How I Use Obsidian Quick Capture on Mobile

I saw kepano’s repost on LinkedIn about the newest Obsidian release. In the release notes, I saw Obsidian Quick Capture mentioned as a feature for this release.

Obsidian famously was slow on Mobile and there was no quick capture function. I had created Apple Shortcuts to simulate those features. Click on a button and it basically calls the Obsidian URI to create a new unique note. Now, I don’t need to do any of that.

How to use quick capture

Obsidian have a nice doc which explains the feature

Basically,

1. Configure capture locations first - this has settings for where the note is saved, what template it uses, do you append or prepend to the note, and so on.
2. Add widget to your phone - Home Screen, etc.
3. Click on the button, type the text and the note is created or text is appended as configured.

I have the rectangular Obsidian widget on my ‘write’ screen now. It has four quick capture options -

1. Daily
2. Inbox
3. Tasks
4. Book

I created a new template for daily and tasks. The daily template has a line divider so the text is appended to it. The tasks template has a markdown checkbox text in it, so that each new task is added to my task list.

The daily capture adds small notes to the daily note.

The inbox capture basically creates a new unique note (with proper template) in my inbox folder, which is the flow I want.

The tasks capture adds a new todo to my tasks tracker.

The book capture creates a new unique note with a book title and using the metadata for my book notes.

All new notes live in the Inbox folder in my vault.