- When I first started using
Obsidian over two years ago, I was pretty underwhelmed
by the lack of options. I felt like I couldn't do anything that I really wanted to do, and I thought that
Obsidian was pretty ugly. Fast forward two years later, and it's the exact opposite problem. Now there's too much functionality. There's community plugin for everything. There's community themes,
there's customizations. And you can be tempted into thinking you need to keep up with
all of these recent updates for Obsidian to be useful for you. In this video, I'm gonna talk to you about why I think that the
base plugins, the core plugins, or options that come with
Obsidian, are underappreciated. And how it's still possible
to have a full-blown setup of Obsidian without ever
installing a community plugin. And I'm gonna tell you
about some disadvantages for relying on community plugins
that everybody should know. There's some problems
with community plugins and the first is security. Because community plugins are developed by third-party developers
that don't have anything to do with the Obsidian team,
it's kind of hit or miss whether you can trust them or not. Of course, because the
Obsidian community is awesome, I haven't actually seen a
plugin that is malicious. I'm not saying that they don't exist, but they're certainly few and far between. And the Obsidian team does vet all of the plugins that get included in the community plugin
section within Obsidian. But they're only human. So it is possible that
something might slip by. And also there's just so much going on, and developers are updating all the time, and they don't have time to
check every single update of every single plugin. So there is still a risk there. The second thing is the
lack of future-proofness. While community plugins
might be all the rage and really shiny and
interesting to install, it can be a problem when
you start to change the way that you use Obsidian and
create your notes just for the plugin. I'll give you an example. Obsidian Tracker is an awesome plugin that I was pretty excited about. Here's what it would look like if I were to use it on a daily basis. Here's what a streak looks like. I've turned it off because
I wanted to show you what it looks like raw. So imagine in a few
years if you have a tool other than Obsidian that
you'd like to be using, or maybe the Obsidian
Tracker plugin goes defunct and the developer stops developing it, you're going to be left with
notes that are like this. Now, it might look good
while Tracker is working, but if either Obsidian
or Tracker isn't working, then you're just gonna be
left with a lot of notes that really won't mean
anything in any other setup, other than the one that you have. So there is a certain point at which these plugins start
to take over your notes and they don't make much
sense anywhere else. And part of the appeal of Obsidian is that it is future-proof, is that it uses standard markdown. When you introduce non-standard
stuff into your notes, then that does make them less useful in the future potentially. The third reason is clutter. The more community plugins
you install on Obsidian, the more often you'll
have to check for updates, the more likely it is that one
of those updates will break, and the higher the likelihood of some of those plugins
having interactions with each other that were unintended. And it is just a little bit more complex. It's a layer of complexity that for some people isn't
going to be worth the effort. For example, Dataview is an
Obsidian community plugin that I love a lot, and will use every day for
the foreseeable future. However, it does mean
that I've had to refactor all of my previous notes, because it requires
frontmatter to be of any use. So you might get stuck in this cycle where you are not taking notes, it's more like you're
just in a continual state of setting up your notes, and you never actually get
to the taking notes part. So while I love these plugins, I think that there is room to be a little bit more intentional about our choices of community plugins. By contrast, core plugins
are part of Obsidian. And so the Obsidian team is responsible for creating and
maintaining these plugins. So the chances are a lot lower that there are going to
be any security issues or regression defects that come into play when new things are released. Of course, there are going
to still be bugs, right? But they're not going to be major ones because it's a lot more controlled. Here are my top 10 core plugins that I think are underappreciated. Number 10 is Daily Notes. Now, I'm still a huge fan of Daily Notes, and I think that this is the best way to start with Obsidian. Because it can be really
daunting to think, "Well, I'm going to build
a personal knowledge management system today." But you know what's not daunting? Is just journaling your day. So just log, like developers
would call this a devlog. Whatever you call it,
just having a daily note to dump all of your random thoughts in, goes a long way towards
building a knowledge management system that grows over time. And that way you also
don't have to start out thinking about the
structure before you begin, because Daily Notes
already have a structure, and it's chronological. So I think that that's a
great jumping off point. Number nine is Canvas. Canvas is the newest
core plugin on this list, and it's already enabled by default, which goes to show you how important the Obsidian developers think that it is. This is a plugin that
is for visual thinkers. If you're wondering about the graph view, I actually considered putting
the graph view in this spot, but then I thought Canvas
is just so much more useful, at least for me. Because the graph view shows
you pretty much everything. And there are links in there that maybe you don't really care about. And yes, you can filter
them, but honestly, sometimes it's just handy to
create my own little structure. And that's what Canvas lets you do. You can drag in media and that
includes images and videos, and, you know, sound files
as well, and embed notes. And you have this
infinitely-scrolling canvas filled with connections
that you make manually. And that way it's much more customizable than the graph view. And you can move things around
the way that you want to. Number eight is the Note Composer. I still use this quite a bit. It is a way to split, merge,
and refactor your notes. You're gonna be doing a lot of that. And I think rather than trying to get it right the first time, having a plugin like Note Composer, that just makes it a little
bit easier to split up notes, or to merge two notes that are the same, is just a lot easier to handle. And it makes you feel like
you can worry about it later. It's a little quality of life thing, 'cause you can always
manually just copy things into a new note. But having Note Composer
is a really easy option. Number seven is Workspaces. I love Workspaces so much, and it's only gotten better
with a recent addition of like the pop-out window
and being able to do tabs. You can customize pretty much everything about how the tabs are
laid out in Obsidian. You can have different windows,
you can have a sidebar open, and then some note that's
pinned to the sidebar. And with Workspaces you
can save all of that. So you can have different Workspaces for different use cases, and then you can just load the correct one when it's time for you to do those things. And I think that it is
a great way to just jump into whatever it is
that you're focusing on, and it really sets Obsidian up as this general all-purpose
tool for work and for play. Number six is Slides. The Slides plugin is disabled by default, just like the previous one Workspaces was. And I think that it's something that you should consider enabling. Slides turns your notes, your markdown notes in
Obsidian, into presentations. Now you might think, "Oh, I
never give presentations," or, "Why would I use something
that's so bare bones?" Well, I think that that's
part of the appeal. Not every presentation has
to have like animations or require an entirely
separate program to run. I don't know about you, but a lot of the presentations
I give are like update ones where I have to create
them in a few minutes. And having them tied to the
notes that already exist makes so much sense. Because I can quickly
knock up a few slides just by putting those dashes in to delineate between
one slide and the next. Then I can embed notes that already exist, so I don't even have to rewrite them from the beginning like I would if I were using some other app for it. I also find it a really good way to synthesize what I'm thinking. So even if I don't have
to present something, I try to also create Slides
when I feel like I might benefit from just thinking through
the story a little bit. Number five is the Outline plugin for anyone who uses Atomic Notes, maybe this isn't gonna be that useful. I appreciate the idea of Atomic Notes, and I think that there is a place for it, however, the reality is I still do a lot of long-form writing. I write blog posts, or
articles, or, you know, sometimes I just get really
caught up in something, and I don't necessarily want to have like a dozen notes that are open. It's nice to have it all
in one file sometimes, and I don't restrict myself
to always making notes Atomic. And the Outline plugin goes
and parses through the note and looks for the headings. And then displays those
headings so that you can see at a glance what the
structure is of a document. I find this incredibly useful, because it's also a way to
navigate through a long note. 'Cause if you click those headings, you go right to that page. So I always turn it on,
I have a hot key for it, and it is essential when
I'm writing anything that's a little bit longer
than a few paragraphs. Number four is the Command Palette. I love the Command Palette. I'm one of those people that
would just use my keyboard for for everything if I could. I do still have a mouse, and in fact I also have a track pad, but I would really love to get away with all-keyboard shortcuts all the time. And the Command Palette
really helps with that. Because in Obsidian, pretty
much anything that you can do, you can assign a hot key for. But it can be a little bit difficult if you're not using it all the time, then you have to remember
what the hot keys are. But as long as it's a command, it's also gonna show up
in the Command Palette. So you can open up the Command Palette just by hitting Control or Command P, and then you can sort through everything that you need to do. And you can type out things as well so you can search for them. And then you can see the
little hot key for it if you just need a bit of a refresher. Such a small thing, but it's such an easy way
to do things in Obsidian without using your mouse. Number three is Quick Switcher. This is another quality-of-life thing, but it would disrupt my flow so much if I had to open up the
files pane in the sidebar just to open a file. This is why I never have files open, because I just hit Command or Control O to open up the Quick Switcher. And then I can search
through my entire vault. So sometimes I don't quite remember what a file name is called, and I just type it there and I find it. And the Quick Switcher is also
something that you can use to create files, not just open them. So you can type in the folder
first and then the file name, and then you can Shift Enter to create that note and
open it all in one go. Again, keyboard shortcuts, but it means that I
don't have to think about where I'm going to put a
note before I create it. I can just create it or switch to it, I don't have to remember
what folder it was in. Number two is Backlinks. Now, this might be a little on the nose, because I know Obsidian's
main selling point is all of the interconnectedness
between the notes. But I still find it essential. I think this is the one plugin that I haven't found a
good replacement for. My Backlinks are always
open on the right-side bar, and it's so handy to be able to see what other notes are
linking to the current note. And another thing that I
discovered only recently, is that you can go into the
Backlink section in settings, and you can enable Backlink in document. What this does is in addition
to having it on the sidebar, so like for example, this
is a new window right now, so the sidebar isn't going to be open, but I can have the Backlinks
at the very end of the note. And it will automatically
adjust when I link to this note. And I love that because that means that every single note now
has this Backlinks pane, just kind of embedded into it. It really prompts me to think
about how to connect this note to other notes that are
already in my vault. And that's what Obsidian's really about. Number one is a plugin
that I think is essential, not just to Obsidian, but to any note-taking tool I will use. I will never use a note-taking
tool that doesn't have this, and it is Templates. Obsidian Templates are
great for automation, but they're also great
for just consistency. I'm not somebody who does a great job at being entirely
consistent to their notes. And having a template that
has all of the frontmatter that I want, that I've decided
on, that I've deliberated on, and that I've progressed over time, goes a long way towards reminding me what structure my notes
should actually be in. The last thing I want to do is, you know, have to stop and put something
on hold and think like, "Oh, yeah, what frontmatter
did I decide I wanted for this type of note?" I would hate to do that. Templates just makes it easy. I create Templates for every kind of file that I regularly create. So that goes for things like daily notes, or you know, yearly reviews. But it also goes for
things like TT-RPG systems, because apparently I like to
compare and contrast them. So I have a template for that. You know, I have a template
for meetings, for people, for performance testing tools,
for development languages. And it's just a really nice way to standardize and add a little structure to my otherwise pretty chaotic notes. Now, does this mean I'm uninstalling all my community plugins? Definitely not. There's so many that I love
and swear by and use every day, and I'm gonna continue to
use them, but you know what? They don't make me more productive, because it doesn't make anyone productive to have to keep up with the latest and greatest of community plugins. It doesn't make anyone
productive to be continually and infinitely setting up your notes. What does make us
productive is the basics. Writing stuff down, having
a system for thinking about how those ideas
fit in with other ideas, and then coming up with ways
to make something out of them. If you'd like to learn
more about what you can do to actually be functional in Obsidian with minimal clutter and
minimal community plugins, I actually made a course for that. It's called Obsidian For Everyone. You can check it out there. And among other things, I go through every single core plugin, how to use it, and how to
maximize your use of Obsidian, and optimize your workflows without having to install
any community plugins. Thank you for watching. Feliz Ano Novo.
