A radial menu for Obsidian and Notion: vaults, templates, and quick capture

Heavy note-takers do the same six things forty times a day. Open a vault. Capture a fleeting thought. Open today's daily note. Hop to a second workspace. Paste from the clipboard. Drop in a template. The friction is not in writing — it is in the navigation between writing.

This post is a layout. It is not an integration. Swik does not have a built-in Obsidian or Notion module, and it is not pretending to. What it does have is a set of generic primitives — pin a URL, run an Apple Shortcut, paste from a clipboard ring, insert text — that line up neatly with how Obsidian and Notion already expose themselves to the rest of the OS. You wire it together. The result is a radial menu that puts your six hot actions one flick from any app.

The DIY part is real. Set aside half an hour for the URL schemes and one Shortcut, and you will not touch the configuration again for months.

The six hot actions

Pick six because the human eye reads a six-wedge ring as positions, not as a list. Add a seventh and people start scanning labels. Below is the canonical set; swap any of them for the action you open every twenty minutes.

• Open vault or workspace. Your primary writing surface. The Obsidian vault you live in, or the Notion page you treat as home.
• Quick capture. An empty new note in your inbox folder. The "I just thought of something" wedge. Should never require typing a filename.
• Daily note. Today's journal page. Most people open this six or seven times a day and reach for it through a sidebar each time.
• Switch workspace. Jump to the second vault, second Notion workspace, or a specific reference page that lives outside daily flow.
• Paste from clipboard. Drop the most recent thing you copied into the current note. Or pick from the last eight clips.
• Insert template. Meeting note. Project brief. Weekly review. The structured page you fill in the same way every time.

Five of these resolve to URL schemes or Apple Shortcuts. The sixth — paste from clipboard — is a feature Swik already ships. We will walk through wiring each one.

The Obsidian half: URL schemes and Actions For Obsidian

Obsidian has supported a URL scheme for years. Every action below is a string you can drop into a wedge as either a pinned URL or, more commonly, as an Apple Shortcut that wraps the URL using the "Open URLs" action.

That is enough for "open vault," "quick capture," and "switch to second vault" without installing anything else. For "daily note" and "insert template," Obsidian's native scheme runs out of expressiveness — the daily-note plugin manages dated filenames internally — so you reach for one of two extensions.

Actions For Obsidian is a third-party app that adds 40+ dedicated Apple Shortcuts actions for Obsidian on macOS and iOS, including "Open or create today's daily note," "Append to daily note," and "Create note from template." Build a Shortcut that calls the action, then assign that Shortcut to a wedge. Here's the wiring guide for Shortcuts in Swik.

Alternatively, the Advanced Obsidian URI plugin extends the native scheme with parameters like ?daily=true and ?append=..., which means you can stay in pure URL territory if you prefer not to add another app to the chain. Either path works; the wedge does not care which one delivered the URL.

The Notion half: notion:// and the Mac app's keyboard shortcuts

Notion's deep-linking story is much narrower. The official trick is documented by Notion themselves: take any page URL and replace https:// with notion://, and the link will open in the Mac app instead of a browser tab.

That is the entire surface. There is no notion://new, no notion://search, no template parameter. So the Notion half of the layout works differently — you lean on three things instead.

• Pin specific pages as wedges. Your home dashboard, your inbox database, today's task list. Each is a notion:// URL that opens straight to that page in the Mac app. No navigation, no breadcrumbs.
• Use the Mac app's keyboard shortcuts inside Notion. Once a Notion page is focused, Cmd+P is quick-find, Cmd+\\ toggles the sidebar, Cmd+N creates a new page in the current workspace. Build a Shortcut that opens the right Notion URL and then sends the keystroke if you want a "open inbox and create new" wedge.
• Use Notion's built-in templates. The template button inside a database is one click; the wedge job is just to get you there fast. Pin the database itself, then let Notion's UI do the rest.

Notion users sometimes ask for an Obsidian-style URL surface and the answer has been "not yet" for a long time. The honest workaround is to commit harder to pinning specific pages — the URL of every page is stable, and a wedge full of pinned pages is faster than any sidebar tree.

Closing the loop with the clipboard ring and text-insert

Two Swik features that earn their wedges in any note-taking layout:

Clipboard ring. Swik keeps the last eight text clips you copied. Put a clipboard wedge on the menu and a flick opens a sub-menu showing each clip — a second flick pastes it into the active note. This is the wedge that turns "I copied a quote three copies ago" from a small problem into a non-problem. It is not a searchable database; for that, see the dedicated clipboard post. For the recency case, it is the fastest tool on the Mac.

Text-insert wedges. Pin a snippet of literal text to a wedge — a YAML frontmatter block, a meeting-note skeleton, a project tag. One flick inserts it at the cursor. This is not a full snippet manager (no auto-expansion, no variables) but for the three or four templates you actually use, a wedge is faster than navigating Obsidian's templates plugin or Notion's template button.

Together, these two cover "paste from clipboard" and "insert template" without leaning on any external app.

A full suggested layout

Here is the layout I have been running for a quarter. Yours will look different by the second week.

Six wedges. One trigger — a hotkey or a mouse side button. The whole loop runs without lifting a hand off the mouse, which is the entire point of doing this in the first place.

Context profiles for "writing mode" vs "reference mode"

One genuinely nice trick if your note-taking splits into modes: use Swik's context-aware profiles to swap the layout based on Wi-Fi network, attached display, or time of day.

• Morning, home Wi-Fi. Writing profile. Daily note, quick capture, and templates promoted to the top ring. Notion sub-menu collapsed.
• Office Wi-Fi, external display. Reference profile. Notion workspace and project pages on the top ring. Obsidian sub-menu collapsed.
• Evening, any Wi-Fi. Review profile. Weekly-review template wedge gets promoted. Quick capture stays.

Optional. The single layout above works fine. But if your writing days and your reference days look different, the profile change is automatic and you stop reaching for the wrong tool.

The DIY caveat, said clearly

Swik does not know what Obsidian is. It does not know what Notion is. It cannot fetch your daily-note title, list your databases, or auto-populate "recent notes" on a hover. None of that is supported and there is no roadmap to add it.

What Swik provides is a circular surface and a set of generic primitives — open URL, run Shortcut, insert text, paste clip, switch profile. The reason this works for note-takers is that Obsidian and Notion both expose themselves to the OS through documented URL schemes and (for Obsidian) a rich Shortcuts surface via Actions For Obsidian. Swik is the trigger surface. You are the integrator.

If that sounds like work, it is — for half an hour. After that, the layout sits there and earns its trigger every time you reach for a vault, a daily note, or a template. The number of times in a year that adds up to is the only argument worth making.