Stashpad Obsidian Integration
Stashpad Obsidian Integration
A giant step forward in the dream of collaborating on Obsidian notes with others.
I use a number of plugins for Obsidian to support various workflows. One use case of some importance is sharing Obsidian note with others, and that has been an area I have not found a workable solution for.
In the perfect world, the company behind Obsidian would offer a ‘collaboration’ solution that would include a Google-Docs-like experience, with shared commenting and permissions control. I would like to be able to share a note with one or more other people to gain their feedback, for example, while not allowing them to make edits to the note’s content. And, following the Google Docs model, I would like them to be able to select text and offer proposed edits.
Enter Stashpad and their integration with Obsidian.
About Stashpad
I only learned about Stashpad this week, reading about the new Obsidian integration, about which more later.
Stashpad is a company that has developed two tools:
Stashpad Lists - despite the name, this is a desktop app for Markdown notes with built-in task management and synch with mobile devices.
Stashpad Docs - a web-based Markdown editor with shared commenting and review capabilities. An Obsidian plugin allows for exporting Obsidian notes to Stashpad Docs.
I downloaded the Lists app, but it doesn’t seem to be integrated with the cloud-based Docs app.
Stashpad Docs
Stashpad Docs is advertised as ‘Your Streamlined Google Docs Alternative’, and that’s pretty apt.
Here’s a Doc I created as a test, and I logged in using my Gmail account to create the doc, and I shared it using a share link and clicked on that in a incognito window (User 91):
First, the basics (from that doc):
Can't seem to export in any format. Have to cut and paste, or use other tools (I have one called Paste to Markdown that converts various sorts of text to markdown.)
Footnotes aren't supported.
The Obsidian plugin works in a one-way fashion, from Obsidian to Stashpad. There’s also no way to even copy the comments from a doc, except one-by-one, manually.
Does not upload images or other referenced files. (I tried with a different export from Obsidian).
Commenting looks very well worked out. Although has some oddities:
Once text is commented on it can't be edited? At least I can't figure out how to edit the selected text, even once 'resolved'. It seems to be frozen until the comment is deleted.
There is no obvious link between a comment and the associated text, but if you click on a comment the highlighting of the associated text darkens.
Permissions and Sharing
Very sophisticated permissioning: I as the creator of a doc can opt to share with a/ anyone with the link, b/ only people invited, or c/ only people from my company.
I haven’t tried the latter two options, but when they are selected you are prompted to either add an email or to set-up a company domain with Stashpad.
Suggested Edits
A suggested edit can be created by turning a toggle at the top of a document page, and selecting text and typing leads to the middle comment below:
Clinking the resolve checkmark applies the edit. Very cool.
Some Recommendations for Stashpad
Two-way integration between Obsidian and Stashpad would be very cool. It poses a few questions, however:
How to render Slashpad comments in Obsidian? There is no natural best answer, but my preference would be to convert Stashpad comments to sidenotes of the sort I’ve written about in the past (see The 'Share Note for Obsidian' Plugin and Tufte Sidenotes). Here’s an example of how that might look. Here’s the Stashpad:
And here’s how it might look on the Obsidian side, with the Stashpad comments realized as sidenotes.
It’s a maxim of Obsidian that users want to have everything in the markdown in their local hard drive, so ultimately I — and other Obsidian users — would like to have the results of coordinated work on shared documents reflected back in the originating Obsidian notes.
And finally, if those invited to share Stashpad documents are themselves Obsidian users — and it they have been granted sufficient permissions — it would be reasonable for them to synchronize the shared Stashpad doc back to their own Obsidian vault. A number of implementation details would need to be worked out, but I bet in the final analysis that what most Obsidian users would want.
And would gladly to pay a monthly subscription for that.