Using the Obsidian notetaking app to write posts for Zola

19 May, 2026 - Categories: notetaking, blogging - Tags: Obsidian, Zola, front matter

By Steven Rosenberg

I've given quite a few notetaking apps a tryout in my quest to both find a smoother workflow for writing posts for static site generators like Zola and Hugo, and now it's Obsidian's turn. Or it's my turn at using Obsidian.

I did leave Obsidian for pretty much the end of my "journey" of trying every notetaking app I could find in Flathub.

Why did I leave Obsidian to the end? I've tried to prioritize apps that are coded in more traditional-to-linux/unix ways (i.e. not Electron or other Javascript cross-platform frameworks).

There even is a plugin to export Obsidian posts to blogs such as Hugo, Hexo and a few others. Like Obsidian itself, the plugin seems very complicated, with a lot of configuration options. The plugin also didn't work for me with the TOML front matter for a Zola post.

I didn't give up so easily. I found the Enhancing Export plugin, which seemed promising.

The export appeared to go well. I got an .md file exactly where I wanted it. However, all of the brackets in my TOML front matter were escaped with backslashes.

Instead of:

[taxonomies]

it was:

\[taxonomies\]

Why is it doing that? Who wants this?

I could spend many hours trying to figure out how to get it to export to go the way I want, but I'm not excited enough about the app to make the effort. If there were another plugin, or native functionality (which this really should be) to do the export the right way, that would be nice.

Note: This entry was copy/pasted into and exported out of Iotas because that is one of the apps that exports the right way out of the box.