Obsidian Advanced URI: How to Create and Use Advanced URIs

If you’ve ever tried to capture a quick thought into Obsidian on iOS, you know the drill: tap the app, wait for the workspace to load, wait for iCloud to finish syncing, and by then, you’ve forgotten what you wanted to write.

Obsidian has a built-in URI scheme to help with this, letting you open vaults or notes from outside the app. But if you want to bypass the Obsidian UI entirely—writing directly to files, targeting specific headings, or triggering background commands—you need the Advanced URI community plugin.

At first glance, an Advanced URI looks like a wall of text: obsidian://advanced-uri?vault=SecondBrain&filepath=Capture%2FQuickNotes.md

But breaking it down is surprisingly simple. Here is how Advanced URI works, how to build one manually, and a few ways I use it to tie Obsidian into my daily automations.

Why Use Advanced URI?

Obsidian’s default URI scheme (obsidian://open?vault=SecondBrain&file=QuickNotes) is great for navigation. It gets you to a specific note.

Advanced URI changes the game by letting you act on your vault without manually typing or clicking around. You can use it to:

• Append or prepend text to an existing note behind the scenes.
• Target specific headers or block references.
• Automate Daily Note creation.
• Trigger specific Obsidian commands from tools like Apple Shortcuts, Raycast, or a home screen widget.

If you’re entirely new to streamlining your note-taking on mobile, you might also want to skim our guide on how to capture notes quickly in Obsidian first.

Getting Set Up

Since it’s a community plugin, you’ll need to install it before your device knows what to do with an obsidian://advanced-uri link.

1. Open Obsidian Settings > Community plugins.
2. Click Browse and search for Advanced URI.
3. Install and Enable it.

That’s it. Your vault is now listening for advanced routing requests.

Deconstructing the URI

Let’s tear apart the example from earlier to see how the routing actually works:

obsidian://advanced-uri?vault=SecondBrain&filepath=Capture%2FQuickNotes.md

• obsidian://advanced-uri – The trigger. This tells your OS to wake up Obsidian and hand the instructions directly to the plugin.
• ?vault=SecondBrain – The target vault. (Notice the ? indicating the start of our parameters).
• &filepath=Capture%2FQuickNotes.md – The exact note we want to hit. The %2F is just a URL-encoded forward slash (/), meaning the real path is Capture/QuickNotes.md.

Every new parameter you add is just chained on with an &.

Building an Advanced URI Manually

Let’s say you want to build a URI that appends a quick reminder directly to your QuickNotes.md file.

You start with the base and the vault: obsidian://advanced-uri?vault=SecondBrain

Target the specific file: &filepath=Capture%2FQuickNotes.md

Tell the plugin what action to take (in this case, add text to the bottom): &mode=append

And finally, feed it the actual text you want to save: &data=Review%20meeting%20notes%20before%20Friday

String it all together, and you have a fully functional automation link: obsidian://advanced-uri?vault=SecondBrain&filepath=Capture%2FQuickNotes.md&mode=append&data=Review%20meeting%20notes%20before%20Friday

The #1 Trap: URL Encoding

If there’s one thing that will silently break your Advanced URIs, it’s failing to URL-encode your text.

Web links can’t handle raw spaces or special characters. A space has to become %20. So Second Brain has to be passed as Second%20Brain.

This becomes critical when you’re passing whole sentences or Markdown into the data parameter. If you try to pass symbols like &, #, ?, or = without encoding them first, the URI will interpret them as structural code, and your link will fail.

If you’re building these URIs dynamically inside Apple Shortcuts, make sure you always run your text through a “URL Encode” action first.

Connecting with Apple Shortcuts

Using Advanced URIs inside iOS Shortcuts is where this plugin really shines. You can build a Home Screen button that asks for a task and silently dumps it into your vault.

Here is the exact flow to set that up in Shortcuts:

1. Add an Ask for Input action (set to Text).
2. Add a URL Encode action and pass the provided input into it.
3. Add a URL action and paste in your base Advanced URI.
4. Add &data= to the end of your URI, and insert the magic variable for your URL Encoded Text.
5. Add an Open URLs action.

Your final URL block will look something like this: obsidian://advanced-uri?vault=SecondBrain&filepath=Capture%2FQuickNotes.md&mode=append&data=[Encoded Input]

If you want to take this further—like mapping it to hardware buttons—check out these setups:

• Using Apple Shortcuts with the Action Button
• Using Apple Shortcuts from the Lock Screen
• Apple Shortcuts for Obsidian workflows

Targeting Daily Notes

You can use a similar Shortcut to append text directly to today’s Daily Note.

The trick here is dynamically generating the file path so it always matches today’s date. If your daily notes are formatted as yyyy-MM-dd, configure your Shortcut to grab the current date, format it exactly like that, and inject it into the filepath parameter.

Example: Daily%20Logs%2F[Formatted Date].md

This ensures your Shortcut never breaks, even when midnight rolls around. (For more ideas on this, check out our Obsidian Daily Notes workflows).

Is Building URIs Worth It?

If you love tinkering, connecting external apps, and building highly specific automations (like a script that triggers a complex Obsidian workspace layout), Advanced URI is one of the most powerful tools in the Obsidian ecosystem.

But a quick reality check: if your only goal is just getting text, photos, or voice notes into your vault without friction, maintaining URL strings and debugging Shortcuts can quickly become exhausting.

Full disclosure: I actually built an app specifically to bypass all this manual setup. Quick Capture for Obsidian lets you shoot text, audio, and files directly into your vault (or specific headings) natively, without stringing together a single URI.

If you’re tired of mobile capture slowing you down, it might save you a few hours of setup. You can Download Quick Capture on the App Store here.

If you prefer to build it yourself, master the pattern: Action → Vault → File → Parameters → Encoded Data. Once that clicks, you can automate almost anything in Obsidian.