Productivityobsidiannote-taking

Getting Started with Obsidian

By Blake Marterella
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Published on
Obsidian Getting Started Guide

Obsidian is a beautiful text editor that is both easy to use and extremely customizable. It is the first note-taking software that fully acts as my second brain, where I can build my own organizational system instead of fighting someone else’s. It's modular, scalable, and a software that can truly grow with your knowledge.

Why Obsidian?

  • Portable: Obsidian stores your notes as markdown files on your local machine. This means you can easily back them up, sync them with cloud services, and access them from any device.
  • Accessible: Obsidian is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. This means you can access your notes from any device, whether you're at home, at work, or on the go.
  • Customizable: Obsidian has a wide range of plugins and themes that allow
  • Endless Creativity: Obsidian is a blank canvas that you can customize to fit your needs. Check out their about page to see Obsidian's guiding principles.

General Configuration

Once you have Obsidian installed on your Mac or Windows Machine, you can start by creating a new vault. After creating a vault, here are some general settings I recommend changing:

Editor

  • Toggle on both the "fold heading" and "fold indent" settings. This will allow you to collapse sections when working on a longer note.
  • Turn on "Auto-Pair Markdown Syntax". This makes writing much quicker once you learn the syntax (See Obsidian's official cheatsheet)
    • On a similar note, enable "Smart Lists" and "Indent using Tab"

Appearance

Besides browsing themes in Obsidian's theme marketplace, I changed the monospace font. The font that I use is the same one that is used by my primary IDE, Firacode (Download Firacode).

Core Plugins

Core Plugins are pre-installed with Obsidian. You can enable/disable these plugins by going to Settings -> Core Plugins.

Backlinks

Backlinks allow you to cross-reference and link obsidian notes to each other. To make a backlink, write [[]] followed by the page you which to link. Backlinks are helpful for decoupling resources and can be visualized using the Obsidian Core Graph Plugin.

Advanced Operations

  • [[#example]] - # links to a section in the current note
  • [[^example]] - ^ links to a block of text in current note
  • [[pageName | DisplayText]] - | allows you to change the displayed text

Recommendations

I'd recommend enabling the following plugins:

  • Backlinks
  • Bookmarks
  • Canvas - Great for quick brainstorming/diagrams
  • Command Palette - Allows you to hit CMD/CTRL + P to search and execute a command
  • Daily Notes - Expedites the daily note-taking process by instantly creating a new note with given name format by pressing the sidebar icon. I'd also recommend changing the default folder for these notes so they aren't always at the root.
  • Graph View - View relationship (backlinks) between notes.
  • Outgoing links - Visualize the links in the current note
  • Outline - View the sections of your note for fast navigation
  • Quick Switcher - Type CMD/CTRL + O to search and open a note
  • Search - Find a note using its content. Supports various search operations for power-users.
  • Slash Commands - Type forward slash in any note to view a menu of supported operations/plugins/text features.

Community Plugins

Community plugins are created by the Obsidian user community. These plugins can be installed by going to Settings -> Community Plugins -> Browse and searching for the plugin you want to install, or browsing the Obsidian Plugin Directory.

Ease-of-Use Plugins

Templater

Programmatically define templates that can be inserted into any note. My most used template is the table of contents that creates a dynamic list of all headings in a note. You can browse various templates used by the community here.

Resources

GitHub Documentation Add to Obsidian

Editing Toolbar

Displays a Microsoft Word-like toolbar at the top of the screen to help with text editing.

Github Add to Obsidian

Advanced Tables

Easy of life improvements to obsidian's built in tables.

Github Documentation Add to Obsidian

Styling Plugins

Purely cosmetic plugins that help with color-coordinating your Obsidian Vault.

Obsidian File Color

Color code file names

Github Add to Obsidian

Iconize

Add icons to notes and folder names. By default, you will have access to Lucide icons along with emojis natively supported on your operating system. This plugin also enables the use of emojis inline in your notes by typing :emojiName.

Github Add to Obsidian

Homepage

Easily configure a homepage that will open by default when you open an obsidian vault. This works best when used in conjunction with Dashboard++, explained in more depth in my other post.

Github Add to Obsidian

Plugins for Power Users

These are advanced plugins which make organizing, visualizing, and up keeping notes significantly easier. They're extremely versatile with a slight learning curve.

Meta Bind

Allows you to create custom drop-downs and input fields, such as a date picker. You can insert a new field either inline or as a stand-alone code block. The example below shows both methods to insert the built-in date picker field:

Inline

`INPUT[date]`

Code Block

```meta-bind
INPUT[date]
```

You can also define custom input templates. My favorite use-case of this is a dropdown selection for project management status (TODO, IN-PROGRESS, DONE):

INPUT[inlineSelect(
  option(TODO),
  option(In-Progress),
  option(Blocked),
  option(QA),
  option(Done)
)]

Github Documentation Add to Obsidian

Dataview

Turns your obsidian vault into a database. You can query and display notes inline. In the example below, I am showing all of the notes in my React directory with the tag #snippet:

list from "04 Resources/Frameworks/React"
where contains(file.tags, "#snippet")

There are so many opportunities to make data more readable, check out this repository with a variety of examples.

Github Documentation Add to Obsidian

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