I love Obsidian. But I have a problem: capturing new ideas is slow. What is the best way to do Obsidian Quick Capture?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First of all, what is Quick Capture?

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Quick Capture refers to the ability to capture an idea within an application quickly, without losing focus on your current task.

This might sound like a small thing, but the ability to quickly add something to Obsidian without friction is important. The easier it is to create notes, the more likely you are to do it, and the less likely you are to lose an important idea.

Some people keep a notepad by their bed in case they have an idea in the middle of the night. Others keep a whiteboard in the shower. These are similar, albeit physical, ways to quickly capture your ideas.

I often have ideas while working, reading online, or while out and about. In that situation, I want to have a way of quickly adding it to Obsidian without switching contexts.

That’s why I need Obsidian Quick Capture. This article is about quick capture on desktop, if you’re interested in capturing to your phone see Mobile Quick Capture in Obsidian.

Note: This is an intermediate Obsidian article. If you’re just getting started with Obsidian, see our Beginner’s Guide.

My Quest to Find Obsidian Quick Capture

Obsidian Quick Capture is tricky, because it inherently happens outside of Obsidian. So Obsidian plugins don’t work (with one exception, which we’ll get to in a bit).

In a perfect world, with a single keypress I could type something out, and it will automatically be added to a note in Obsidian for me to review later.

When I decided to look into this, my first thought was to search the Obsidian Forum, and sure enough, there are many different solutions presented there. Let’s look at a few of them.

Automation Solutions

Many people use automation tools for this purpose. The three most popular seem to be AutoHotKey for Windows, Autokey for Linux, and Shortcuts for Mac/iOS.

They all have their own way of doing things, and you can find examples for each on the Obsidian Forums (examples at the links above). But the idea is roughly the same: you bind a series of actions to a keyboard shortcut.

These can be handy, but they’re a pain to set up and they’re fragile. I’ve set up hotkeys like this before, but I often forget about them, or I have issues with them that I’m unwilling or unable to resolve. For this reason, I don’t typically recommend auto key solutions.

If you’re already familiar with the above applications, then you may want to try it. But for the rest of us, these solutions tend to be too complicated and not worth the effort.

App Launcher Solutions

Next up, let’s talk about app launchers. App launchers are, in theory, a great solution to Obsidian Quick Capture.

What are app launchers? They are small applications that allow you to quickly launch or swap applications. They are similar to the Command Palette in Obsidian. With a single key press, you can access any number of apps or workflows on your computer.

Even better, most app launchers support plugins that you can use to do more complicated things.

My favorites app launchers are Alfred on Mac and ULauncher on Linux. Both work for Obsidian Quick Capture.

If you use Alfred for Quick Capture, I recommend this workflow. Follow the setup instructions, and then you can add to either your inbox or your Daily Note with a single command, and without switching to Obsidian. Pretty nice!

If you’re on Linux, ULauncher has a very similar plugin. It doesn’t have as many bells and whistles, but it works well for me.

What about Windows? I don’t have any recent experience on Windows, and it seems like App Launchers aren’t as popular on Windows. After a little bit of searching, I found Flow Launcher, which looks nice and has an Obsidian plugin. But the Obsidian plugin looks like it isn’t well maintained, so I don’t have a lot of confidence in it. If you are on Windows and try it, or find a better solution, please let me know!

As an honorable mention, I also discovered UseType for Macs, which is like an app launcher but specifically for Quick Capturing notes. It seems really nice, if you want Obsidian Quick Capture with a few more bells and whistles.

The QuickAdd Solution

The App Launcher solutions are great for quickly adding to an inbox or your Daily Note. But what if you want to do more than that?

I frequently want to add a task to an existing project. I know the name of the project, so why bother sorting that later? Can I add directly to that project, instead of my inbox?

Yes, but with a caveat. You can do more complex Quick Capture solutions in Obsidian, but it requires a plugin: the QuickAdd plugin.

The QuickAdd plugin is great, because you can automate many aspects of your vault. Instead of dumping all of your quick capture notes in one place, you can fine tune where things go, and how they appear. Eventually I will write a full tutorial for QuickAdd, but for now, if you’re interested in QuickAdd check out the official documentation.

Currently in QuickAdd I have three separate workflows, which add content to three complete different areas of my vault (and with different formats):

For many months I didn’t use QuickAdd much, because it’s a pain to switch to Obsidian in order to use QuickAdd. It adds just enough friction to keep me from doing it, which is why I used App Launcher solutions for the last two years.

But I recently discovered another plugin that changed everything for me. It is the Global Hotkeys plugin. This plugin allows you to trigger Obsidian actions from anywhere on your computer, which is a game changer for QuickCapture.

So I set up Global Hotkeys and created a global hotkey that triggers QuickAdd (ctrl+alt+a, if you’re interested), and all of a sudden, I was using QuickAdd again. This one small change changed everything for me, and ultimately led to this article.

This isn’t a perfect solution, because when you trigger QuickAdd it switches you to Obsidian, and makes it harder for you to get back to what you were doing.

So I use both: I use the App Launcher when I am doing focused work, and the global hotkey whenever I don’t mind switching contexts to provide a little more organization. And so far, this is as close to perfect of a solution as I have found.

The Elephant in the Room: What About Mobile?

Fear not dear reader: Quick Capture is a difficult problem on mobile as well, and I have another article in the works. If you struggle to find the perfect solution for Quick Capture on mobile, then sign up for my newsletter, and you will be the first to know when the article comes out.

In Conclusion

Obsidian Quick Capture is a vital piece of the puzzle for knowledge workers. If you spend focused time working on your computer, then you owe it to yourself to find a good solution to quickly capture ideas without breaking your focus.

I hope this article has helped provide some of those ideas. If you know of other solutions that you prefer to those examples above, let me know! I don’t think a perfect solution exists yet, but maybe someday one will.