obsidian-frontmatter

Purpose

This skill manages YAML frontmatter — the metadata block at the top of every Obsidian note, delimited by ---. Obsidian calls these "Properties" and displays them in a structured panel. This skill covers the complete lifecycle of frontmatter: writing it correctly the first time, enforcing consistent schema across notes, updating stale properties, and repairing malformed YAML that causes Obsidian to show parsing errors.

Frontmatter is how Obsidian notes become queryable. Without consistent, well-formed properties, Dataview queries fail, searches return incomplete results, and the vault's metadata structure erodes over time. This skill treats frontmatter as the schema layer of your knowledge base.

When to Use

Invoke this skill when:

• The user wants to add a frontmatter block to a note that has none
• The user wants to update a specific property (e.g., change the status, add a tag)
• The user needs to standardize frontmatter across multiple notes to a shared schema
• The user asks to "add properties", "update metadata", or "fix the frontmatter"
• The user's note has a YAML parse error and Obsidian is not showing properties correctly
• The user wants to add or remove items from a list property (like tags or aliases)
• The user wants to set up a consistent template for a note type (meeting, project, daily note)
• The user is building Dataview queries and needs to define which properties to use