Obsidian

Last updated Jan 20, 2025

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.

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?.

See Why Obsidian.

More on Obsidian Plugins.

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:

1
2
3
4

---
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.

• I search by Quick Search / Omnisearch. I explain all of it in My Obsidian Note-Taking Workflow
  • same does Kepano the CEO of Obsidian: Kepano search in Obsidian

• 5 Killer Hacks to Boost Your Obsidian on Mobile. | by Lohith dhaksha | Obsidian Observer | Medium

• Background battery optimization for obsidian and Brave/chrome:

  • Initial Launch takes too long : r/ObsidianMD: I have about 2.5 GiB of data, in more than 6k notes and some hundreds or thousands of attachments. Obsidian takes less than 8s every time (8s is the slowest since 1.7.7), and usually between 5s and max to start.
  • What I see that makes a difference is RAM memory and excluding the app from battery optimization so that it doesn’t get killed.
  • Mine stays active for a day this way, so opening it – except for the first time – is instantaneous.
  • Also, reindexing shouldn’t occur often. If it is, there’s something that’s changing your files metadata or creating too many of them while Obsidian isn’t running.

Reddit - Dive into anything:

• If I am not wrong, if you set battery to unrestricted for both Chrome browser and Obsidian, it will stay in background. Read it somewhere.
• I used to try this but then again, sometimes leaving it in background cause me more problems. Dataview not updated. Editor goes haywire. Eventually gave up on keeping app in background.
• Then again, maybe it is just my phone problem.

See StackOverflow Survey 2024, most desired besides Markdown. .

• Optimal Note Taking Framework for all subjects using Obsidian
• The Rise of Obsidian as a Second Brain
• Hack Your Brain With Obsidian.md

• Jump to next Markdown Heading with ]] and [[
• toggle fold za ( .vimrc) and zR unfold all and zM to fold all
• Vim for Obsidian
• Vimrc for Obsidian

It serves almost all my needs already; if I have to wish:

1. mobile opening up within 1-3 seconds, not 10.
2. smart connections with local-llm integration trained/aggregated with my vault notes
   1. Second Brain Assistant with Obsidian (NoteGPT)
3. integrated OCR image search
4. respecting my existing Neovim configs for native vim navigation

So there are basically two reasons why characters would be considered illegal by Obsidian:

• links invalidation: []#^|
• file systems limitation: \/: and ? for Android

Other than these most characters are legal, like those emojis being unicode characters, and most other unicode characters, like stuff with accents/diacritics: áāãőůçĉ, and national characters like æøåßþƴðđ.

So feel free to use characters rather freely. See also  Internal links and special characters - #2 by holroy source

Obsidian Mobile Troubleshoot

Origin:
References: Second Brain
Created