Quantum OS Acceptable Use of Aliases

Obsidian aliases are not standard markdown and may only be used for the acceptable uses listed below.

Acceptable use

Obfuscate names

As a personal Commonplace book, many notes make references to people. It is not appropriate for me to mention their names publicly in The Quantum Garden Website so I use aliases for this.

The form [[original name|reference]] allows me to reference my wife without you seeing her name.¹ There is custom Quartz code to remove all references for pages that are not uploaded.

Simplifying book, paper and article titles

Obsidian aliases are good for displaying note titles properly so book, paper and article although notes are named in accordance with the Quantum OS Note Naming Rules however this can create cumbersome name for reference. In this case an Obsidian alias with just the basic title.

• Create a YAML mapping of the proper name to “title”
• Create an YAML mapping of the proper name to “aliases” thereby creating an Obsidian alias for fast linking during note creation

Compound nouns

Aliases may be used for compound noun plurals as writing becomes clumsy otherwise. For example, always using the singular “Map of Content” when the plural “Maps of Content” is more appropriate and reads better.

Reintroducing illegal file system characters

Certain characters are considered illegal for file names. Two common ones where it comes to Quantum OS Note Naming Rules are ”:” and ”?”. The question mark in particular is usually one that needs to be displayed elsewhere for correct grammar.

• Create a YAML mapping of the note title with the illegal character to “title”
• Create an YAML mapping of the note title with the illegal character to “aliases” thereby creating an Obsidian alias for fast linking during note creation

Date expansion

The Quantum OS Linking Rules require all dates in the form YYYY-MM-DD to be linked. It is acceptable to use an alias to expand these to d MMMM YYYY or yesterday, last Friday, etc., for readability as the underlying file will never be renamed.

Website index pages

The Blog, Commander’s Log and Notes pages are a mix of pre-written intro and auto-generated index of entries. For this to work, there is a folder with an index.md file. That’s difficult to link to. In the previous sentence and without aliases, the links would be index, index and index. The best way to manage this is an alias on each index page with the required name. Then, within the system all links read properly.

Pluralisation

Although Obsidian aliases are good for pluralisation, there is the risk that Obsidian aliases create note-taking friction and show should be avoided for pluralisation where possible. Ideally rewrite the text to avoid the need for a plural.²

Footnotes

1. In the previous sentence all you will see is the unlinked text “my wife”. ↩

2. 2026-05-15: The prohibition of plurals via aliases was removed. [[note]]s was to be used instead of [[note|notes]] but it causes an unacceptable jolt to reading comprehension as [[note]]s needs to be parsed separately from the subject. ↩