Obsidian

Obsidian.md is software for note-taking and wiki-editing. It's a glorified Markdown editor (that I love 💕).

Everyone has their own note-taking methods, and unique setups. Here's some general tips I think everyone could benefit from.

To be a true Obsidian user, you must look up Zettelkasten at least once.

General note guidelines

1. Add a set of tags to every file. Don't bother with complicated folder structures.
2. Include full context, including links in every note.
3. Write as though you're writing it for someone else.
4. Write any proper noun that is closely related as a [[Wikilink]].
5. Separate private notes somewhere else.

Features

Search

Searching can be done in Obsidian by entering the quick search menu with ⌘+Shift+F.

Basic rules for searches

• meeting work returns all pages containing both meeting and work.
• meeting OR work returns all pages containing meeting or work.
• personal (meeting OR work) returns all pages containing both personal and one of meeting or work.
• personal -work returns all pages containing personal and not work.

Operators

To find notes using tags, use the tag search operator like tag:#meeting. To find notes with filenames, use the file: operator, like file:.jpg To find notes with particular paths, use the path: operator like Obsidian.md

Tags

Tags are an alternate means of organising Obsidian pages outside of a nested folder structure.

Tags can be added to anywhere with the hash (#) key, like #cool-tag but for whole pages, they should be added to the metadata, where the hash is unnecessary.

Daily Notes

Daily notes are a great way to have a place to throw notes that don't belong anywhere in particular. Obsidian is fantastic as a way to store working memory (relevant links, resources).

Daily notes are configurable to begin with a template in case there are things you always end up noting. They can also be configured to have a different naming convention or to automatically sort themselves into folders.

This can be done in your vault settings under Settings → Daily Notes → Date format.

I personally recommend a format which sorts into folders. I use YYYY/MM/Do MMMM, YYYY, which ends up with daily notes sorted like 2024/01/1st January, 2024.

Plugins

Tasks

Tasks is a plugin for supporting to-do lists, to-do items, and querying over them.

To write a new task, it appears like this in Markdown:

- [ ] This is task
- [ ] This is another task
- [x] This task is finished!

You can query over tasks, using a self-explanatory query language for example:

not done
due before tomorrow
sort by due reverse

Obsidian Git

Obsidian Git is a plugin for automatically syncing an Obsidian vault to a Git repository.

To install, follow the usual steps from the Obsidian community plugin section.