How I Write in Obsidian

somewhat inspired by David Pell's podcast how I write I've started a series on the YouTube channel about how I write each video going through a writing project from start to finish covering other elements of my writing process with other projects as I go through because I don't just sit down and write for 7 hours I do jump between projects so I want to show you in this video how I set up my obsidian so that when you look around or watch any of those videos you don't get completely lost and all the clicking backwards and forwards and it gives you a bit of context as to how my layout my obsidian for writing and working I will leave a link in the description for a template download but you can just build it from scratch from this video so what you're seeing now is Obsidian if we have a look on the left hand side we've got the left ribbon uh that's the top button of the left sidebar right at the top then below the collapse button we have the quick switcher the canvas the insert template open command pallet and templator buttons I personally don't use any of these buttons and the only one really worth paying attention to is this top one open Quick switcher if I click it what that allows me to do is quickly switch between different files inside of my obsidian so what is Obsidian if I go on my computer you can see this PC I'm in my G hard drive I'm then in my obsidian folder or OBS folder and I'm in my personal obsidian Vault and that's what you're seeing inside of obsidian if we have a look on the left hand side we've got canvas as a folder we've got class as a folder other folder projects folder sources folder templates folder and they are the exact same folders here because obsidian is just a folder that you're seeing all at once so if I double click into this templates folder on my computer you can see we've got essay event feedback and if I open up the templates folder inside of obsidian we have the exact same files so you've got the same folder the zot Tera folders there and then we have the same files so obsidian is just a folder that's been opened up and you can see the files inside of it the biggest difference is the files that you make inside of obsidian if you have a look it says MD document so each of these files are what's called an MD document if I go into it you saw there this is markdown MD markdown so the hash is a symbol that tells obsidian hey this is a heading one if I look at this one this hash there's two so this is a heading two if I push hash three times it goes to heading three four is four five 6 and so in this left sidebar I have all of my folders with files in and so when I open the quick switcher I can go to the essay template file quickly if I go down to the bottom of the ribbon I can change the Vault and that opens up this Vault switcher here so you can see I've got three different Vault folders one's called personal the folder we're in one's private the the one we're not in and then another folder which I sometimes go into though is completely new to obsidian you are likely going to create a new vault which is just a folder on your computer that will have a DOT obsidian folder in and maybe a DOT trash folder in this is where all of the settings are stored there's the help button that you will rarely need to go to and then the settings Cog which is where I'm going to go to now now obsidian has loads of settings that you'll probably play with and I play with sometimes depending on what I want to do but a general rule of thumb is just to keep everything default I don't bother messing around too much in here when I go to files and links I have my sources folder and images folder so all of the images that I bring into obsidian goes into the attachment folder which is the images folder that just saves some time then inside of the appearance settings I've changed my font to inter you can manage and then select any of the fonts from the drop-down list so if you want to change any of the fonts you can do I have in because I like when I come in here and I push the dash and then a greater than it turns it into an arrow so if I uh zoom in you can see I now have an arrow if I do that with the equals gives me another arrow that's just a font style but probably the most important part of this is the additions CSS that is why I have the orange at the top here that is why as I move the cursor around it highlights certain blocks and how I've changed the color of the heading so heading one is orange heading two is a different orange and why heading three is blue there are some other small custom changes in there but they are the main ones I have loads of hot keys so I'm not going to go through all of them but the main ones to keep note of are the ones that I'm going to share when I go through the community plugins these core plugins are built and maintained by the obsidian team so that's why they are core to the obsidian app you can see the ones that I have on and the ones that I don't you can stop the screen and then add the settings to which ones you want or don't want but I just turn off a lot of the settings that I don't actually use if I jump down to the you can see core plug-in settings the backlinks I have them show at the bottom of the file so you got to turn that on for the canvas core plugin which I rarely use I mainly as you can see food I do that for food planning that's basically it these are the settings I have I have it specified to the canvas folder so all new canvases go to the canvas folder the command pallet is just default settings file recovery I have the history length quite high at 600 and the snapshot at 10 minutes so every 10 minutes it creates a snapshot and it keeps those for 600 days the note composer default settings the page preview I have it so I have to hold control to actually see the page preview unless I'm in the editing view if I hover over with the mouse you can see it's changing color because it's a link but if I hold control now it gives me a page preview I've changed that to have to hold control because I don't want this popping up every time and you can change the settings obviously in here page preview and then toggle it on or off in the quick switcher I show attachments but I also show files that don't currently exist and this is another change or another difference in obsidian that is I find useful if I come to the top of obsidian and push square bracket square bracket I now have two square brackets and it opens up a search and this is what's called an internal link inside of obsidian you can see we have educational science in a nutshell is a file inside of the other folder so it's inside this folder if I open up the folder you can see there is the file when I go back into the brackets there is that file it's showing me the file so if I go to a different one let's say exclusions in school I've now created what's called an internal link and this is in the editing mode so if I hover over it gives me the page preview because that's the setting I don't need to push control then but I do here because this is a query which I'll get to in a minute but with this link I can left click and it takes me to the file if I go backwards it takes me back to the educational science in a nutshell but I can middle click with my mouse wheel on my mouse and what that will do is open it up in a new tab so I have two tabs open in obsidian with two different files if I left click on the tab and hold the left click and then drag all the way to the right you can see we've now got an orange I can split screen it to the right if I go to the tab left click and drag and go all the way down to the bottom I can now split screen up and down if I left click and drag I can actually put it in this sidebar you can see I'm moving it around in the sidebar we got an orange line there go underneath these two plugins if I drag that down I now have the file in the sidebar or I could drag it to the right sidebar but I'm going to drag it back into here so we've got a split however exclusions in schools a file that I've already created if I go bracket bracket and then say new file now leave you can see it doesn't actually come up with an option to click it because it says new file is not created yet when I go back to the quick switcher it says show existing files only so when I click on quick switcher and type in file you can see there's an icon there it says plus so if I was to click here it would create a file called new file if I turn this setting off now when I search for new file the option doesn't come up to create it because I don't want to see the files that haven't been created yet and to remove this line I'm going to use a hotkey contrl d that deletes the line up with the arrow key delete the line delete the line so it's just making everything cleaner and it's nice and easy with a hotkey cuz I don't have to click and drag to highlight the text I can just delete it contrl D or undo with contrl zed and I've just noticed I can't spell so I'm going to right click and then actually change the spelling to skeptical I could add this to the dictionary but I'm just going to keep it to skeptical and then come and close down this folder because I like seeing this uh nice and clean but now moving down to settings I use obsidian sync so I sync this folder with my phone there my sync settings I basically keep everything off uh except from syncing the images and for templates which I'll go through in a bit I use the templates folder so I have a folder for all the templates that's the folder that I showed a second ago and these are all of the templates that I have inside of my obsidian and this templates core plugin is actually used with one of the community plugins which I use which is inside of here if I go up to the options Community plugins and I click on browse I then get an option of at the moment 1,500 plus plugins and these are Community developed plugins so if the developer decides they don't want to maintain it anymore then it may stop working which has happened to a few of these so bear that in mind if you do start using Community plugins you can see it will show you that you've installed plugins so I've got tasks data view templator quick ad and you can search for any plugin so if I type in update it then says hey this is the plug-in update tracker I've also installed this one and when you click on a plugin you see this one says options and it will take me to the settings and it shows me some information about the plugin this one I don't have here I could then install it and then enable it so I'm using the plugin so going to the exit here I can then come into the community plugins see my installed plugins and scroll down these are all the plugins I've got and all of these actually have settings so I can go to the better word count setting the main reason I have this plugin is so when I have a look down in the bottom right you can see at the moment it's going to show the amount of words and characters in the file and here if I highlight this it's now going to show me I've highlighted three words and 34 characters the reason I use the community plugin is the core plugin doesn't let you do the highlight and show you the words and characters bit data view is a very complicated plugin which I have a video on which I'll share at the top right but that is what these query blocks are if I click in here it gives you a load of code which basically just says hey go and look for files inside of these folders and and show the links when you find it and in this case you can see that's what these are these are data view queries showing me files so it makes finding information far easier because it just collects them automatically so for example I know this query is going to look for files that are inside of the project folder that are not linked okay so if I create a new file right click and then new and call it new project you can see I've got a new project file inside of the projects folder if I open that up change the sort order by created Time new to Old you can see there is the new project file that I've just created I go back and let's actually open that up so I can push crol o on my keyboard to open up the quick switcher that's the button in the top left of the ribbon search for the new project so I've typed in new there's the new project push enter it's now opened that file in the right Tab and you can see it's showing inside of my project inbox because this file isn't linked to this file if I have a look in the right sidebar you can see it's changing this is the outline core plugin so it's showing the headings so you can see project is the heading at the top inbox is the heading underneath source is the heading underneath that and there's actually information inside this Source because I've toggled it shut so there's a query that I can hide or show but if I go right to the top of the cber there are other options I have the search I recently searched for fan and you see it's showing all of the results where fan appears in either the file title or inside of the file itself where I've written the word Fineman so it's inside effective Educators and inside of there you can see it's in there five different times but what I'm looking for is the back links for the new project so a backlink is a link that goes back to the file the other one is an outgoing link so what I want to do is inside of this file this educational science in a nutshell file is create an outgoing link so that's square bracket square bracket new project then enter if I push enter again I move the cursor down you can see now I have an outgoing Link in educational science so if I go over to that panel there are lots of outgoing links it's 384 um but this is a new outgoing link then when I click over to new projects you can see it's a backlink to the educational science and a nutshell file if I toggle this open you can see there it is I've linked it if I come down to in progress go square bracket square bracket and then new project I now have a second outgoing link and this is going to create a second instance of where the back links are so if I toggle this open you see new project new project and for those Vigilant if I look down the bottom of this file here are the back links and that is this setting right here so I'm in the core plugins back links backlinks in document I have this turned on so it shows up at the bottom so I don't have to mess around in the right sidebar I rarely use the unlined mentions but I've just deleted those outgoing links inside of this file and if I type new project so those words are exactly the same as the file name so if I click on the unlink mentions you can see actually there's there's four different mentions here but if I toggle this open there is the new project so these words here new project match the file name so if I click link you can see it's now turned this into a link and now it's a backlink it's not an unlink mention it's a backlink and throughout that explanation you may have noticed the project inbox is not showing the new project file when there is a link so if I delete this now there's no outgoing link to the new project and there's no back link from the new project to education science in a nutshell and that's what this query is looking for the reason I have this project inbox at the top is when I create a new project I want to see all of those new projects that haven't been linked in a section so I'm going to go to the top I'm going to middle click I'm going to use the mouse wheel middle click on the tab to close the tab down now I'm going to use a shortcut shift and then right arrow key and you can see now I'm showing the same file twice the other way I could do that is by right clicking on the tab and then split to the right so you see now it's done it again and now I can see the file three different times if I close the left side barar and the right side barar it's easier to see them all but I'm actually going to use the outline so I'm going to open this up close this tab down middle Mouse will click again and now in this section I want to go to the outline plugin which shows me all of those headings and let's for hypothetical sake say this new project is something to do with school curriculum I can jump down here then enter to create a new line and you can see is creating a task automatically that's a task plugin which I'll go through later and then go bracket bracket new project and now I have this new project linked in the curriculum section is going to disappear from my project inbox then I click on new project and I can see okay this project is linked inside of the educational science nutshell wait what section is that under then I click the show more context show more context and I can see other projects around it or I can actually click here and it take me to the link so I can now say oh this is under the curriculum section but I don't actually want this I'm going to delete the file using my hotkey control alt backspace you can right click and then delete you can see delete the file and it's permanently deleted so I'm going to use my hotkey to delete it and now it's gone to that blurry link because it's not actually been created and I don't want it here either so crl D to delete that line and then I want to close down this tab too but while I'm writing obviously I don't want to see this file all the time so what I've done is I've dragged it into the sidebar you see here and now I can see the file inside the sidebar which I can collapse and expand so that I can see what projects are in the inbox what projects are in progress while I'm writing so if I go to this project I'm writing in this project and if I Collapse that down I can then add a new project from here which if I go back to the settings you see I've gone through the better work count gone through data view if I go down we've got quick ad and all of these are different settings for quickly adding a new file you see here we've got the new so when I push control n on my keyboard it gives me the option to add any of these options so ingredient meal essay Danny video Source or educational science so as I'm doing this project I push contrl n educational science that's the project I want to make so I pushed enter on my keyboard now I type out the new project so new project just like we had before and then push enter now I've created a new project but I don't want to leave this file an ecological way to then go and have a look for that project so I open up the sidebar then scroll up and you can see in the inbox there's the new project because the file was automatically created and it's automatically being shown inside of this query and so I can middle click on my mouse for this new project and it will open it up in a new tab I can drag it to the side and you can obviously see there's information already in this new file but I didn't add that in that was automatically added and that is because if I go to the Cor C add settings and go to the settings of the educational science one that's the that's the button that I pushed a minute ago you see templates video template es and it creates the file in the project folder so going to the templates folder and going to the video template es that's the one that's in the new quick ad you see there's all the information that's currently in the new project so every time I create a new project with the educational science so crln educational science so I can enter cuz it's already there already another new project enter let's go back to the inbox you can see there's the new project middle click on my mouse to open that one up another new project in the left side see there's all the information looks exactly the same as the template because it is and the new project here is the exactly the same because it's using the template now I don't want this file so I'm going to use the hotkey to delete that control or backspace for me and as you notice the video template es is going to be different from all of these other templates so when I go to the settings and let's say Source let's go to the settings here you can see templates Source template and this one is being created in the source folder so this new project file is in the projects folder so if I close down that one you can see projects it's in the projects folder that's where it's created the new source quick ad so when I go contrl n s for Source enter new Source enter that's going to create a new source file inside the sources folder so what I'm going to do is change the sort order to new old close down the book folder and there is the new source so if I click on that one this is the template for a source which is just title and URL nothing complicated because I don't need anything complicated but this is already in for a reminder hey What's the title of this thing and is there a link to the online whatever it is so that's a brief overview of quick ad I'll link a video if I've done a video on quick ad up in the top right if not then I will put it on my list of things to do metadata menu I've done a video on this I know so I will link that in the top right now and what this lets me do is as you can see I've got a little video icon and when I click on that it lets me change what's called metadata or yaml or properties they all mean the same thing property information of the file so is it active true or false yes or no is it done true or false yes or no what channel is this for educational science and if I click on here Danny Hatcher or other so they YouTube channels that I have if I go back to educational science in a nutshell you can see as I go down to other sections let's say perception I have different icons so I can immediately see okay this is a video project this is some research this is a source and if I scroll down you can see there's a pen so this is an essay that's my very limited use case of metadata menu but you can do a lot with it the pandoc plugin lets me export my markdown files in obsidian to word there's no real need for most people to use it but these are the settings um I don't actually use that so I can delete that now um yeah it's just the default settings and this is where the word documents go they go to my main Vault folder this community plugin just tells me if there's an update so where I go to community plugins instead of having to click check for updates every time in the bottom status bar you can see I've got a tick with a plug that's what the update plugin is and it says I'm all up to date if I'm not it will give me a red one or two or three tell them how many updates I actually need to do I also use the task plugin as you will have seen inside of this file I've got a completed date so it automatically gives me when I'm done with it this little Emoji here is a a priority for the task so if I use my hotkey control shift n it lets me edit or add a new task there's the description the chess teacher bit there there's the link I can add priorities I can make it recur due date schedule date start date there's loads of stuff to this plugin but simply put I can tick off something done or not done inside of the file but you don't actually need the task plugin to have a task you can just make a task so if I use my hotkey that was control enter or you can add in this markdown so a dash space square bracket space square bracket and then space and start writing then it's a new task block this also suggests comes from the task plugin which obviously you would need to install as a community plugin but if you just want default task you don't need it I have templator installed for one very specific use case case which I'm not going to go over here cuz it's really not relevant and I rarely use it but I figured I'd mention that I have it and then zotter integration I have done a couple of videos on this one of them quite recently talking about how I use the plug-in with different templates so I'll link that in the top right and then for those curious about this thing at the top it's the bookmarks core plugin so again this is developed by obsidian and what I've done is i' it's like a favorite bar or a starred panel I can add any file you see there's the there's the file title I can add that to a group I don't have any groups but you can add a file to the bookmarks so let's say I'm working on this I can then add this to the bookmarks saves and can then drag this up and down as a priority put it into a group but mainly it's just so that it makes navigating to the file easier I'm going to right click remove it and then jump back to the main file and in the bookmarks I have my I guess you could call this a dashboard page a main page a query page it's just the place that I go to find stuff out and then I have my food canvas which is a canvas of the week planning of food what I'm going to eat what I'm not going to eat to see Monday through Sunday and then lunch orth through to tea then we've got shopping list which is not complicated at all it's quite literally just a file of tick boxes which I sync to my phone so I know I'm going to go to Asda and get these things or I'm going to go to Littles and get these things and money which I'm not going to click on CU obviously it's finances is actually an Excel document so for those of you that have reached this part of the video or skipped to this part of the video uh prepare yourselves I'm now I'm going to show detect all file extensions so when I click on this it's now going to showb file CSL file another bi file and a CSS file inside of my files called plugin they are different types of files that obsidian doesn't normally recognize and when I go to my others folder you can see there's a zip file and there is one Excel file which I can open for you so if I click on that it opens an Excel document of data that I collected for an article that I was reading but I wanted to have it linked inside of obs so I made the Excel file then I linked it inside of obsidian so I could click and open it and I've done exactly the same with my money Excel document and then because it's in obsidian I've bookmarked it so I can go and do my finances in my Excel spreadsheet and navigate there from obsidian rather than having to open it up in my documents that is a somewhat quick overview of my obsidian but when I'm going through the videos inside of the series things may change look different because as I write as I evolve my obsidian things may change such as the queries or the location of different plugins maybe new plugins or plugins are removed and of course files were changed so if you have any questions on something that I do while I'm doing any of these series videos just put it in the comment section and I will try and answer as best as I can so here is a link to the playlist hopefully and you'll be able to go through literally any of the videos that I've done because all of them are going to be slightly different maybe you go for the most recent one or you start the beginning it's up to you

Channel: Danny Talks Tech

Views: 3,116

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Id: eoKs2bhd4OM

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024