Using symlinks to manage multiple Git repos in a single Obsidian vault

This is a note about how I link my book and Blog to my Obsidian Second Brain Vault. Both of the folders are git repos that usually I edit in a separate Vault or with Neovim. But with Symlinks, thanks to Lazar I linked them directly to my main Vault and I can edit them now from within one single Vault.

Why is this important or how does that help?

It helps me, especially for my book which I write in Markdown and references my second brain notes with plain wiki-links [[]]. I have a script or mdbook-extension that converts automatically all my links from Wikilinks like [[my link]] to my Second Brain links ssp.sh/brain/my-link.

This was already pretty cool. But whenever I renamed a note in my second brain, I had to update my book and do the rename there too. But not anymore, see below.

Also linking my blog into the second brain, only the content part, it’s just so cool to have one single vault for all my heavy writing. Quickly referencing and searching the content I have written in the book or blog is so cool.

Using Symbolic Links to reference my blog inside my vault:

Gives me this:

And now in Obsidian I can edit directly my blogs !!!

I created even a Template 🕸️ ssp.sh Template that I set as default in Templater:

Wow, you can even reference them, and finding them with [[]], this is amazing:

• Can I reference them index.en
• e.g. data orchestration trends blog here: index.en

That means I can write my book inside my second brain vault as well, and even use my wikilinks to my second brain !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And they even show up in the search!!!!!!:

This is almost too good to be true. And everything is still in its own GitHub, meaning I still see all the changes in case I mess something up.

I’m curious if related links that I use would be updated?

Yes, they do!!!

🤯: If I rename the linked note in my obsidian vault, the links in my DEDP book get renamed as well!

• Now I need to write a module that I can use Obsidian wikilinks [[]] inside my blog as well, and my links are persistent and change when renaming!

E.g., for the blog and book, it actually syncs all the notes to Obsidian Sync because, for Obsidian, these are normal files. Meaning I even have them on mobile!

Attention

So if I change them on my mobile, they might conflict with what I have on my machine. Not sure if Obsidian sync will then overwrite what has been stored on the local disk, i need to test, but probably yes.

• so the best thing to change these on the computer as there is only one file and hopefully obsidian sync is not conflicting.
• But we’ll see. I always can revert back to Obsidian Sync, and also in Git.

Update after Tests:
It, seems to work quite well between sync mobile and my computer. At least if the Macbook is connected and syncs it directly to the file system. Maybe it’s different if the Mac is offline, changes are made on mobile and then I’d change without a second brain vault, but the book vault

Update 2025-01-20:
Potentially Symlink can make problems in Obsidian Mobile Troubleshoot, see Problems with Indexing Crashing Obsidian - Help - Obsidian Forum. And I had the problem that the “Vault was indexing on each open on Mobile”. After excluding this folder from the sync on mobile and deleting them, after a while, it worked, and the Obsidian Sync/Indexing Vault worked back as normal. I still have the folders on my Desktop without any problems.

More on how I publish my second brain publicly see Public Second Brain with Quartz.

See HackMD.

YouTube Video

I created a YT video this topic, check out at - if you enjoy a video more:

Origin: A lazy man’s Obsidian + Astro workflow integration - YouTube
References:
Created 2024-08-08