Obsidian position marks

Here's a quick Obsidian tip. I've written quite a bit of lengthy prose in Obsidian then revised it, and when the work is broken across multiple sittings, it's easy to lose my place in a document. All the more so on a mobile device where the scroll sometimes resets unpredictably in large notes. I used to mark my place with some sequence of symbols, such as //, then search for that to find where I left off. Obsidian offers an improvement via block links.

Instead of a special sequence of characters, type a caret and a word, such as ^here. That's a block reference that marks the preceding paragraph with a label. You can jump to that mark with any internal link, such as [[Your file#^here]], but I use it in the file itself by creating a frontmatter field called marks with the value [[#^here]]. That gets rendered as a link which when clicked jumps to the ^here mark.

I put ^here on a blank line between paragraphs. Jumping to it briefly highlights the preceding paragraph, but I know the mark is a separator and resume editing below that point.

If you make the marks field a list, you can include multiple links in one frontmatter field. You can also create a template that works with both the Templates core plugin or the Templater community plugin:

---
marks:
  - '[[#^here]]'
---
^here

That will add the link to the marks field, creating the field if it doesn't exist, and add ^here wherever your cursor is.

Be warned that not all Markdown renderers recognize Obsidian's ^ syntax. While exporting from Obsidian won't render the in-document marks, other Markdown formatters might, and I've occasionally ended up with stray ^here paragraphs.