Mind Like Water

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Export to Obsidian ​

Send your MLW notes and daily pages into an Obsidian vault as plain markdown files. The export is incremental — each run grabs only what changed since the last one — so you can run it as often as you like without re-importing your whole library.

Settings → Profile → Export to Obsidian.

How it works ​

  1. Click Export to Obsidian.
  2. On Chrome or Edge desktop, a folder picker opens — choose your vault (or any folder inside it). MLW remembers the folder, so future exports are one click. On other browsers, the export downloads as a zip you unzip into your vault.
  3. Files land in two folders: daily pages as Daily/2026-07-19.md, everything else as Notes/<title>.md.

After the first run, the button reads Export changes and only exports notes you've created or edited since. Export everything is always available for a full refresh.

Choosing folders ​

Both folder names are configurable, and nesting works — set the daily folder to Journal/Daily and files land in that subfolder of your vault. Your folder choices are remembered.

What the files look like ​

Every file gets YAML frontmatter with the note's title, created/updated dates, its daily date (for daily pages), its tags, and an mlw-id — a stable identifier that a future two-way sync can use to match files instead of duplicating them.

markdown
---
title: "Air Fryer Salmon Bites"
created: 2026-06-09
updated: 2026-06-09
tags:
  - recipes
mlw-id: 40c28110-83fa-4575-bb6a-3156e9877243
---

MLW notes are already markdown under the hood, so bodies transfer almost verbatim:

  • Tags become real Obsidian tags — #Deep Work exports as #Deep-Work (Obsidian tags can't contain spaces).
  • @-mentions of tasks, projects, and people become plain text labels.
  • [[Wikilinks]] pass through untouched — they resolve natively in Obsidian.
  • Checkboxes, tables, and images pass through unchanged.

What gets exported ​

  • All your cloud notes and daily pages with content. Empty auto-created daily stubs are skipped, so your vault doesn't fill with blank dated pages.
  • Notes that originally came from a vault are excluded — they already live there.

One-way, by design ​

This is an export, not a sync. Editing the markdown in Obsidian won't change anything in MLW, and re-exporting an edited note overwrites the file in the vault with MLW's version. Treat MLW as the source of truth for exported notes.

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