Obsidian is a mix of Markdown editor
and knowledge base app. Basically, you can edit and view text files in Markdown
format, and also create links between these files. The app can be downloaded directly from the
website and it's currently available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. There's
a mobile app coming soon. Obsidian is completely free for personal use, with additional paid options that
will be mentioned later in this video. There's a vibrant community with a forum
and a Discord server where you can get help, ask quick questions, and get
to know other Obsidian users. Creating a new vault. After completing
the installation you can create a new Vault which is the folder in your
computer that will store the notes. To create a new note, you can use the button
on the left or the keyboard shortcut Command N. Give it a name, a title, and just start writing. You can use folders for organization, and
it supports emojis for naming if you like. Internal links. Create links by simply
pressing the left bracket key twice, and a panel shows the notes
that you can create a link to. External links. To create an external link, select
any word, press Command K, and paste the link. Notes location. Right-click
a note or folder and choose "Show in system explorer" to
see its location in your system. Word count. At the bottom of the
screen, is shown the word count of your current note and the number of characters. Preview and edit modes. Notes can be
viewed in either edit mode or preview mode. In edit mode, you see a
basic markdown visualization, but certain things, like highlighting and
images will only show up in preview mode. Linked panes. Panes can be linked
together. With a note open in edit mode, hold Command and click the preview button at the
top. Linked panes will be marked with a link icon, and any changes you make in the editor
will show up in the preview in real-time. Also, scrolling one will scroll the other. Keyboard shortcuts. Learn keyboard
shortcuts to be more efficient. The ones I usually use the most are, Command
E to toggle between edit and preview mode. Command Enter to toggle a checkbox and
Command Shift F to search in all files. You can add custom hotkeys for
the most commonly used commands. In the hotkeys settings, click the
asterisk icon and type the new command. What I like to do is assign option arrow up and option arrow down to
easily move lines up and down. Command Palette. The Command Palette is
a very useful way to access most of the Obsidian features. Type Command P, then
simply type in the name of the command. Drag to rearrange panes. Panes can be rearranged by dragging. Grab the icon in the upper left
corner to arrange them however you need. Header levels. To create a heading, add
number signs in front of a word or phrase. The number of number signs you add should
correspond to the heading level. For example, to create a heading level
three, add three number signs. You can add emphasis by making the text bold
or italic. To bold text, add two asterisks or underscores before and after a word or phrase,
or use Command B. To make a word italic, add one asterisk or underscore before and
after the word, or use the Command I shortcut. Strikethrough. Any word-wrapped with
two tildes will appear crossed out. Use two equal signs to highlight
text. The color of the highlight will be different according
to the theme you are using. Lists can be created using dashes in front of
the item. Hit enter and a new item will be added. Lists can also have sub items by pressing tab. A useful shortcut is Command left or
right bracket to change the indentation. Numbered list. To create a numbered
list, type 1, period, and the item. After typing, hit enter, and the
next numbered item will be added. To-do list. To-do list can
be easily created with dash, space, opening, and closing
brackets, and a space in the middle. Blockquotes. We also have blockquotes
which are great to highlight phrases. In preview mode, it looks like this. Create separation in your notes by
using dividers. Just type at least 3 dashes and a horizontal
line is added in preview mode. Sidebars can be collapsed to declutter the
screen and help to focus only on writing. Export PDFs. After writing and format a note, it can be exported as a PDF
in the more options button. Light and dark mode. There's a light and dark mode
that can be switched from the command palette. If you are on Windows or Mac, you can make the window translucent by enabling
this option in the settings appearance tab. Deleting files. After deleting a note, by default, it's moved to the system trash, but
this can be changed from the settings. Open a link in a new pane. Open
several notes at the same time by holding Command and clicking each one. Save notes. Obsidian automatically saves
your note two seconds after you stop typing, or if you close a pane. You can also manually
save at any time by pressing Command S. Use the help vault if something is not clear. You can search, and learn
more about Obsidian features. Structure and organization. Don't try to
structure everything if you are just starting out. Start at your own pace. Worry about
structure later when you have more notes. Home Note. Setup up your home note with
links to notes that you often need. I also like to add a link back to the
home note to make navigation easier. Dragging notes. You can drag a note and
pin it to the sidebar for quick access. Tags. Use tags to group multiple
notes so they are easier to find. Clicking on any tag will activate
that search. There's a plugin that you can enable to show a list of all tags
that are used across all of your notes. Spaces are not allowed in tags. So, if
you want to have multiple words in a tag, you can use underscore or a dash. Tags can be nested, for example, you can
create inbox/to-read, inbox/processing, and it shows as a tree of tags in the sidebar. Templates. Use templates to save time. When
you enable the plugin, the template button allows you to use a note as a basis for a new
one. For example, I have a weekly review template with the questions I answer every
week. So I create a new note, choose this template, and simply answer
the questions following the structure. Toggle headers and lists. In the editor
settings, there's an option to fold indents, making it easier to hide parts of the text. Backlinks pane. To keep track of
all your links, the backlink pane shows how the current note is referenced in other
notes. There's a backlink count in the status bar. Presentations. Did you know that's is possible
to do simple presentations right inside Obsidian? Just enable the core plugin called slides,
and use 3 dashes to separate each slide. Then, choose "start
presentation" from the options. Random notes. What if you could push a button and
immediately be given an idea? You can enable the plugin called Random note, and press a button
to show you a random note from your collection. Graph view. An impressive feature of Obsidian
is the Graph View that we can access through this button on the left. It shows a graphical
representation of all the links between the notes. You can hover each node to highlight the
connections, and drag to rearrange the graph. I'll show you more options about
the graph view later in this video. Local graph. Use the local graph to
see the connections near the open note. This view can be fixed to the sidebar. Search. The search is a
powerful feature in Obsidian. In most cases just by typing what you
are looking for is enough to find it. It supports different options like search
file names, tags, and more. It saves your most recently used search queries, and you
can also copy the search results as a list. Starred notes. If you enable the Starred
notes plugin, you can star a search result to keep it close at hand. You can also star any
other note and it will appear on the sidebar. Renaming notes and links. To rename a note, change the text in the top bar. All links
are automatically updated to the new name. A notification shows how
many links have been updated. Attachments. Images can be easily
added by dragging them to any note. The image file will be shown in the
file explorer. This also works for PDFs. If you have lots of images and attachments,
a good idea is to create a folder and set it as the "attachment folder", so next time a new
attachment will automatically go to that folder. Daily notes. Many people like to write daily
notes with everything relevant to that day, and this is easy to do in Obsidian.
Just enable the daily notes plugin, and a new button appears in the
sidebar. This button creates a note with the current date if it doesn't
exist, or opens the note for the day. In the options of this plugin, it is
possible to choose a folder to group all the daily notes or choose a template
to be applied when creating a new note. Use emojis if you like. I like to use emojis
because I am a visual person and I find that they help me to have context about notes. Personally,
I also think it looks more aesthetically pleasing. Community themes. Speaking of aesthetics, a very
cool part of Obsidian is the themes created by the community. There are a lot of cool themes
available and they completely change the look and feel of the app. If you know CSS you can even
create your own theme and share it with others. Community plugins. Obsidian allows developers
to write third-party plugins to extend Obsidian's functionality. They can do awesome
things like Calendar, Mind Map, Timeline, and more. In order to use these plugins you
need to turn off safe mode because third-party plugins can access files on your computer and
connect to the internet, so be aware of that. In general, you should be able to trust most
of the popular plugins from the community. Obsidian Publish. Obsidian is free for
personal use, but there are 2 paid add-on services available. Obsidian Publish and
Obsidian Sync. Obsidian Publish lets you easily publish notes. It can be useful to create a
wiki for your team or documentation for projects. Obsidian Sync. Obsidian Sync keeps the
vaults in sync on multiple devices, including the upcoming mobile app. Quick Switcher. There's a button on
the left sidebar called Quick switcher. It lets you jump to other notes
by just typing the file name. If you want to create a new note, typing a unique
name will cause the Quick Switcher to create it. Page Preview. Page preview lets you preview
a page when hovering an internal link, without needing to actually navigate to
that page. You can even scroll the preview. Zettelkasten Prefixer. If you use Zettelkasten, there's a plugin
that adds a new button to the left sidebar, which can be used to create a new file and prefix
it for you using the current date and time. Audio recorder. Audio recorder is a plugin
that lets you make a recording without leaving Obsidian. It's useful for class and meeting
notes when you can't catch up for some reason, or for recording important discussions
so you don't miss any details. The audios are stored in the attachments folder. Open multiple files. You can edit
and view multiple files in Obsidian. By default, when you click something,
it will open in the active pane. But, if you hold Command and click
it opens the note in a new pane. Split vertically and horizontally. To create
other layouts, you can split the current pane in half either horizontally or vertically. Sticky panes. If you're working on
something and want to use the other panes as temporary reference panes you can
pin it to make sure it never gets replaced. Web clipper. Because Obsidian accepts any
Markdown file, you can download entire web pages by clipping to Markdown files and downloading
them into your vault. "MarkDownload" browser extension works well for this purpose. It adds a
button to download articles in markdown format, ready to be copied to Obsidian. You can get it
for Google Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge. Link to headings. You can also link to specific
headers in files. Press the left bracket twice, when the note you want is highlighted, press
number sign, and it will show all the headings in this note. Choose the one you want, and
a link direct to the heading is created. Indent and unindent shortcuts. Use shortcuts
to change the indentation. To move a line to the left, hold command and press left bracket
key or right bracket to move it to the right. Default view mode. By default,
Obsidian opens notes in edit mode. But you can change that if you want.
Open the Command Palette with Command P, and search for "toggle default view". Now, next
time the note will open directly in preview mode. Find and replace. Use the search and
replace for editing your notes. Again, from the Command Palette, search for search and
replace. Then, you can search the occurrences of text you want to replace. You can replace
them one by one, or all of them at once. Code blocks. You can also add code blocks to your
notes. Just put the code inside three backticks. You can specify the language in order
to have syntax highlight, for example, JS for javascript or PY for python. Text inside backticks on a line
will be also formatted like code. Outline. Another useful plugin available is
Outline. After enabling it, it adds a pane to the sidebar with all headings in the current
note, making it easier to navigate in long files. Workspaces. If you are like me and use
Obsidian for many different things, the Workspaces plugin will very handy for you. It
lets you save and load the layout of the panes, sidebar state, and files open. For example,
I have a workspace called Calendar that I use to write daily notes and another
one for writing without distractions. Footnotes. Footnotes allow you to add notes
and references without cluttering the body of the document. To create a footnote
reference, add a caret and an identifier inside brackets. Identifiers can be numbers or
words, but they can’t contain spaces or tabs. Add the footnote using another
caret and number inside brackets with a colon and text. You don’t have to
put footnotes at the end of the document. You can put them anywhere except inside other
elements like lists, blockquotes, and tables. The rendered output looks like
this, and you jump back and forth. Multiple cursors. You can create multiple
cursors in Obsidian. Hold down Alt or option on Mac, click. This can be useful when
modifying a lot of lines in the same way, for example putting a dash at the beginning
of multiple lines to turn them into a list. Link with aliases. Links can be displayed with
a name other than the file name. This is useful if the name is too long. Just add a vertical pipe
after the link with the name you want to display, and that's what is shown in preview mode. Resize images. You can resize images using
the following syntax. Add a vertical pipe, type the width and the height in pixels,
then the image will be displayed smaller. Link to blocks. Another cool feature is
that you can create a link to blocks, like linking to part of another note.
A block can be a paragraph, blockquote, or anything that has empty lines before and after.
To link to a block, first type left bracket twice, the name of the note, then type caret and continue
typing to search for blocks to link to. Once you hit enter, a link to that block will be generated
for you, in the following format. The number is the block ID created for you. When we are not sure
which file the block is, another way to create links to blocks is to type left bracket twice, 2
carets and it will search for blocks in all files. Query blocks. Now let's talk about query blocks. I
recently discovered that we can embed blocks with search results. For example, you can group
tags within a note by doing the following: type 3 backticks, the word query, and the
search syntax for tags is – tag, column, and the tag itself. Close with 3 backticks, and
when previewing the note all the search results are listed. This is great because any new notes
with that tag will automatically appear here. Templates snippets. When creating templates
you can use snippets that will be replaced by their actual value at the time of the insertions.
Title for example is replaced by the title of the note. This also works for date and time. These
will be replaced by the current date and time. Iframes. Obsidian supports iframes
allowing you to embed web pages into notes. For example, you can embed YouTube videos
like so. Click share, embed, copy the iframe, and paste it in Obsidian. Preview
the note and it will show the video. Tables. You can create tables by assembling a
list of words and dividing them with hyphens, and then separating each column with a
vertical pipe. Tables in Markdown can be a pain to edit when they are big,
but it works fine for simple tables. Graph View Filters. Now let's
see some graph settings. I love the Obsidian graph view and it was
the feature that made me want to use the app. You can use filters to hide notes from the graph.
For example, I use it to hide my daily notes. Groups allow you to choose different colors for a
set of notes. You can create your own color code, which in addition to helping with navigation,
makes everything much more beautiful. There is also an option to show or hide orphan
notes, in other words, notes without links. You can show or hide the arrows that
represent the direction of the links. In the force options, several
adjustments can be made such as center, repel and link force. I recommend
you play around with these options a bit and customize your graph
the way you think is best. Markdown importer. If you use other apps,
Obsidian has a tool to help import notes from other popular apps like Roam Research and
Bear. There are a few differences between the way various note-taking systems work that means
moving between them can be a little complicated. In general, if you can convert to a
markdown it will work on Obsidian. But some things, like tags
and links, can be tricky. Diagrams and charts. Obsidian can show
diagrams and charts. It uses Mermaid, a tool that generates diagrams and flowcharts from
the text. The syntax is easy to learn, and there's a live editor to preview your diagrams. You can
copy-paste the code into Obsidian. Just type 3 backticks, type mermaid, and paste the code. A
beautiful chart will be displayed in preview mode. Link to notes. Notes can also be linked to
other apps. If you use another note-taking app like Apple Notes, for example, you can
copy an Obsidian URL, and paste it there. This link will open the note in Obsidian. Working with multiple vaults. Each collection
of notes in Obsidian is known as a Vault, and you can have multiple vaults, which
essentially just creates a new folder that you will put markdown files
into. Choose "Open another vault", and create a new vault. You can open
multiple vaults at the same time. Sync and backup. Put your vault in the cloud for
backup and synchronization with other devices. For example, I have my vault inside an iCloud
folder, so it synchronizes with my phone. facilitate filling in information such as
topic, date, and people who participated. After the meeting, share your notes in
PDF, so everyone is on the same page. Manage tasks with tags. Tags can be useful for
managing task status and keep track of projects. You can have tags in the kanban style as a
to-do, in_progress, and done, for example. Inspiration list. You can create a list of
inspirations with the things that you have read or watched and want to apply in your life. I keep
a list like this and it's very useful to be able to reflect on the things I've been consuming,
and I use them when I'm stuck for ideas. Book notes. Another suggestion is to write
book notes in Obsidian. After reading a book, I write a short summary of what I liked about
the book and what were the things that I learned. I also use a simple template to guide me
when it comes to writing with things like my 3 favorite phrases, who should I recommend
the book, and what were the things I learned.
Awesome, thanks for sharing!
Good job, learned a lot
Amazing video, thank you!
Thanks. I learned a lot.
Good job, thank you for this!
Thanks!
I'd rather read this as an obsidian doc ;)