmarks and 1.1 brought us Canvas, all cool new features, and yet this version 1.4 is the one that I think I like the most. That's because rather than just giving me cool new features to play with which is nice as well, this is actually just giving me a better experience for a feature that I was already using very heavily, frontmatter. As of right now, version 1.4 the properties release is out to insiders, which means that if you signed up to give a little bit extra on the Catalyst plan, which is $25 as a one-time fee, which I think is pretty reasonable, then you will already have access to this. However, if you don't and you're just using the free version of Obsidian, usually it takes a couple weeks before it is released to the public. There probably going to be some changes between what I've just shown you and what eventually makes it into the public version. But I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek. I'm gonna keep you updated on the status of whether or not it's out to the public or not in the first pinned comment down there. So keep an eye on that. This really still works really well with Dataview. So if you were kind of on the fence on the Dataview community plugin, then maybe this is your push to finally go and learn that. Then checkout this video where I give you a tutorial on how to use Dataview, all of that will still be compatible with the changes described here. Thank you for watching. Gis la venonta fojo. (upbeat music), Obsidian Properties in YAML Frontmatter, Nicole van der Hoeven, 01hb4305nq19hnzy9y063t1v35.