At its easiest, Obsidian is software: a place where you dump and search data. It can be pastebin with a bow on it. The bow can be Obsidian’s search functionality, which works fast. (View Highlight)
Using Obsidian can be hard. Or it can be very easy. That’s up to how far you want to take it. (View Highlight)
Obsidian, to me, is more of building a process to handle information. It’s a lot like Getting Things Done, which is a productivity methodology: you don’t have to learn every little thing but, rather, it’s about how you want to use and what you want to gain from information. (View Highlight)
At its best, Obsidian is where I go to store, find, and relate all kinds of knowledge:
all my research
word and term definitions, in order to create a glossary
book reviews, where I link authors and themes together, creating a knowledge graph that allows me to see visual maps from vast amounts of text
daily notes (which are actually created with just the touch of a button)
reports that I’m writing
Microsoft Writing Style Guide which is simply snatched from GitHub
temporary notes (that later could become permanent)
food recipes, linked and tagged
blog ideas
relating philosophy ideas and concepts (God, I long for the day when a constantly-evolving Obsidian vault regarding philosophy drops!)
diagrams and flowcharts that are composed from text (yes, really)
music reviews that I’ve written
a list of all the stuff I’ve got insured
my collection of fountain pens
all the stuff that I’m keen to try out once I get my Pinebook Pro
a list of all music that I’ve been listening to for the past year
music that I’m trying to learn to play
embedding music into files
drag-and-dropping image files into notes which embeds them
films I’m going to see (View Highlight)
And all of this is instantly indexed and searchable. And it’s all stored on my computer; I’ve used Resilio Sync to sync my Obsidian vaults to another computer that is backed up. No Google, no Amazon, no nothing to capitalise off my personal experiences. (View Highlight)
I can also use iA Writer or Typora and hack away at my Markdown files that are in an Obsidian vault and then return to Obsidian to link them. Straight up. Try doing that with Microsoft OneNote or something similar: you’re fucked. (View Highlight)
a folder-and-file list
an editor where you see Markdown in effect
a preview pane of my Markdown (View Highlight)
What you write in Obsidian is a note. Every note is a Markdown file. Obsidian allows embedding of certain files in notes and more advanced stuff will follow, e.g. creation of diagrams and flowcharts in Mermaid. All of your changes are made in folders and files in real-time (and you can undo actions). (View Highlight)
OK, time for a side note: I don’t create diagrams and flowcharts that often, but this application of Mermaid is very cool. Type this code into Obsidian:
sequenceDiagram
participant Alice
participant Bob
Alice->>John: Hello John, how are you?
loop Healthcheck
John->>John: Fight against hypochondria
end
Note right of John: Rational thoughts prevail!
John→>Alice: Great!
John->>Bob: How about you?
Bob→>John: Jolly good! (View Highlight)
One example of the power of backlinking is this: I’ve imported every quote from all of the books that I’ve read. (I use Readwise for collecting all of my book quotes via my ebook reader, by the way.) Then, I linked stuff together. One of the key features of Obsidian is Unlinked mentions; I show the feature quickly here and it’s used to let you—with solely one select—create links in existing text.
If a reference appears in the Unlinked mentions, and you want to link it, hovering over the text will bring up a Link button. Clicking this will automatically surround the highlighted text in the referenced note with brackets, making it into an explicit link.
Text from Obsidian’s built-in help vault (View Highlight)
Obsidian isn’t shimmering where mobile is concerned. When I started out, I installed a sync client—Resilio Sync, if you’re wondering, although I hear Syncthing and FreeFileSync are also sweet—to make sure that changes I make in my mobile are synced with my desktop computers. Then, I installed an Android Markdown client, e.g. Markor or iA Writer. I then edited a Markdown file, saved it, and it synced to my computer. The file was updated in Obsidian without issues. Simple. It’s not as simple as most cloud-based clients, though, and it’s not as straightforward. (View Highlight)
I’ve always loved Workflowy, which has suited my mind to a t. Obsidian allows me to build beyond Workflowy’s borders (and bear in mind that they’re different products; Obsidian isn’t an improvement of Workflowy). (View Highlight)
I love to add formatting and build large notes. Linking allows me to create structure not only in text but pushes me to consider how to better structure projects. Due to its linking nature, Obsidian helps me to create topic-based documentation via the Every Page Is Page One approach. (View Highlight)
visit the Forum often and why not? They provide inspiration. Where else would I go to find somebody’s written a Python script to auto link text? Or to see how others use knowledge systems?
If push comes to shove and I suddenly must use another system than Obsidian, I’ll use Zettlr, foam, Joplin, or Roam. I’ll just open my folder-and-file structure in one of those—or import my Markdown files—thank you very much. I sure as fuck won’t be going back to OneNote at any point. I’m very happy right now. (View Highlight)
One more thing
Don’t forget the web-browser extension MarkDownload – Markdown Web Clipper that allows you to visit a web page, think ‘I want this in my Obsidian’, select a button, copy the resulting test, and paste it into Obsidian: voilá, Markdown applied, good to go. Reckless fucking abandon. (View Highlight)