🧠 Second Brain

Obsidian

Last updated Aug 12, 2024

Obsidian is a Second Brain and note-taking app. It is a powerful and extensible knowledge base that works on top of your local folder of plain text files.

Obsidian is a wrapper around your folders and Markdown files, including one single folder called .obsidian in your root. That’s it! In case you like to use another editor such as vim, VSCode or just any other Text Editor you might have, open all your files individually. Or, in case you want to open all notes in one go, use open Obsidian.

# Price and Features

Let’s get this out of the way, Obsidian is entirely free! You can add two paid features, 1. if you want to use their integrated sync tool, or 2. if you want to share your notes, including the fancy graph and outline view.

But yeah, as it is plain text stored on your hard drive, you can use Dropbox, Google Drive, or any other sync tool! As I’m using Sync.com with end-to-end encryption for all my files, it does not work nicely on my mobile. That’s why I added Obsidian Sync. I could have added it to Dropbox, but I didn’t want to give them my most private notes.

If you want to check out all the other features, see the complete list at Obsidian.md or find more customization with 25 core and 329 community plugins, 60+ themes, plus custom styling, you can tweak Obsidian to work and look exactly how you want it.

Some community plugins do a single thing extremely well, like Calendar and Kanban. Others unlock endless possibilities: Dataview and Templater are great examples.

See more on How to Take Notes in 2021?.

# Why Obsidian

See Why Obsidian.

# Plugins

# How I create links in Obsidian

I struggled with that as well. And I noticed over time, I automatically linked less. I like the example. Over time, you will change and update your notes and also feel when to use a connection and when it’s obvious.

Also, to relax your brain, e.g., I wanted to link everything to Obsidian as it was the root for many things I’m writing. But even though you do not link it, you will still see the connections in Unlinked mentions. This helps me not to think I will lose the note.

Usually, every note should at least be linked to one note. I also do that with my template that has an Origin and References. If I didn’t come up with a link through the text, I make sure that I at least link it to one reference that I think relates most, so it’s more likely to come up months or years down the line. Most of the time, the link also comes from Origin, as it’s usually a person or a blog that I already have in my Second Brain.

Here is the footer I add automatically to each note:

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---
Origin: 
References: 
Created <% tp.date.now(&

Sometimes, I even create an intermediate new note to the next, as it helps me to find and categorize my thoughts better.

But again, with time, you will figure that out; these come naturally. Especially when you check backlinks to a note, and you have 100s of them, they get a little useless. Therefore, you naturally add fewer in the future.

See also why quality software deserves your hard-earned cash and local first approach. Find all my configs for Obsidian (hotkey, plugins, etc.) on my linked dotfiles.