Getting Started with Obsidian (plugins, templates, folders, and more)

hey everybody welcome back to a better computer my name is matt and today i want to go over what i recommend doing when you're first setting up obsidian on your computer there's a lot more to the app i'm not going to go over every single thing right now but this will just be helpful if you're just starting up with the app and want to make sure you get things set up the right way so let's jump into it so when you first download obsidian you're going to get this you just drag it into your applications folder i've already done that so i'm just going to skip that step and then i want to open the app and you'll see something like this so i can open an existing vault so your vault is basically what your obsidian it's your database basically all your notes are going to live in your vault ultimately it's just a folder on your computer so if you've never used it before don't worry about this one you want to create a new vault and so we're going to hit create we're going to call it something this is my work vault so i'm going to call it work again this will just be what the folder is called and then where do you want to save it so i'm going to say just save it to my home directory right just save it there cool so it's gonna be saved to users slash map birchler and then a folder called work so create and then the app is open and i'm just gonna pull up my home directory here so you can see it so i have a folder here called work if i go into it it's empty uh there is an invisible folder here called dot obsidian but we'll get to that in a second um but yeah so now that i'm in the app i can go ahead and get running with it so first things first let's just make a new file so i can hit this icon here or i can create a new file with command n i'll do that and then i just name it this will be my first uh first note there we go and then i'm just going to paste in a note that i've previously written you can see it's using markdown all these files are marked down you can already see over here in the finder i've got a note here called myfirstnote.md and then all the content is here and so it's just a markdown file it's a plain text file you can open it anywhere if i go here i can hit command e to preview so i can see it kind of formatted you can see my front matter gets taken away there's a setting to leave that if you want but my front matter gets taken away my headings get turned into formatted text and everything i've got bold italics a link all of this uh just you know it's markdown if you know markdown this is gonna be very familiar to you and the editor itself is nice and smart uh if i hit enter here it makes it fourth on the list if i tab it makes it a sub item under that list if i go back like shift tab it'll make it uh less indented so yeah just a really nice editor we're not talking about that but this is basically my first file if i want to make a new one i said command and again uh second file and this is gonna be uh just a uh i'll just put today's date there right so nothing fancy but again another markdown files created here with just that content and so yeah that's really it before we get going into the settings that i want to change i do want to create a couple folders so what you'll see is a new folder icon here and i want to create three folders because they're going to be useful for different things so one is assets you can name these whatever you want but these are the things that make sense to me there's assets i like one called archive and then i like another one called templates so those are the three folders that i set up and again they're over here in the finder you can see those there and actually while i'm at it let me go back here if i drag this folder into a text editor so this is nova these are just the exact same thing so these are the same files you can access them from any other app if you'd like it's not proprietary at all it's all just yeah it's all just text files really all the way down and then here's that invisible.obsidian file i talked about a second ago there's some config stuff there's a workspace you don't really need to worry about these files these are just what obsidian uses um but yeah so let's get that out of here um we'll just make that visible again and so yeah so now i want to go into the settings and change a few things so let me go into settings there's this icon down here or you can do the traditional mac os thing of command comma and then you get your options and so there's a few things i recommend turning on or off depending on your taste so the first one is spell check i really like having this i recommend turning this on it's just it's nice i do a lot of like writing writing in here so i do want to see when i misspell things i actually turn off readable line length uh this basically makes it so that if i make the window wider the text will go all the way to the end no matter what i do like that uh and then let's see and then there's one more here fold heading so i do like this one if i turn this on uh whenever i'm previewing a document so if i go back to this one and hit command e to preview it i get these carrots here and so i can minimize sections if i'd like i can see them so this is good for like really long notes that i have that's a nice setting to change so i like changing those three files and links there's a couple things i want to change here the first is for deleted items so whenever i delete an item from obsidian i can choose to either move it to the system trash or i can move it to the obsidian trash i actually choose the move to obsidian trash because this makes it so that if i delete a file i can undo it and those deletions sync across all my devices so if i have a work computer and a home computer or very soon if i have the mobile app and my desktop computer they'll all still be there and i can retrieve those files i'm typically just dealing with text so i'm not really worried about size but this may be different for you i just like putting it in a obsidian trash folder so that i can get them again if i need to and the other thing i changed on here is all the way down at the bottom default location for new attachments so it defaults to the vault folder which is your top level folder so if i pulled in like an image it would throw it in here just in this top level with all my markdown files i don't really want that instead i want to do it in a subfolder under the current folder so that's a little weird but i want it to be um i want it to be assets [Music] right so that's the folder i wanted to go into um so yeah so the attachments will be saved to blah so yeah so that's what i wanted to save as i wanted to save it to this assets folder and so if i do that right now what you should see is uh let's see i've got a typo in here too uh fix that so i can go down here i can pull in an image maybe let's see let's pull in this image drag it there and so now i should see in assets i have my image file there it wasn't put into this list with everything else so that's really nice and then if i preview it it actually does display images in line in here so that's a nice thing but yeah all of my images that i drag in now we put in the assets folder which is just helps me keep this top level more organized i should also mention at this point the reason i put this archive folder is like maybe i'm done with this file i don't really need it right now i don't need to see it every day when i launch the app just throw it in the archive there we go and it's out of my way and i can just kind of keep looking at the notes that i'm actively working on everything i don't need anymore is still accessible i can still search for it it's just in the archive and out of sight out of mind so uh what else can we do let me go back into the settings we're almost there you also can change your theme and so if you go to appearance i personally like the light theme better i like a light themed editor uh that's nice um you can do some custom css and stuff if you want to do a community theme you can go to here and hit browse and there's all sorts of community themes you can choose from i'm just going to choose this one use this there you go and now it's got a slightly different look but again you can change this to whatever you'd like you can write your own theme if you'd like that's actually what i've done that's a rabbit hole we don't have time to get into today but you can definitely choose from some really nice looking community themes and at the very least change it to light or dark based on what you like so then we get into plugins um this is one of the really cool things about obsidian is that all of these features a lot of the features in the app are considered plugins and so that means you can turn them on or off and a lot of them are on some of them are off i basically keep most of them on but a few of them just aren't relevant to me so for example the graph view that big thing that like obsidian and rome have really popularized i don't actually use it so i can turn that off and then it's just not available to me in the app i could turn off search even like i don't know why i would do that but i do wanna but i could turn off search um there's a whole bunch of things here that i can or can't turn on or off it's really up to me which is just uh it speaks to the flexibility of obsidian and then there's community plugins and so this is a still kind of newer thing it's been around for a while in obsidian's lifetime but there aren't a billion things here it's not like when you open visual studio code and there's like a million plugins you can do but basically community plugins are things built by other people if i turn off safe mode that enables them and so i can turn off safe mode and then i can browse for community plugins and you can see there's 197 of them they're ranked listed from most downloaded to lease downloaded here's what i like to install so i like templater so i'm going to install that and there we go that's it i can enable it as well i also like uh let's see i also like uh the paste url into selection i really like this one so i'll install that and show you how this works in a second i'll enable it as well and then the third one that i really like is a editor syntax highlighting or highlight and so this will basically make it so that if you do a code block and then put the language right after it right after your three ticks to kick it off it'll actually know how to highlight the code there nicely so i like having that for little code blocks that i throw in there so that's enabled as well and then i can yeah see that on this community plugins there's a few more things i can check for updates for those plugins no plugin updates found because i just installed them i can turn the monitor off i can hit the x to uninstall them so there's a lot here and then you've got plugin options so i know we're covering a lot here but you can kind of see stuff like templater so where's my template folder location okay i made that templates folder earlier that's where i wanted to be so templates will live in the templates folder um there's some other stuff here but basically what this will let me do is if i get out of here go to templates and create a new file we'll call this a new post i'll do done title hey date oops there's that and then heading so this is not a super inspiring template but we're going to call it that we're going to move this to templates and now the next time i create a new file i'll do a post for the day and then i can do command p to bring up the command menu i'll start writing templater insert template new post and it inserts that template into the post there is so much more i can talk about with this this is one i just literally thought up on the spot but i have one for meeting notes at work i'm not going to show you that exact one right now but you can do like basically if you do blog posts through here you can have a template for that if you do i do youtube planning through this as well and so there's a few things that i'd like to have especially up here in the uh the front matter of the post i like having that little sections there's some stuff you can do with javascript variables this is a rabbit hole that i don't have time to get into in this video this is already going to go long but yeah there's a lot here that you can do so the template feature is cool uh if i go to um let me grab a url real quick right okay so i've just uh copied a url so i can do google and then i can just select the text and then paste right into it and so that's what that paste url into selection does is uh if i'm just like pasting it it pasted the url but if i have this is a link to google and then i have it all selected or if i just say a link to google i can paste and then it will automatically format in a markdown link and if i preview there's a link to google so that's just a nice little quality of life thing i'm used to that in ulysses and you can do it here as well so and then we'll do one more so this is a css and we'll do [Music] body and we'll do uh font color or juice just color uh color red right and so it formats that uh just like uh css so very good and then you can yeah see it right there so it's formatted correctly so those are some of the templates i use or sorry the plugins i use those are some of the settings i recommend changing this is the folder structure i recommend having and yeah again these are just folders in your on your computer so if you choose not to use obsidian you can just load it in another text editor another app it's just text files you can do anything that you'd like with them this is just scratching the surface but i thought it'd be interesting to show you kind of what i recommend setting up for obsidian the first time you launch it and hopefully this gets you going thank you so much for watching i'll see you here next time bye

Channel: A Better Computer

Views: 17,405

Keywords: productivity, tutorial, apple, tech news

Id: 1qB2-ciYlt4

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021