Obsidian

I’m always eager to improve my workflow, but this time I’ve fallen behind while using Joplin and then Notion for far too long. After a few years of using them, I find that Joplin doesn’t make enough progress on its UI in terms of overall features, while Notion ends up offering way too much for my taste.

So what is the right balance between simplicity and feature-richness? I recently stumbled upon Obsidian which, if you ask me, is exactly what I was looking for. It’s UI is elegant, usable and the quality of life is no match for any other note-taking application I’ve tried over the years.

Let me introduce you to Obsidian which is available on all modern operating systems.

Openness

Each note you type is a markdown file on your local file system, which is optimal for offline access.But of course they can be synchronised to all your devices using the Obsidian Sync service (starting at $4/month) or any other method available through community plugins. This openness to files and folders is another big advantage over Notion. Nothing is hidden, you see everything in your file system and can work with any other editor you like. It’s a future-proof solution, you’ll always own your markdown files no matter what happens to Obsidian.

Ecosystem

I missed the first release of Obsidian by 4 years; not only did this software survive the wave of new kids on the block, but during that time it developed a strong ecosystem of contributors and youtubers creating plugins and howtos. This is a huge advantage when you start using it, while at the same time you can fall down the rabbit hole of watching people talk forever or adding an infinite list of useless plugins. Keep it simple and make sure everything you use makes sense for your workflow. Copying someone else can be the wrong approach, you need to be inspired by others but own it at the same time.

Making it your own

Finally, Obsidian opens everything up for you to customize and configure. Not just themes, but hotkeys, callouts, CSS, UI, etc… This allows you to really turn Obsidian into your own personal knowledge management (PKM). It becomes much more than just a note-taking application. You can easily create links between your notes and visualise the connections as a graph, create mind maps using the Canvas core plugin, query your notes using one of the most useful plugins, use the dataview community plugin to query your notes metadata, and much more.

Below you’ll find the hotkeys I’ve mapped and the list of plugins I’ve qualified for my own use.

Hotkeys

One aspect of this application is the way it allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard. Not only do you have a preset of hotkeys configured, but you can also set any additional hotkeys for any feature of Obsidian. As you’ll see below, I’ve set/changed some of them to better suit the way I work.

On ios, you can configure the mobile quick action to be launched by swiping down, ideally to launch the quick launcher instead of the palette by default.

Formating

Callouts

Callouts let you put an emphasis on some important elements. It’s just using a blockquote, which ensures that other markdown solutions won’t break when you use it. It will just show up as a normal blockquote with the square brackets uninterpreted.

Syntax

A folded callout (-)

> [!faq]- folded callout, click to open
> surprise !

One which is open by default (+)

> [!info]+ open callout
> Welcome

Single line callout

> [!question]- single line callout

12 types of Callouts

Obsidian comes with twelve types of callouts.

• note
• abstract, summary, tldr
• info, todo
• tip, hint, important
• success, check, done
• question, help, faq
• warning, caution, attention
• failure, fail, missing
• danger, error
• bug
• example
• quote, cite

You can also define your own custom types, which Nick Milo did. He added 55 more callouts in his Callout Pack for Obsidian, see the content categorized by color:

PURPLE: Calendar, Globe, Industry, Network, Orbit, Venetian, Video
CYAN: Blocks, Map, Radar, Rocket, Planet, User
ORANGE: Book, Boxes, Compass, Keaton, Shell, Tram-front
YELLOW: Combine, Connect, Puzzle, Sparkles, Sun
GREY: Box, Command, Cross, Hexagon, Link, Script, Notes
PINK: Activity, Joystick, Milestone, Rainbow, Tower
MINT: Cable-car, Castle, Combo, Camera, Play, Recycle
GREEN: Bike, Contact, Leaf, Sprout, Train, Training, Trees
BLUE: Anchor, Locate-fixed, Parking-square, Sailboat, Ship, Shipwheel, Snowflake
RED: Award, Cone, Fingerprint, Watch

The required file could be found and copied from Ideaverse/.obsidian/snippets/nick-milo-callouts.css which is freely available from his Ideaverse for Obsidian vault freely available .

The Callout Manager community plugin will help you deal with all these additional callouts.

In the same folder you’ll also find interesting CSS stuff to create wide page MCL Wide Views.css just by adding the propertycssclasses: wide-page or MCL Multi Column.css to create multicolumn page by starting your blockquote with > [!Multi-column]

Snippets

Snippets gives you the ability to customize Obsidian CSS as much as your imagination allows.

1. First create vault/.obsidian/snippets directory if not already in your vault
2. Enable the copied snippet at the bottom of your settings > appearance configuration

Community plugins installed

As I said earlier, it is easy to get lost in the world of plugins. I made sure to install only the ones I really need. I want to keep it simple, I don’t want to fall into the Notion trap of trying to do everything with a single application, let’s keep the UNIX philosophy.

Dataview

dataview is a must-have plugin if you want to use the YAML metadata of your notes.It helps you treat your Obsidian Vault as a database that you can query.Provides a JavaScript API and pipeline-based query language for filtering, sorting, and extracting data from Markdown pages. The Obsidian team is now working on dynamic views, so this kind of functionality may one day become part of the core.

Style Settings

https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-style-settings This plugin allows snippet, theme, and plugin CSS files to define a number of configuration options.For example, it is required for the Prism plugin to work properly.

Callout Manager

https://github.com/eth-p/obsidian-callout-manager Easily identify and customize all the callouts available in your vault.

hotkeysplus-obsidian

This repository contains some additional hotkeys that I use with [Obsidian] (https://obsidian.md/). The default hotkeys are:

Folder Org

Nick Milo inspired me to think about my folder structure. He shares the following ideas on his YouTube channel.

PARA - Project, Areas, Resources, Archives

This organization doesn’t have my preferences.I miss a folder for timed notes.

ACE - +, Atlas, Calendar, Efforts

This is the one I tweaked, remember to make it your own.

• + inbox
• Atlas - thinking, Ideas
• Calendar - time based
• Efforts - action based
• x- templates and other things, images, pdf

Deleted files are kept until you click a purge button that appears when your remote vault is 95% full.

Links

• Obsidian documentation
• Obsidian roadmap
• Obsidian web clipper
• Nick Milo youtube channel
• Resolve Merge Conflicts docs