Automating Offline — Mac Tool — Hazel

What is Hazel

Everyone has files they want to organise so this tool is essential for doing just that based on rules you set up. An example of something I set up yesterday was for my journal pages. I have a generated list every day of a journal note (Daily Pages in Obsidian) which was starting to get long. So I’ve set up Hazel to automatically move any of these notes before this month into their own subfolders based on the month they are for.

Hazel is an automated file sorting application created by Noodlesoft for the Mac. You can basically set it to watch specific folders and give it rules to handle files within those folders.

This basically means that you can decide that certain things about any possible file should be organised in a certain way and maybe have different attributes, such as different filename, tags and moved to other folders or subfolders.

How to Use with Obsidian

Obsidian vaults are ultimately just a main folder with subfolders and files (most of which are text files). This means it works perfectly with Hazel. In order to use Hazel with an Obsidian vault all you need to do is add a rule and select the folder to watch, either the main vault folder or a folder within the vault, depending on the context of what you want to achieve.

Since this is a Mac only app then you obviously need a Mac to do this and run it. There are limited Windows alternatives, and while possible to do similar things it’s far more cumbersome to set up.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog