Free swipe file templates
A working structure for collecting other people's work — hooks, layouts, formats worth reusing. For Notion and Obsidian. No email, no signup: the files are plain Markdown, linked directly below.
Obsidian vault template
Index note with YAML frontmatter, the tagging scheme, and a worked example entry. Drop it in your vault and the tags appear immediately.
Download .mdObsidian entry template
One-entry template using Obsidian's and variables. Point Settings → Templates at it and every new entry is pre-shaped.
Download .mdNotion template
Import via Import → Markdown. Includes a starter table you can turn into a database, with the properties worth having and nothing else.
Download .mdThe one field most swipe files are missing
Every entry in these templates has a Why line: one sentence, written when you save it, saying what you'd actually steal.
Weak: “great thread”
Useful: “Opens with the objection instead of the benefit.”
That sentence is the entire value of an entry. Without it you're left re-deriving what you found interesting months later, which is slow enough that you stop opening the file at all. If you can't write the sentence, you probably don't need to save the thing.
Tag by use, not by topic
Search already handles topic. What search can't tell you is whether something is a hook, a structure or a visual reference — so that's what the tags are for. Five you'll recognise in six months beats forty you'll never reuse:
#hooksOpeners that earned the second line#structureFormats worth reusing#voiceTone worth learning from#visualLayout, colour, typography#proofHow a claim was credibly shown
The failure mode to avoid
Saving links instead of content. The post gets deleted, the account goes private, and the entry becomes a dead link with nothing left to tell you what it said. A swipe file only earns its keep at the moment you're stuck and reach for it — and if that reach fails once or twice, you stop reaching.
You can see how bad this already is in your own bookmarks with our dead bookmark checker.
Filling it without the copy-paste
Clipping by hand is where swipe files die. SocialClipper captures whole posts — text, images, video and threads — from X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn, and exports Markdown in the same shape as these templates. Free for your first 50 posts.