Obsidian for beginners: Building a second brain from scratch

today i'm building my note-taking system in obsidian completely from scratch i do have a note-taking system it's all built and i will show it later on in the video but i'm going to build it completely from scratch so someone like me when you first look at it don't get really confused when you're like what are all these buttons for if you want to skip ahead there will be timestamps in the description so let's get to this to start with you need to actually download the app so you can go to obsidian.md that's literally what i googled and this is the website you'll find you will need to pay attention to the version so you can see i'm version 0.12.10 so the version will be developed obviously as we go so if you see this video in the future which in theory it will be in the future but when you see it in the future just keep note that some of the things that you will see in this video may be slightly outdated the app is available on the app store and google play etc so you can just download the app onto your device now i say device because there is a mobile and ipad and tablet app which i will go through later on in the video but as you can see up here we've got pricing and as we go to pricing you see it's free it's completely free but i do actually pay for catalyst uh mainly because of the insider builds i want to i'm nosy i'm a nerdy person so i want to see what's going on and see certain things first and then you have a commercial build but most people use it for free you don't need to pay for it which gives it an advantage over things like rem note and roam research however there are add-on services that are paid so the sync so if you're using multiple devices it allows you to sync your notes to different devices and because this isn't cloud-based sync is basically your cloud because it's local based storage which i will explain later on for those aren't that tech savvy and then publish i don't use publish but you can publish your notes so instead of putting on a website you just use your obsidian go this folder this folder these notes publish the mobile app works on both app store and google play so you can just download it on there again i will show you exactly how i do that on my android phone later the sync tab for when you want to buy sync and i actually use sync because i use my pc my laptop my sister's ipad because i don't have one and then my phone and they're all synced all over the place and you get five sync volts if memory serves that may have changed by now but i have one sync fault my sister actually uses another sync volt so i pay what's that four dollars i think it's like three pound 80 something like that a month but i paid annual for two people which is pretty good and you can have three more people on there if you wanted because you can have an encryption password for that vault so my account is on my sister's computer but she has a password for her own vault so i can't actually access her notes and she can't access my notes either but we're using the same account the community around an application is really useful when you struggle doing certain things and because this is still in beta it's still 0.12 it's still a little bit cody and hacky in some ways when you look at it and you're not a coder or not someone familiar with tech and software so the obsidian forum which is online obsidian forum is really useful for getting quick answers to their questions but the discord is where i would go it's where i live most the time and when i want to ask a question they're there and the developers silver and lycat are both in there which is really nice just to see them engaging which you don't see from other applications sometimes so once you've downloaded obsidian which i have obviously already done you then load it up and this is what you'll see or something similar to this this is actually my note collection so this is a shortcut to the vault that i currently use and every time we open a vault another shortcut will appear we can get rid of that using the x and it is stored in my external hard drive and it's called note collection because it's local file storage so if i open up my folder system you can see this is my e external hard drive and there is my note collection that is every single note i have in my current obsidian which is around 2000. now when you first download it obviously you won't see a shortcut because you've never opened a vault folder so you'll either need to open folder as vault so if you've already got a folder ready you can either create a new vault so create a new folder or you can open the help fault and this is another great place to find answers to questions you may have or just see what the application can do so if i close that down if i actually close this down for a second and then reload that back up you can see boof there it is because we've just opened it it's now a shortcut there now i don't want that shortcut there so i'm going to get rid of it but that's essentially what happened so if we go create new volt you can see pick a name so i'm going to pick a name obsidian vault and i'm going to find a location and it's going to be in my external hard drive so i can select folder and click create so now i have a new vault so let's just see what's actually going on here so you've got obsidian vault in my folder it's right there if i click into there i've now got a dot obsidian folder and then i have these other files in that there they're not massive files as you can see so it's perfectly fine to have on your system now going back to this open vault menu you can see there's the obsidian vault and if i want to do open vault as new folder i can click open it takes me to this menu and there is that vault that we had select and boof now we're in to give you an idea of what's actually going on behind the scenes with obsidian if i create a new note you can see we've got the button there and we call this let's call this first note because i'm really original when we go into this file you can see there's the first note it's an md file in there and the same will happen if i create a new folder first folder again really original the first folder has now been created in the documents and this is how the whole of obsidian works so i can now drag that note into the folder and boof it's disappeared and now it's in that folder so that's what's going on behind the scenes when you're using obsidian on your system just to give you an idea so obsidian now we're into obsidian now we're into the application we can see what's going on we've got side menu left side menu right action menu all the way all the way on the left and then we have our main space in the middle and i'm gonna call it a main space because it's not just one note which we'll get to later we have some action buttons at the top so go backwards and go forwards and then we have some stats down the bottom so words characters backlinks and almost everything in obsidian can be customized and changed so every action bear this in mind every action you do so if i click that click that i click in here almost every action you do has a shortcut hotkey which again i will show you later on so going down the buttons you can push you've got go back go forwards which is pages then we have the file explorer this is called the file explorer and it's actually a core plugin you can turn off or on depending on your preference and this just shows your folder structure obsidian vault that is the main folder that you're in you can see there's two files and one folder currently then you have a subfolder you have the files and then other files all of this is toggleable you can make as many files and folders as you want so let's create a second folder and we can then nest the folders in there so we've now got a second folder inside the first folder the first note is inside this first folder is not actually inside the second folder but i can click and drag and pop now it's in there so you can see we've got one file and then we've got one folder and one file you can then change the sort order of all of these things using this and what i personally do is actually go modified new to old that's my personal preference and then we have search and search is pretty powerful and as you can see you can search in lots of different ways so you can search for a path so if i go path colon i can search for specific folders so if i click first folder that's what's in the first folder then i can search for a file name so if i push in f for example f there we go that's the first note you can search for tags which is actually easier using the tag pane which i'll go over later on line search sections and you can use rejects and things like that inside the search if you know how to use it when you're searching you can customize the search using match case and match case does exactly what it says so if i type in f that first note hasn't appeared because it's a capital f that it's now looking for you have the help section which tells you what it's looking for i personally don't have that on and i don't have match case on either so now i have two files with an f in i can search for f and you can see we've now got them both coming up if i go into the fourth note which is the note i'm currently in and type write something funny funny has an f in it and there it is it's now appeared so if i collapse result it's not going to actually show me that there is an f there is some there's something beginning with f in this note it's going to give me a one if i uncollapse that you can see it's there so if i write oops i've misspelled funny there we go um we've now got two results and we can collapse and show that result that's our choice i personally collapse those and just look at the number then if i actually want to see what is in the note i will then go and find it now i've got two results in fourth so i'm going to untoggle that so we can see what's going on and then we have this button next to it show more context now i can either go down in here and go show more context and this is showing where it is or if i had more context so if i type in more context i now have a line a block underneath this first block so that's now going to show there what i could do instead is click this option here so that is now on i can now open this up and that context is already being shown i personally don't use that but that's something else you could do so i'm going to tick that off and then you can change the sort order by pretty much the same thing again i go modified new to end and then you can copy the search results now i personally don't use this often like at all but you can copy the search options and what this means is when you're searching for something specific you can then copy it and put it into whatever page you're looking for you can show the path so that shows the path of where it is so this first note is just a file and that is it is dot md this second note is in first folder and second folder so it will show you where it is if you need that location then we have the link style so wiki links this will be useful later on so you could either use wikileaks which looks like this which that's how i use the wiki links or you can use markdown links which look like this now you can use either one for your backlinks internal external linking which again i will go through later on but these are the two options you have i go with wikilinks and then because you're basically copying a list of things it gives you the option to have list prefixes so there's the asterisks you can have a dash in front of it or you can have a numbered list of things that you want but again i don't really use them much on the right hand side we have the backlinks panel now for those that aren't familiar with backlinks basically that wiki link that we just saw so if i go bracket bracket there's that wiki link you then get given a search menu very similar to the search we've just gone through and it searches through all of your notes blocks headings if you want as well so there's the two notes that we have first note fourth note i can start typing in so i want the first note it is there i click enter now it is linked now it is a wiki link and it's not showing up here but it will show up in the first note so if i come back over to my side menu open up first folder if i control click which is an action click which you will use a lot in obsidian i hold ctrl on my keyboard and click this note i've now opened it up now you can see we've got both notes open we have this first note here which we can drag around and then we have the fourth note so in this first note you can see this backlink panel now has first note in there again the collapse results the show more context change sort order all exactly the same as in these other panels so if i'm going to collapse this you can see it there it is there's the one i want more context where it's going on that's what's going on first note so this first note is in fourth and it's linking to first so i have a podcast that is talking about coaching so i'm going to rename that file now when i click off this file boop update link because it was a wiki link in the podcast page it's asking me do you want to update that and that's part of the settings which i'll go through in a second and i'm going to always update it because that's my personal preference but you can have it just as once always update so now that link has changed it's now coaching so podcast is now linked to coaching if i wanted coaching to be linked to podcast i could then go into coaching go bracket bracket podcast there it is and now that is linked in here so in coaching i have a backlink from podcast to coaching so the coaching is in podcast going to coaching and then in coaching we have an outgoing link to podcast so there is a link inside the coaching page that goes to podcast vice versa i go into the podcast page i have a backlink from coaching and an outgoing link to coaching now obsidian doesn't have a what you see what you get editor like notion roam research type or etc they are working on that but it's currently a button again hotkey if you want up here so we can click there and this is what it will look like in the preview mode in the preview mode currently you can't do anything you can't edit text because that's what the editor mode is for but you can click through links so this is a link this is the page preview if i click on this coaching link bam i'm in coaching so now i've actually opened up coaching twice i've got the coaching page up in a preview mode here and edit mode here if you do want to know what obsidian are working on you can type in obsidian md roadmap into google then click on the obsidian roadmap in trello and see exactly what they're working on now you can see it working on export to standard markdown which is nice but the what you see what you get editor is right there on the short term list so they're working on it they're they're actively looking at it and you can see everything else that's that they get that's going on right in here so we've just jumped through the link so we can go podcast coaching we can jump through these links but if there are notes elsewhere that we want to try and find instead of going into search we can use something called the quick switcher now there is an option on the side menu quick switcher again there is a hotkey for which i'll go through later but when you click on there or use the hotkey it comes up with a search menu the same search as you would get the backlinks same search with the search menu and you can just type things in so let's have a look for coaching there it is i can then go enter and there's that page if i add another page so let's come up here and let's say i want a page on marketing so we've got marketing in there now i have a new page but if i close that page down and i want to come into marketing and i don't want to go through this file explorer i can then go to the quick switcher so let's click on there type o m a it's already there and i can either push you can see down here i can navigate up and down i can push enter to open the page i can push control enter to open it in a new page just like we did with the control click on the file explorer control enter new page shift to create the page because it may not be created yet which i will show in a second and then escape to dismiss so i'm going to control enter on my keyboard and boof we've still got that page up that we had coaching page and now we've got the marketing page if i go into this three dot menu you get lots of different options link with pain which i'll explain later on pin does exactly what it says it pins the page you split vertically horizontally et cetera et cetera all the way down which i will cover most of these if we delete this file poof it's gone don't delete an artist again delete now for me i have this set to delete because when i delete the file i just want it gone there is file recovery so that's fine so i'm going to delete that file now when i come into here and i type in marketing you see the page is actually gone from the file explorer because we've deleted the file and marketing i've now created the page but not really it's like a placeholder page so if i go back into preview mode you can see this one is blue it's light blue because that's the theme and this is the page preview this is dark because it hasn't actually been created you see not created yet when we go to search file and we go marketing you can see oh that page hasn't been created yet and because it hasn't been created yet we can either go ctrl enter to open it or because it's a setting that we already have done in obsidian again i'll go through that in a second i can push enter and create that page so it's currently not created you can see it hasn't been made i can go search m it's there i can push enter bam there's the page and now it's dark blue because we can see what's going on and we can write something exciting and there it is we're writing something exciting in this page preview which is a core plugin you can turn on and off you can open the link so i'm going to open the link to that page and it's there so if we close that down come into here i'm going to open the link there is that page and you can jump through quickly just like that now inside marketing you may want sales so double bracket sales and there's no match found but i can just click out and there you go the page has a placeholder page so if we go into the graph view which is one of those views that can get very confusing we have lots of pages mine is very confusing but we see this and these lines represent the links so the backlinks that we had in this panel here are those lines this is a page this is a page a page and this is a page it's a different color it's dark gray rather than light grey because it hasn't been made yet and i can make it from here or i can leave it there now before i carry on if i go into marketing i can add a tag that tag that we saw earlier so if i go here tag i now have a tag and when we go into the graph view that tag currently isn't showing but i want it i want to see it so i can come up to filter and it gives me those options so this search works exactly the same as all the other searches so i'm not going to go through that again if i click on tag it's going to show the tag there's the tag and it's a different color nice attachment there isn't an attachment currently in here but again that would show existing files is currently there i click that off but it's gone now i like seeing my existing fi my non-existing files so i tag all that tag or that one off i toggle that one off attachments i actually want to see on there and then we have orphans so if i go into podcast and i get rid of this link so if i get rid of that link and i go back to that graph view see podcast is still linked because there is a link from coaching so we're going to go into coaching and get rid of that podcast link as well there we go now go back to the graph view hey there we go so that was an outgoing link and a backlink in podcast we got rid of both of those and now this is an orphan so if i click orphans it's now disappeared i can click it back and boof is reappeared again to give you a quick example of what attachments look like i'm going to print screen so windows shortcut windows shift s for those of you that don't know i'm going to drag around that now i have a print screen of that page i'm going to go to marketing i'm going to paste it and it's pasted it as an image because it's local files i now have an image file in here you can see png file it's also been embedded that's what the exclamation mark is and it's here so if i go into this view it's going to show me that image come into this view it's going to show me this image now when i go to the graph view we can see oh there is that attachment and it's being shown i can hide it or i can show it and it's a different color again the css theme you can change as much as you want those that know css will understand that those that don't again i'll go through it in a second with core plugins we then have groups which i use quite a lot because i like colors and they're very useful for seeing the graph rather than just having a blurb of dots so when we come into here it works exactly the same as search so you can use all the same search functions as you would in everything else i'm going to type in c and anything with a c in it is now going to be colored red because that's the color i can click on the color and find whatever i want so c is going to be red now if i add another group and i say a everything with an a is now going to go yellow now sales isn't going yellow because it's not actually a file and coaching isn't going yellow because it's already got this first group on there so bearing that in mind some of these groups will cross over something else now if i make this sales page so i'm going to control click buff it's now up here as my page because i've just made it and there it is it's yellow because it's a and it's in there that's how you could use those groups and just something to keep in mind when you are making groups inside of a graph view then we have the display which you can change the arrows so you can see we've now got an arrow on there we've got an arrow off that helps you understand whether it's a backlink or an outgoing link then you have the text fade threshold which basically means if you zoom out and you move this all the way to the left you'll still be able to see it but if you move this all the way to the right you won't be able to see it unless you zoom all the way in to actually see it so i have that around there i think i will show you my vault later we have node size so if you want a big dot it's there you're on a small dot it's there so let's just leave it as a big dot for the moment and then link thickness exactly the same so you can see what's going on so let's add those arrows on both there we go we can see exactly what's going on now forces are as you would imagine you can change the forces and it changes the different forces applied to the graph and you can play around with this to your heart's content to make it look all fancy and whatever and when it when it comes to interacting with the graph you can click and drag all the points around um doing absolutely nothing or just wasting your time by dragging dots because um yeah like a cat with a ball now i've been breezing over hotkeys and shortcuts and actions for the moment but command palette again another core plug-in but when you click it you can see buff here is every single command currently uh in the obsidian space and you can add them in as you add core plugins in as you add community plugins in more actions become available and you can see all the the hotkeys that are default this is just the default hotkeys but we can search something so if i want to go to the graph view you can see there it is ctrl g so instead of having to click over here if i was to go into a page let's go to the podcast page i can go control g woof there it is or if i go back into a page i can then go into the command palette search up graph view and click it yes that's a longer way of doing it but when you want to find different actions and you're not sure where the button is or where to find it you can go into the command palette and try and find that command you're looking for we then have a markdown importer which does exactly what it says it imports markdown from your your more favorite markdown editors roam research bear zephyr casting etc etc play around with those as you wish i'm not going to go through all of that because that's a whole video in itself we have an open another vault option so you can actually have two volts open at once now i'm using two screens and i'm going to very quickly show you poof there's my obsidian that i have on my other screen just giving me a bit of a run down through the scripts to make sure i don't forget anything so when you click that this is the menu that comes up very familiar from the beginning of the video you have obsidian vault and then you have the note collection the two shortcuts this is the obsidian bottom in and the other one is mine you have the helpful option so this is another shortcut to get to the help vault you can click that in buff there it is and then we have settings and before i go to settings i do want to explain this graph you a little bit further because you go into podcast you can actually have a local graph view so if i come into this menu you can see local graph open local graph or you could go through the command palette or create a hotkey so i'm going to open up this local graph view podcast that's it there's nothing there is nothing too exciting about this graph view the filters are slightly different though we still have tags attachments existing files but now we have neighboring links outgoing links incoming links and depth so if i go into this podcast note and create a link to sales now i have close the filter i have an outgoing link to sales so if i turn off outgoing links that's now disappeared now if i open up another page so let's open up marketing and drag that down here if i put podcast in here so podcast we now have marketing and marketing you see we've got podcast and sales so in here we have our podcast page which is what we're on the yellow dot that's the graph one that's a local graph we're on we're going to filters so we've outlined outgoing links so we're on the podcast outgoing links is sales i click that off sales has now disappeared i click that on it's now reappeared incoming links so that's the backlinks here where's the backlinks marketing so this line here should disappear now it's gone i can bring that back that's good now what's this other line in between that's the neighboring link so if i click this one off you can only see things that are going in and out of podcast because that is the graph view the local graph you were on i go neighbor links bam now i can see the neighboring links between these two different points which is this link right here and then we have depth so we're currently at depth one now when i go to depth two what's going to happen another thing has appeared why is this appeared this has appeared because it's linked to marketing but not podcast so it's gone through two notes there's one there's two if i go back to one there is only one link so it has to be a direct link to podcast depth two okay this is now linked if i go depth three there is nothing linked to coaching so there is nothing dot dot dot if we go into coaching so we open up the coaching page and we add something else let's go sport because sport is another option sport has now appeared let's get rid of this page for a second sport has now appeared as a third link to coaching so it's gone from podcast one to marketing two to coaching three to sport that's the depth that's how it works grouping works exactly the same display and forces work exactly the same in the local graph view it's settings time i like spell check and when you do have something that you've added to the dictionary it will come into here so as a very quick example uh blah blah blah bl is now a word i've decided that is now a word i'm right clicking on the word there's some options nah nah i'm going to make it a word because um it now is i've decided i don't actually want that word anymore so i can come into settings and then get rid of that very useful for adding certain terms that aren't recognized especially in research when you have massive long words that no one knows other than people that are writing about them you add that to the dictionary readable line length if i get rid of those pages we can see now we're here we go there we click onto here it's now in the middle so it just changes where the indent is to start with and a couple of other things later on but i have that in the middle that is my preference strict line breaks you can see is currently off and when we go into preview mode it leaves all of these there but when i go in and click that on if i go into preview mode boop oh it's got rid of that so what it's done is it's moved this so strict line break has moved this up here because it's only one line there so it's combined it all into one line i personally don't like that so i have that turned off show front matter for those people using yaml or aliases or things like that this is so that you can see it at the top of the page if that didn't make any sense to you then you probably won't be using it i understand it and i still don't use it because i can see the information anyway auto pair brackets so when you make something if i want to bracket both there's both and if i want to go there there's both there that's my preference because i don't want to have to go bracket bracket then write something out and then close the brackets down i just want it there to start with auto pair markdown syntax is the same as the brackets and just with the bold italics and strikethrough smart indent does exactly what it says it just indents things appropriately again i have that turned on fold headings i turn on because i want to be able to fold information underneath my heading kind of like a toggle from notion fold indent i also turned that on so when i come back into here we can see if i add a heading we can see that little arrow to the side you can change that to the size in css but now you can fold things and if i tab this over we now see there's the indent here what i will say is when you're in preview mode this works but this one doesn't it has to be a bullet point currently for that to work so if i make that into a bullet point and i make that into a bullet point you can see it folds there now when i go into this page and now it folds here just something to keep in mind default new paint mode i put that in preview because that's my personal preference show line number so you can see how many lines you've got in the editor mode so one two three four blah blah blah this is actually useful we have something where you have a really really really long line that is one block and you can see that's eight that's nine that's where it's useful because when you're referencing blocks later on using block references which again i will show the line number actually helps you see things a little bit but when you get used to obsidian and how it looks how it formats you'll get a feel for what it looks like which is why i no longer use line numbers for that purpose so we're going to turn that one off use tabs i do use the tab button and it's four spaces because that's the default it's nice easy nice and simple line wrap basically does again what it says if you have line wrap on you can see it's wrapping the line here if you have it turned off it's going to disappear along the page and you're going to have to scroll backwards and forwards and who wants to do that really so we're going to turn that one back on auto convert html does what it says vim key bindings if you don't know what vim is then you can't use it don't use it if you do know what vim is then feel free to use it just put in the appropriate code and then you can use vim going around so you can use j to go up and down for those unfamiliar with them you can use a different that was dd to delete the whole line you can then undo things and paste there's loads of options in vim but vim is like a a whole world apart so i'm going to turn that one off because i personally don't use them even though i know i could now files and link confirm file deletion prompt before deletion now we've already deleted a file so this is already over but you can tab that on and off whether you want i just want it to be deleted and gone so i have that off move to system trash yes you can move it to obsidian trash permanently delete i just move it to the system trash so i can recover a file automatically update internal links again that was that setting that popped up so i'm going to keep that one on because i want it to automatically do that i don't want to give me a pop-up every time that's just annoying default location for notes is the vault folder so that's the main folder you can choose other options but i personally go for the main folder so whenever i create a new note so i'm going to use the keyboard shortcut ctrl n there's the new note and it has been made inside this vault folder you can change the name of this and the shortcut will still be the same new link format i don't want all of this stuff you saw when we did the copy search it gave you first folder second folder all of that i don't want any of that information i just want the shortest possible link which is my preference wiki links i'm using those i'm not using the long ones detect all file extensions now i actually use excel files in my obsidian so i actually turn this on so i can store the excel file in my local documents inside my obsidian folder then when i'm in my obsidian folder i can click it and go through and then the default location for attachments you can set up a specific folder for your attachments which is useful but i actually split mine up so i have images and pdf files and they both go in different folders so i just put them in the vault folder and then use the move shortcut again i'll go through the shortcuts later but i'll go through the move shortcut and just dump it in the folder which takes like three keystrokes appearance um i'm a light themed person so i'm going to put the light on dark has been challenging for the first bit but i'm a light themed person translucent window i don't like this at all but it makes your tab translucent so you can see there's there's the uh thingy going on and oh there it is it's translucent well look at that look at how how lovely that is it's an option font size 16 is what i use it's the default and you can make it bigger or smaller depending on your eyesight and the screen size etc but that's an option in there quick font size adjustment i have this left here what that allows you to do is you can zoom in and out so i'm going to hold ctrl and now i'm scrolling with my mouse and i can zoom in and out of writing what that's basically doing is changing that dial here up and back so move it back to 16. yes and that button there that you saw is restore to default you will be familiar with that if you use hotkeys which i highly suggest so that is what you can do i leave that on but i never actually use it and then we have themes and this is where most people change their obsidian and customize everything you can use css in room research as well remnant i'm not too sure but if you don't know how to use css you can browse community themes here are loads of themes that you can use i know santi has a couple of things santi is uh someone who i can't spell your name sorry santi um zanti is someone that i know has got a couple of things and has got a course which i will link in the description below has obsidian course great course but what you can do is you can click onto the theme click use you see fetching css you are now using this fetching blah blah blah blah blah and what it's done is it's automatically put it in basically so this is the theme i personally don't use this theme i have my own theme but this is the theme and you can see now in this folder none was for those of you curious what actually happened if we come into my obsidian vault this this is what we've currently made you can see these are all the files we go into the dot obsidian and we can click into themes here is that css file so if you want to add adjust change that css file is there if i double click there is the theme it looks great doesn't it but that's that's what's going on behind the scenes so you can see where everything is in your file system sorry santi but i'm turning this off because i don't like it uh hotkeys now instead of going through all of the hotkeys that i use i'm just going to make an image and dump it on screen for you now um and that is all the hotkeys that i currently use in my uh in my obsidian vault and there are lots of them feel free to customize them as much as you want so in here what you do is you find the one you want you click on this customize and then you click the hotkeys so um control d control d is now add embed um that's actually conflicting with delete paragraph so i'm not going to use that i'm going to use alt oh i can't even push buttons alt d there we go and now it's there or i can restore it to default which is bang all the way back there so that's hotkeys and have fun the about section is very quick that's the current version you can check for updates great automatic updates turned on obsidian help i use the help button down the bottom left language english because i'm english receive insider builds yes please i'm a catalyst subscriber person part of the membership community whatever it's called so i get to see that so i get things early but you won't have this button if you're not one of those people i don't think anyway you can see there is my license and i can activate commercial license but i don't want to because i'm quite happy here and then we've got the advanced hardware acceleration i've never really played with this but it says if you turn it off performance will be decreased so i don't turn it off there's your account information from inside the application and here is the core plugins so those things that you saw me talking about here the file explorer the search the backlinks and other things that i did mention earlier on this is where you'll find them you go into the settings and core plugins so there's the file explorer you can turn that off see oh it's disappeared turn that on and now it's reappeared but it's over here as a tab uh then we've got search got that on quick switcher got that on gone through that graph you've gone through that backlink's gone through that one as well now we have outgoing links which i'll click on tag pane which i will click on daily notes which i will click on the page preview is the pop-up templates which i will click on note composer which i haven't shown but i will go through command palette which i've gone through start i will turn on mark that reporter gone through don't use it so i'm actually going to turn it off that'll catch some prefixer uh i will turn it on to show you but i don't use it random note again i don't use it but i'll turn it on to show you outline i don't really use it but i'll turn it on and show you word count i don't use because i use community plugin but i will leave it on for the moment so you can see it slides don't use but i'll turn it on audio recorder i do use not often on my pc normally on my mobile but i'll turn on anyway to give you an example open in default app yes because i just want to be directed there anyway workspaces i use sometimes so i'll turn it on and show you file recovery i use especially when i've made mistakes publish and sync so publish i don't have so i don't turn it on and sync i do have but i'm not going to turn it on here because i don't want to sync it up to this so now we're back in the main workspace we have loads more buttons to push so we can see there's the search there's that file explorer but here is starred now star works different from file explorer and i actually prefer it to file explorer because you can see let's go podcast and i'm going to add this to the starred pane so i'm going to come down here and go start you can see i don't actually know where that is because i use the keyboard shortcut for that uh and then we're going marketing and we're going to do the same thing so start now we go to the start pane boof marketing and podcast here it is sorted by whatever the sort order is or is in the start pane you can drag and move around so if you've got a big long list and you want things like really stored at the top you can drag it around which you can't do in the file explorer so that's why i use the start pane you can unstyle the current file and then star or uninstall the current file depending on where you are but i'm going to actually drag those down here i'm now customizing my workspace uh and as we move over to this side this is the outgoing links so remember that local graph you're talking about these are the outgoing links so they're the links in here there's the sales there's the pasted image and there's the podcast and the backlinks there's the coaching so if i want those in different different levels there we go let's move that there let's drag that up here and i want the tag pane as well so let's go here there's that tag remember search i was talking about the tag i click there that's how tag search works so if i if we come into here and i go hash there's the tag i want that tag in there i push enter now tag is showing up twice now when i click on tag you can see woof two now it's in two places let's go into the sales page and go tag now it's in sales page and that page but what i actually want to do is i'm going to tag it with coaching as well now i've got coaching tag and coaching is now appearing in this panel so instead of typing all of this out i'm going to go to the tag panel click on coaching and bam there it is nice and sorted something else you can do is if we go into another file so let's open up the quick switcher go to podcast now in the podcast file but i actually want a nested tab so i'm going to go hash coaching and then i'm going to go slash sport so it's coaching but it's also sport so if i now look at the tags we've got tag coaching and coach sport what you can do is then go show nested tags woof so now we've got coaching sport you see now you can toggle these things so i'm going to search for sport only or i'm going to search for coaching now we've got coaching and sport we can show some more context collapse those out and there we go there's those tags so search works the same for files tags and blocks outline what does the outline do with the outline is exactly what it says it gives you an outline so there's your heading if i come into here let me go heading two heading two has now appeared in the outline if we go heading one now we're heading one down there and we can toggle this on and off very similar to the tags pane except it's working with the headings some of the plugins will appear on the action panel on this side so you can see start recording so i'm going to start a recording and it's already started and i'm actually recording on audacity as well at the same time because obviously screen recording this i'm going to stop that and poof there's the recording and again it's going to be a file so here is the file right there and there is that file so if we go into preview mode i can then play that through i'm not going to play that because i can't just say myself again but that's how you can audio record there i use that on my phone most of the time we have open random note which does exactly what it says it just opens a random note there you go there's a random note and there's another random note so if you want to randomly go through your space you can i personally don't use it but it's an option the workspace plugin saves your workspace so you can see this bit of a bit of a mess that we've made we can save this as a workspace so i'm going to save it as mess and now it's there so if we change this around a bit let's move that over here let's move this up here let's just get rid of that completely and let's actually add in another page so now we've got lots of different stuff going on but i want to open up that workspace we currently had i can come to mess load and there is all that nest that was just made so if you want a specific workspace when you're working on something so have a daily note up a specific daily note or a specific page maybe a home page that you're working with you can set that as a workspace with everything set up for you so it doesn't matter when you drag stuff around it's all there ready to go if you're going to use the zettle cast and core plugin you can click over here and there is that zerocastor note and it's given you a note and actually gives you settings inside the settings to to change how this works or you could again you could use that command palette and then go zephyl there's the second zephyr caster note in there so when we go into the settings and we scroll down here you can see plugin options go to zeff or cast and prefixer and here are those options so this is currently what that number is it's taking the year 2021 is taking the month oh wait it's taking the day uh 31 is it 31. it's not 31. it's o3 and then it's taking hours and minutes which is 1505. that's the time of the note if they make another note it's o5 and then it's always going to add a number even though it's still the same something to keep in mind so it doesn't actually duplicate things which is something in notion that you can't struggle with when creating something like this it just adds a number on and you're always there i don't use this method because the numbers for me are just a waste of time but that is an option now as you will have seen this plugin options you can see command palette here's the command palette you can pin something to the top so let's say we're always going to go into the graph view and we're not going to use the shortcut for some odd reason when you go into the command palette you can see now that command is pinned at the top so you could either use a shortcut or go command palette and pin something there which is nice i don't use the command palette because i use hotkeys now on the daily notes i'm actually going to change this so it's going to go days months and then one two three four years and you can see this is what it's going to look like for me because this is how i prefer to see it now i need a file location and i need a template location so we're going to make a new folder for all of the daily journals so journal in there and then we want a template folder now i actually need a template for the days so we're going to go daily template and what you can actually do inside this daily template which i do and it's quite useful in other templates as well as you go brackets now that's making the link and then i'm going to use curly brackets and i'm going to type in date and what this is going to do it's going to input the date but for me what i want to do is i want i want it to input the date in the exact same format as the actual date that i want and you can change the format with any format that you want and the keys are actually in the settings which i'll show you in a second so daily template let's put that into there so we're going into the settings here's the format reference so if you need some reference for how you want things formatted you can click on that and go through but where do i want the file to be located i want it to be in journal and what template do i want to use i want to use the daily template now when i come out of here we've got the daily template journal is currently empty i don't know the shortcuts i'm going to go to the command type in daily note and bam there's the daily note so you can see it's taken the date so it's got the day and the month then the year because that's what we've got in our daily template inside here that's the format we want and journal there is the note here is the note and you can put whatever you want so let's add something in there and because the way of citing works you can add a template whenever you want so i'm going to go command palette template now i can insert a template it didn't work why didn't it work because the core plugin isn't set up so i'm going to go into settings go all the way down to templates and you see this is what we've asked it to do look for nothing in nowhere which is why i created that template folder so now we've got a template folder and now it's going to know where to search just to keep in mind if the function doesn't actually work this is probably why i've made that mistake which is why i did it there um so p template insert template there it is now we've only got one template so it's basically going that's the one you're going to use so let's make another template control n new template content template so this is actually an example of one of the templates i have in my space again i'll go through it later now i'm going to go bracket curly brackets and i'm going to use the exact same thing in there but this time i actually want the title in there as well so i'm going to go there curly brackets and then title i'm going to drag it into that template folder now when i go into a note let's go into this note and i ask for can i have a template please it says oh which one do you want and this is where you can pick them so type in c enter content template now it's copied the name of the file which is this number rubbish up here for zettocaston and you've got the date if i change this to a name of a file look at that it's changed in there and what i actually use this for is when i'm looking at long files i can open this up on another page that's ctrl shift click and i can scroll down this one and stay up here so when i'm working on the same page instead of having uh things split or me having to scroll up and down all the time or toggle things i can just have two pages open this can be a paragraph five this can be a paragraph ten i can have another one at paragraph 33 and i can see them all at the same time in different places which is really useful which is why i have this linked in all of my content file recovery does exactly what it says on the tin i don't really change any of the settings i just come into here and when i delete something i find it and then just copy it to clipboard and put it back into my obsidian nothing too complicated about that note composer allows you to combine notes together i very rarely use this but when you do want to combine notes together it is very handy instead of having to do a copy and paste you can just combine them together so if i'm here i'm going to go note composer because again there's no shortcut i'm going to click now it's going to ask which which file do you want to combine it to so i'm currently a name of a file that's the file i'm in i want to combine it with this one there i mean i know there's nothing in the note but i can merge and don't ask again again one of those settings so i'm going to merge it and it's now disappeared because the file no longer exists and it's now going to be in here so what it's done is it's merged uh a name of a file which now doesn't exist with this it's merged the two notes together so it's got rid of the one i was on and added it to the one i clicked on there's that setting that we've just clicked off because we've already gone through it the quick switcher plugin i always have and i think most people have on these are the settings so it show existing files only i don't have that on because i want to see the files i haven't made normally it's a person or a book or something show attachments yes please because when i'm searching for things i want to see my pdf in the search menu and then show all file types i actually have that on because like i say i have excel in my in my vault which i will get to very shortly and then we have page preview which i use a lot when i'm going through and working in my notes so you can see there are different options here so control click if we come into here you can see it's already showing me a preview this this here is the previous talking about i can go into there and i can i can preview all the way down just like the old windows broken format thing where it like goes all over the page um and this is the preview however it's not showing the preview there so if i control now it's showing the preview if i come back into here see preview if i click this on so when this is ticked it's not showing me i push control bam it's now showing me choose choose those options for you and i can't remember what my settings are so i'm going to go into my space now so now we're in myspace you can see orange is is my color it's my theme i like orange you can see my room is also orange other side there you go rose orange um this isn't the local graph you will see this move around as i move around pages i will go through the groups very quickly journal is blue so anything daily journal is blue a capture note is green which is a literature note i think is what's used in smart notes a capture note if you haven't seen my series on how i work through notes i will leave a link in the description and go through those to understand the philosophy behind my notetaking then we have people people and books are red templates are purply pink magenta and then we've got process notes so dark blue i know i need to work on them everything else is orange so if there is a working note something that i have summarized a working note that will be orange and anything in here will also be orange now these notes are orange and i can see today any notes that are done today will be on so that one redefining how we speak about communication this is actually a podcast i listened to earlier today this is essentially my inbox if there's something outside of here it's in my inbox and i left it there i made sure i listened to a podcast today before this uh and that's alright so i know i need to process it and i will process that in a minute uh when i go through the space to show you how that works now because we're in myspace i'm actually going to use my shortcuts my hotkeys to get around my space so i will try and save them as i go it just is going to make this slightly quicker so ctrl shift s to get into settings i'm going to scroll down uh oh i've turned slides on already look at me being prepared i need to do slides i need to show you the slides i don't actually use it it's normally off i must have turned it on in preparation uh but you can see i have sync on so that is a different thing and that's now going to appear in this plugin so you can see sync is now here and some other things in here that you won't have seen in the last space because they are community plugins i'll go over in a second so slides what are slides this is my daily note this is today's daily note you can see that was control control space that's how i go between preview um and edit mode so this is the recording i did on my phone uh this is a link to my gym stuff this is my curiosities page you can see what's going on this is actually a reference to this so i actually need to go through this uh i need to go through this at some point today uh this is this is this is a a capture note from a podcast from these two people and there's the podcast episode and that's just their notes it's a very short note and this links me to all the different days so you can see blue there are the different days gym training curiosity so you can see all the links that's going on in there but slides what are slides if i come down here and i go line dot dash dash dash it's going to make a divider so i go into the main page there's that gray divider a new slide i go down a couple another divider another slide and then another divider what i can do i don't have this shortcut set up because i never use this thing is i can start a presentation this is what slides does there is my first one you can see it's it's linked it's still covering it's still linking going through and there's my next slide and there's another slide um so that was escape so you can actually make a presentation inside of obsidian and it looks like a powerpoint presentation which is quite nice and there are community plugins that do make that slightly nicer here we go i'm actually going to turn that off because i never use that that thing so it slides goodbye community plugins what you do with community plugins is you have to turn turn it on so you have to turn safe mode off which allows you to turn it on so if i go into the other vault that was control shift v and i go back into that vault we were in if i go into the community plugins here you need to turn that off so i'm turning it off keep safe mode on keep turn safe mode off now i've turned it off we can then search and browse for a plug-in so let's install this plugin very quickly it's installed all good there we go now i turn it on from here now it's appeared in my plugin options and then i can change the settings around it will also have appeared in here there's the calendar plugin very nice so let's go back to my obsidian see we've got the calendar plugin up here there's that and what i have in my settings for the calendar plugin is zero i don't want to see a dot not my preference monday confirm before creating a note i don't i mainly use the calendar to navigate backwards in time rather than creating notes forwards in time because i create a note at the end of the day but there's that week number i don't show a week number but i do have weekly notes which is another community plugin and then there's there's that setting so better word count why is this different better word count i use this instead of the core plugin word count mainly because 19 191 that's all you get with the core core plugin with this one i can highlight these and now i can see 5 words 37 characters words the same as microsoft word essentially and so i can then highlight all the different things that i need to and it gives me those pieces of information and while we're down here three backlinks one two three backlinks that's where they are and then we've got this fully synced that is only for sync obsidian sync and that's because it's synced up to my phone my ipad my the laptop and all that sort of stuff that's the better word count that's the canada command palette i i don't use the command palette so there's nothing there file recovery again nothing changed kanban board so i actually use the kanban board inside of obsidian which is mainly for youtube videos i don't use much of this functionality feel free to go into the community plugins as much as you want so let's have a quick look at my kanban board so i can open youtube videos this is the kanban board i don't have that up so it's there some ideas of videos this is linked to a page this is what i'm doing right now this is the video i'm doing right now and this is the video that's going to be published friday so by the time you've seen this it would have been last friday and then i can click archive and it will archive the page but this doesn't look like markdown and that's because it's been formatted slightly and if we come to here there it is so this is the markdown these are all the archived projects that i've done this is the markdown page but i never look at it like that i look at it in a kanban board view so opening up these pages uh ah shortcuts that was control h and control l to open and close those pages um and go back to the daily note which ctrl shift y going back to my main page and here we are again uh ctrl shift s to go back to my settings note compos note composer i rarely use this page preview these are my settings for that periodic notes i use this instead of my daily notes so i still have the same settings pretty much uh as you saw for my daily note that's there but i actually have weekly notes as well so you can see this is for a weekly review which i do funnily enough weekly and there are my weekly folders um and i do have i have played around with monthly notes but i literally like as of yesterday got rid of those i'm going to turn that off and what this means is if i come into here and i go ctrl shift w because that's the setting i've made here's my weekly note so this is that day that day that day et cetera et cetera and these haven't been made you can see they're slightly different colors but now i have a weekly note so i have a weekly review and that's automatically made and they are stored in my folders so that is this month that is this year you can see there's the weeks there's all my weekly reviews there's all my daily reviews with in the in the month we've got the audio journal this is where i store like i said earlier the attachments this is where i store all the audio files they were videos now they're audio recordings hidden notes which i'm not going to go into and then this is my current daily note and it's there so i know okay that was the last day that i went through things my notes stored capture notes uh they are um lots of youtube stuff uh they're old videos capture notes there are the capture notes that i have people there's people all the old people all the people uh processing so there are the blue notes and then working notes and then templates so let's go into my start page and you can see this is a script i'm working on so this is what i'm working on see this is changing and these are all the other pages that i need to act on they're mainly processing notes that only have a couple of things to do so they're these dark blue notes so obsidian is one that's linked in here somewhere uh probably down the bottom yeah there it is it's linked in down there and this is a note that i need to work on so that's in here now we're in here what i'm going to do is i'm going to go through an example page and this is the the differences between the editor page and the preview page what i'm going to do is i'm going to link i'm going to link with pain so i'm going to link this with this so now when i scroll they scroll both at the same time love it so editing one two three four five six there we go and that's what they look like and we've got the toggles on we've got writing a block that's a block etc etc going all the way down something to note with the bold you can do it in two different ways in italics again you can do it in two different ways these are the squiggly lines which are the shift and for me it's on the same as the hash next to the enter button squiggly lines there's strike three that's what it looks like highlight again code block you can either use the three dashes or the one i don't use them very often but they're there anyway a pasted image so this is a screenshot i took and this is what it looks like that's what a pasted image is in bed is the exclamation mark if there wasn't an exclamation mark it disappears so let's put that back and there it is this is inline math works exactly the same as everything else with latex latex don't know how you say it slash pi plus m times c there it is nice and simple so you can do inline maths in there here we have an example page so this is linking the page so this is a backlink like i was saying earlier and this is the same page inside of itself this however is a link to a heading block so if i click on this link it takes me up to heading and the difference here is it's a hash link so if i want to make that again i go bracket bracket hash here's all the headings heading one which is a heading one two three four five six if i change that heading one to heading and now do it again just to solve any confusion you may have now it's changed the name so this is the actual name of the thing heading one is just what heading type it is so heading is now there and now in here we've got heading one and heading and this is a block reference which is very similar dart go bracket bracket carrot symbol top hat and now you can search any block so that could be a heading or it could be any other block and you can see this random spew of numbers is that block writing a block there we go there it is boof so if you come over here you can see there's that reference there's that reference i can click there and it's going to take me up to the block reference and we can see over here when it's done see that number there that's the same number as in here 7 e 9 a d 4 7 e 9 yeah so i'm going to get rid of that because i don't want all of that and go block and what that's now done is it's it's still working it's still working the same as it did before so we've got dash block and it's still working up there but i've changed it so instead of being a load of random numbers and letters i've changed it for my own personal reference so when i want to reference that again i can anywhere and because it's a block i can do a global block reference so if we come back into here we've got one character you see we've got the one character we've got the heading if i get rid of this and come into here i got a carrot which this is just this page and i go carrot again it's now going to search every single page in my vault and it's just going to keep scrolling for for forever but i i don't really want to do that um and i can type in block and there is that block reference you can see example page that's the page i'm pointing with my hand that's the patron example page and that's the reference block so i'm globally referencing the block if i was to go to another page i would still be able to reference it that's how you can reference any block anywhere but in here we've got block block i don't really want that so what you can do exclamation mark embed the block so if we go in front of here for exclamation mark now it's embedding the block did you see that change so you've got reference reference i come in here this block here i put an exclamation mark turns into an embed of that block we have a comment here so a comment doesn't actually show in the preview because it works the same as code it's a comment if i was to get rid of and it's now appeared as a comment doesn't show up what i use this for is when i have a comment or a thought in mind that when i'm working on the page oh that'd be a good idea i either put it in todoist which is my task management and i'm going to go through my entire digital uh digital toolkit yeah i'm gonna go through my entire digital toolkit um in the next video but i can either add it in todoist or i can add a comment into the page and then it doesn't show up so i can put loads of blurb in there for thoughts as like a checkpoint but it doesn't show up a quote block very nice css can change the look of them i don't use quote blocks so i don't change it and then footnotes and i use footnotes quite a lot they're essentially references inside of obsidian and this is something that i haven't seen in notion at all that works very well which is one of the reasons that i actually moved from notion to obsidian for my note taking because footnotes are so handy how they work very similar to block references you can see this is a footnote so we've got a bracket carrot one uh actually you know what let's zoom in one of the very few times i'm actually going to use this i've zoomed in that's what i'm looking for and that's what i'm looking for this is the reference for this one and this is the reference for this one this is the editor view remember in the preview mode we've got one two three that's all it shows so it doesn't show any of this it just shows a one this shows a two even though it says footnote in it it says two because it's the second one in the page and then this one shows three so the first two you need a line here if you don't have a line break and you get rid of it doesn't work so you need to have a line there a paragraph break so that it works and when you click in the preview mode one jumps down to this section and this section only appears in the preview menu see it's not actually here but it's here we can click up there and jump back so nice you can use that for references and pages you can use that for jump spaces anything you want i use them like this though so this is a reference this is a reference using personal links this is a reference using a page so example page is a page and what i've done is i've footnoted the page so it's three jump three and there's that page this is the page we're on i'm gonna scroll all the way down let's go in between again and what i do in my space in my working notes is i have my capture notes as footnote references so i can go straight back to wherever it was that i found the thing we then have external links so danny website is what it's going to show up in the preview it's there and this is the website it's looking for this is not a wiki link this is what all the links would look like if you didn't have the double brackets which this is just way too long so i use the double brackets but this is what you can do with external websites and then you can see i've embedded my youtube video and that's the iframe but how do you do that iframes were confusing to start with uh but essentially what it's doing is it's inside code i've learned how to do code iframe here width is what it says width so if i get rid of that it now looks really silly let's put the six back so you can change the width that's the width that's the height this is the source so this is essentially the link to the video which i actually have up here as well so you can see it's the same title and loads of other data in there if we go to the video so i'm going to open up the video this is my most recent video any video on youtube works like this click the share button click the embed button all of this will be copied when you push the copy button so i'm going to copy that go back to my obsidian i can come into here and then go paste and now i have the exact same thing now that i've gone through that i now want to go through how i actually use a lot of these shortcuts and features to process some of my notes through working and the series i've done before this the four videos i've done before this actually go through this process in way more detail but i am going to give it a quick overview now so i've got a couple of notes here that i've just made this one is a podcast that i have consumed and i'm going to go through how i did that on my phone after this so i have the name of the file here so if i go back to edit mode and the name of the file that was in the content template that i showed you earlier i then have date created and what this has done is it's linked it to the note i've created so if we come down you can see here blue that's the data i've made it so every piece of content that i consume it has a date associated to it so i know when i consumed that content not when it was made when i consumed it then i have the author here we actually have an alias which i'll show you in a second and i have another author so this allows me to link you can see down here red brett bartholomew that is the person that is that does the art of coaching podcast and scott is the other person now in my graph here i don't actually show scott because if i come to preview this isn't actually oh it is a page why isn't it linked that should be linked ah it is but it's just there because this is because i haven't actually processed this so it looks different because this is here it isn't filed and because of the way this is grouped notes people it should be red so this is currently orange which means i know i need to work on it this is red means i know i filed it and this is the this is scott right here because it's the first time i've ever seen scott um but if scott wasn't created uh it wouldn't be there it wouldn't be showing so if i add someone else uh another person if i had another person in there there is a link there but it's not gonna show on this page because i don't show the orphans on this page so i can now get rid of that because i have no intention of using it you can see it's jumped up to the top because modified goes to the top and then have the source link the source link is going all the way back to the source wherever it was whether that is a pdf if it's a pdf it will be in my pdfs file uh yeah there we go in pdfs in there i never actually go through my file switches well i don't know that but yeah so if it's pdf i'll either go through the link if it's a video or whatever it is there will be the source link and then i have my notes and i'm not going to go through how i do all of this but basically these are all the different points and now what i'm going to do is i'm going to very quickly go through this note and organize it in different places but before i do that scott let's organize scott this is the template i've put with scott so i've gone open template so that's control colon and then i push p and then push enter and that's the template for scott so that's been put in there and then i have an alias and this alias is leave your mark that is his podcast and that's exactly the same as what i've done with uh brett which i'll show you in a second so i can go control m i'm going to move this to person so push p people now he's out of this and into people so when i go back to oops wrong one when i go back here now it's red so breast is red and scott is red so if i go into brett you will see bret bartholomew art of coaching if i go back to that podcast that we're going through there oh you can see if i quickly go back that was control back bracket yeah square bracket that one i know that's one i'm working on because these are all uh processed these are all green so if i go back into here you can see art of coaching is being shown not brett flop but brett bartholomew because brett's is that the name the original note the art of coaching is the alias and i'm referencing art of coaching because it's that's the podcast is on that's the guest i will probably speed this better but i'm now going to process this note before i get questions about that what i've done is i've gone ctrl o to open up a page i've typed in the page that i think it's going to relate to then i push ctrl enter to open it up as another panel and now what i'm going to do is go through and basically copy and paste all the points across to the appropriate pages a quick point because this is a working note i saw it was a working note in the quick switches so i come into here you can see working is in that little uh path because i know this is a working note and i just added something to it i'm actually going to control m and then move it to processing so now i need to process this note and because it's quite a quick process i'm actually going to star it so i'm going to go alt s so you can see it's now starred now when i come down here it's going to be down there so i know there is a really small change in this working note that i can quickly get done in in that working process but back to it and you'll notice i've just copied the same block into two different pages because i think it's appropriate to be in two different places and i will i can do this as many times as i want and the main reason i don't use block references is for that purpose because that block right there that block here that i've highlighted is going to be reworded in two different ways so if i was to use the block reference i wouldn't be able to reword it in two different ways in two different places or three or four or five so i copy and paste them and then put the reference in the reference then becomes a footnote which is what you would have seen in the other working notes and if i come across another one i'll stop and show you now in that example there actually i'm just going to bring in a point when i typed in value you can see there are lots of different things in here i've got capture note which i just completely skipped over working note working note processing note processing note they're the ones that my eyes drew to because the capture notes i don't need them um but bad values to me good values to me i don't know if the point that i've taken is actually appropriate for that note yet so i was looking for a processor's note which is why i went for adding value so i know when i go into adding value i can then process that point it may be applicable in both of these points but i don't want to spend too much brain time thinking about it does it doesn't it i just want to get it out of that highlighted point and into a note because i don't want to spend my time thinking about it now because my brain isn't working with that i'm doing a flow state around that right now so i just want to get into a point get it good go done and if you saw that i'm actually made the note so this note wasn't made but it has references you can see it's referenced uh in a few processing notes and lots of working notes so it's been referenced it's been used but i didn't have any content in the page yet so i made it it came up here and then it very quickly disappeared because i was so used to it and just moved it to processing uh and and while i'm actually there what you saw me do is i actually clicked on the wrong page but because the page is linked already linked to the page i actually wanted to go to because i've worked on that note i just clicked through the link to get to the page i wanted which is another advantage of having working notes so densely linked and while i remember this is a working note so even though i'm in edit mode if i go into preview mode you can see blue blue and blue so all of these are footnotes uh and these are the footnotes so garyvee has said something and he must much said something uh and that's scary videos another reference from the same thing so that's a reference that's a reference for the points that were made and that's essentially what this point is going to be turned into a a sentence in there somewhere somehow but i don't know yet because i'm doing that later uh just as a shortcut i realized that i already had that in there and ctrl d deletes a paragraph so i just deleted the two lines in between okay so now that i've actually finished that i'm going to move that to processing now it is out of this list here and all of the points from here are now linked so if i actually click on this page you can see it's linked to lots of different processing pages i've got the list down there and i can jump to any of those pages i it is linked to scott livington uh because that is a person it is linked to brett and it's also linked to context matters and you can actually see if i zoom in a little bit let's not zoom in too far you can see there are links between a lot of these ideas already which means that this is obviously talking about a specific area specific topic which could be quite useful i don't use the depth because um well let me just show you if i move this to depth 2 yeah that's useless i can't use that so i don't use depth 2 and that is the reason okay so now i'm on my phone you should be able to see it next to me on the screen and i'm going to go into obsidian now it's going to be synced with my obsidian volt so everything you see in my pc will be on my phone there may be a little bit of time to sync which is what i'm hoping for fingers crossed and this is my daily note so if i swipe down on my phone it's kind of a shortcut i swipe down it goes to my daily note this is my daily note i can go into the edit mode it's there so i've audio recorded on here and then it's synced over to my main note i swipe right this is that side menu so i've got the backlinks i'm going to hide the backlinks there i then have all the other options down the side so those those dots at the top those different options at the top on the right would be here only i only use backlinks on my phone so there's nothing else here i can click into sync that's my sync i was going to show you there but you're going to be able to see the screen that's my sync and when it takes time sometimes it takes 10 seconds to sync up when i've when i've added something new that's in there if i swipe to the right the other side you can see woof there there's the folders so if i click out of the file uh file explorer you can see that's what it would like look like so i've got starred search and file explorer most of the time i'm in file explorer anyway but this is what we have in here now we have all of the other options so when i'm recording something you can see recorder is on the right so if i i'm in my daily note so let's pretend i'm taking another recording i'm now recording something on my phone and it's recording you can see because it's blue and then i push oops i push the blue button again and now it's recorded you can see there's the new file there's the new file in there and then i can play it on that's now going to have synced to my pc i'm going to leave it there for the moment because we will see it on the ipad when i get there but we don't have keyboard shortcuts so when i tap into the phone you get this toolbar this really nice toolbar that you can change in settings so we have indent right indent left move up move down templates brackets and delete paragraphs they're the ones that i have chosen and then you have your normal your normal texting but what this allows me to do is if i have a new note so for example let's make a new note i'm consuming a podcast i have no idea what the podcast is but i'm consuming a podcast uh and i'm in here i can push the add button and now i'm going to templates this is going to be content template so now i have my content information i have my author which is going to be um let's call it seth godin so seth godin is now my author and then i have the link now if it's a podcast on most of the time it's on spotify so i just copy the link from spotify and put it in there and i then make my notes uh going down the page yeah this is a really good note there you go there's my notes for that podcast um and because it is at the bottom of oops actually i can show you because if i go there i'm in this page i swipe down bam home page um but because it's at the bottom on my pc it'll be there it'll show so if i go into settings now you see we've got the mobile mobile option which isn't in everything else here is here on uh pc but the editor is different so i'm going to go into mobile and we can see configure this configure button at the top is the command palette so that command palette that list of all the different commands is here and this is the swipe down so whatever action is in there the swipe down is is what we should is what it shows so the current command is set to periodic notes open daily note so when i swipe down it goes to my daily note and then we have manage toolbar and you can add things take things away and these are all the different actions that you would do so insert template there are loads of options in here so let's just add that one i've pushed add and then i can drag it up and say there we go let's have it in there so now when i go into the page there it is you see the add button is now on that side so i can scroll across there it is now i don't actually want that on there so i'm going to go back into settings go into mobile and actually get rid of that because i have never used that i think most of my practical uses on my phone is audio recording so recording a quick note quick capture and because it is style it's styled because it is stored in my files on my folder go internal storage go documents go obsidian go sync there we go there's the recording so the recording is local and all of the notes are also local so it means i can take notes i don't have to with notion or any cloud based service i don't have to wait for anything i can be offline taking notes and as soon as i go online it's synced and back on my pc okay so now i'm on the ipad you can zoom on ipad here and hopefully you'll be able to see this on the screen so what i've done is i've opened up my vault and this is also synced to my phone and to my pc this is currently empty if i swipe down buff there is my daily note now this look this ipad is actually my sister's so i haven't got my css theme on here which is why it's purple um but the same same function same functionality so swipe down is my homepage my daily page i swipe to the right there is all of those things so we've got the podcast that's that note that we had earlier so if i click on there that's the that's the note that i just made on my phone literally like a minute ago it's probably a couple of seconds ago for you uh and then we go right exactly the same menu because it's the same application the the main difference here you can see the tab bar is much much larger writing something i don't think i've ever written on youtube so that is what my handwriting looks like if i'm writing something and i want to go in between the line i can either do that but then it gets rid of the line and i'm like ah so annoying um or we can go forwards and backwards like this and that's my personal preference but most the time when i'm writing to be honest on here uh which i do when i when i use the ipad it's at the moment for testing things out but it's when i'm downstairs and my laptop is like rubbish dying before i leave the ipad uh if we go into sync you can see currently synced volts so i can choose the volt there are going to be two vaults there's going to be my sync volt and then my sister's stuff because it's her ipad and she actually uses my sync account like i said earlier on on here so i've just chosen my vault and these are all the things that i'm thinking with not really that much because i'd like to say i don't use the ipad um but yeah that's that and i realized something while i actually like going through and editing this video is i'm actually using obsidian as my cloud storage so i recorded obviously the ipad screen on the ipad and then the video was on the ipad so what i did was i just saved it to the files on the ipad and then put it into obsidian so there is the recording from the ipad in obsidian that's that's how i've put it onto my pc i didn't use google drive onedrive or anything i just put the file into my obsidian folder and then it's synced up into my obsidian and i do the same with like photos from my phone so if i take a picture on my phone i just put it in the like files on my phone and then it goes into obsidian here so that's essentially what this recording is it's just recording from my phone that's now in my obsidian on my pc really nice and because that was over three hours of me recording and it's actually an hour 15 i forgot to record an outro so get off youtube then do something productive with your time instead

Channel: Danny Hatcher

Views: 21,138

Rating: 4.9121952 out of 5

Keywords: second brain, note taking, obsidian app, obsidian for beginners, obsidian notes, personal knowledge management, note taking apps, second brain apps, note taking apps for ipad, obsidian notes review, personal knowledge management system, personal knowledge management obsidian

Id: njibNuFQwjw

Length: 74min 58sec (4498 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/DannyHatcher]

I moved from Notion to Obsidian and it took me a while to become truly comfortable but now I don't think I will be going back anytime soon.

[u/FUThead2016]

That is an amazing video. Thank you for the patience with which you have made it. I’ve been using Obsidian religiously for the last few months, and I must say even then I’m going to go through your video from minute 1. There are so many hidden gems and interesting ways to use Obsidian