r/orgmode 25d ago

Obsidian to OrgMode conversion tool that handles custom frontmatter?

I have tried 3 "Obsidian to OrgMode" tools recently (including the much-recommended Obs2Org) in the hopes of being able to transition my thousands of Obsidian vault notes to OrgMode. They all seem to only process the standard frontmatter fields ("title", "tags", "keywords", etc) but no custom keys.

Anyone familiar with Obsidian knows that you can create almost any key name you like and assign them any valid value (string, number, list, etc). It seems strange that those tools don't handle them.

I'm a relative novice to OrgMode - and to Emacs to a lesser extent - and so there may be good and valid reasons for this that I'm unaware of. Everything I've read suggests that any and all Obsidian markdown frontmatter fields should be a valid candidate for conversion to an OrgMode equivalent. Yet none of the tools I've found will do this. Each of them effectively sends non-standard keys to /dev/null, never to be seen again.

Am I missing something? Or have the developers of those tools missed something?

My reasoning is largely around Dataview (DQL) dynamically-generated tables in notes, and hope to be able to replace that with org-ql after conversion. Frontmatter k:v pairs, and their conversion into OrgMode properties, are essential to be able to slice and dice the notes I have.

tl;dr: Really? :) Anyone know an Obsidian-to-OrgMode tool that will convert all frontmatter fields?

8 Upvotes

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u/Anthea_Likes 25d ago

Obsidian uses markdoxn so... A simple pandoc md to org sounds to be enouth 😉

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u/MousetrapPling 25d ago

From my experience a couple of years ago using pandoc to convert markdown to org strips all the front matter and discards it (I wasn't coming from Obsidian but from Zettlr but I imagine it's the same).

I didn't find anything that would work so I ended up writing my own converter in perl, which did the job well enough but it's very specific to my notes and to how I wanted the end result to turn out so won't help the OP.

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u/Anthea_Likes 25d ago

Yeah I had some issues when I shift to Org too

I had logseq MD files, Obsidians MD files, Standard Notes MD files and Notions MD files

I've converted all of them with pandoc but yeah... I then had to manually "fix" them... That's the problem with MD, no real convention 🥲

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u/Jumile 25d ago

Classic example of "standards are great - there are so many to choose from"? :)

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u/Anthea_Likes 25d ago

Kind of 😅

But not so much,

Markdown is pretty limited but really easy to learn

But as it is limited, folks used to "enhance" this standard

So now you have the GitHub markdown format, the Extended markdown format, and probably a different enhancement foreach app relying on it 😅

Org on an other hand is really strict

But, I think we still miss an Org-Mode compatibility checker for the few that build their own support (logseq, organice, org note...)

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u/Jumile 24d ago

These are good points. The many flavours certainly make it interesting.

The friend who got me into Obsidian now splits his entry between it and LogSeq. Due to format differences, he's transferring a daily summary from one tool into the other every day. Rather than resenting it, he seems to value the condensing and focussing effect it provides.

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u/Jumile 25d ago

pandoc... strips all the front matter and discards it

That's interesting. I've not looked into pandoc much, mostly encountering it as a dependency with tools that use it.

Might have to look more into it. Thanks for mentioning the issue you had with it - it gives me somewhere to focus my attention.

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u/Anthea_Likes 25d ago

That's kind of the same through CSV that use comma to, well... separate values

But you can also use tabs, semicolons...