Obsidian Properties: Everything You Need to Know About

Obsidian has launched the properties feature for the public with the latest update. This is only available on the desktop app. The mobile app doesn’t currently support properties. You will need to wait a bit for that.

Properties are not an entirely new thing. They are a powered-up way to add metadata to your notes.

Forget the complexities of YAML. While the metadata still uses YAML format, it is easier than ever. You can edit metadata on the note itself. You no longer need to understand YAML. And you don’t run the risk of breaking the syntaxes.

The new properties feature can make your Obsidian experience somewhat similar to using Notion

In this article, we’ll explore what properties are and what you can do with them.

Using Properties Feature

To view your properties, go to Editor> Display> Properties in Document. Right there, choose the option to make the properties visible.

Let’s create a new note and see how it works.

By default, the note will not have any properties. It’s an empty note. To add properties to your notes, you will need to use the command palette or the assigned hotkey.

If you edit in source mode, a sidebar will open with the option to add properties. But if you edit in live preview mode, the properties will be shown in the editor itself.

Default properties

By default, you can have properties.

• aliases: Alias is an alternative name to a note that you can use to refer to it
• cssclasses: This helps to apply the custom CSS to style individual notes
• tags: This property will show all the tags used in your vault. It makes it way easy to add tags to your notes.

Custom properties

Besides the 3 default properties, you can add as many properties as you want. The different available property types are:

• Text