Getting started with Obsidian
If you are anything like me, anytime you try to be organized with a note-taking app or productivity system, you would quickly drop it because it is just such a pain to maintain. Often time, these systems forces you to spend a large amount of time just to put things in it’s place (often in deep hiearchial structures) which, while not a big deal once or twice, become an annoyance over time. These task of organizing tasks, I recently learned, are called metatasks. Fact is, metatasks makes you feel productive but you are never truly productive completing one metatask after another.
Over the years, I have learned that the key to a good note-taking system is friction. Any friction that is created by the system for putting things down and pulling the information back out again for consumption decreases the usefulness of the system. The friction stops the “flow” from flowing. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a system that lets you get text onto the page as fast as possible while allowing you to pull up any piece of text just as easily? If you are a programmer, you will see where I’m going with this — just imagine how great it would be to have a VScode-like or other text editors experience when you are taking notes. Well, no need to imagine because Obsidian is the app that will give you that exact same experience and more.
What is Obsidian?
I like to think of Obsidian as a text editor to manage markdown files. If you are familiar with Github, the markdown file extension is the same thing that you use to write your readme files. This is really powerful because you are not obligated to use Obsidian to edit your notes but you can use any other markdown reader (even VScode) that you want. You are basically writing your notes in plain text files.
The thing about Obsidian is that eliminates the need to organize things in hierarchical order. You can just chuck all your notes into a single folder which Obsidian calls a vault. Within this vault, you can choose to organize notes as much as you want through the folder structure. However, this is entirely optional as Obsidian allows you to create links to other documents. You may imagine that this is great for when you are taking notes about a certain subject and suddenly make a connection to another topic in your mind — you can quickly create a link from where you are, go to the other document to jot down some notes and go back to what you were doing. Frictionless, baby. By doing this, your notes take the form of a graph, which Obsidian gives you the ability to visualize.
Obsidian also reduces the friction of putting notes down and pulling notes up because of all the wonderful keyboard shortcuts extremely reminiscent of VScode’s keyboard shortcut. This way you can move text around, navigate to other documents, getting almost anything done from your keyboard. There’s a reason why programmers don’t like moving their mouse — it’s slow.
Another point on why Obsidian works so well with a developer workflow is that since all your notes are markdown files inside in a folder, you can choose to back it up on Github by creating a git repo inside the folder.
“I’m convinced, how do I get started?”
To get started with Obsidian, download it by following this link and download the version compatible with your OS.
After downloading, open up Obsidian. On the start screen, it will walk you through creating a new vault. This vault is basically just a folder so you can name it whatever you want and also place it where ever you wanted. Once that is set up, all your notes that you create will go into this folder or any subfolders. You are now ready to take your notes
The following 2 points are lists of what I find I most often use in Obsidian. These lists are by no mean an exhaustive list of features available in Obsidian.
Markdown 101:
Markdown files add styling to text through text-modifier texts unlike something like MS Word. This helps greatly increase your note-taking speed. Below are some of the most common modifiers.
Headers: like HTML, markdown has 6 levels of headers which are denoted by the # sign followed by one space. The amount of # denotes the level of header. For example, “### Text” denotes the word “Text” to h3.
Bullet points: bullet points can be easily created with your common dash (“-”) as you would expect.
Bold: To bold something, add ** in front and behind of the thing you want to be bolded without any spaces. Alternatively, you can highlight what you wanted to be bolded and use “ctrl+b” in Obsidian which will apply the ** for you
Italics: Add * in front and behind the selection or “ctrl+i”
Helpful keyboard shortcuts and features:
Opening command palette: “ctrl+p”
From the command palette, you can do any available operations in your Obsidian environment. If you happen to forget a shortcut to do something this should be the first place to check out.
Open file: “ctrl+o”
Non-existing files will be created, just use this when creating a new file since you can also specify the folder you want to create a file in.
Create a new link: 2 angled brackets. For example “[[Linked Note]]”
You can choose from a list of available files in your vault when you type the angle bracket or leave it. If the linked file does not exist, it will be created when you first click on the link. To navigate to the linked file, you can use the shortcut “alt+ enter” or hold the alt key and click on the link with your cursor.
Move forward and backward in notes history (like a browser history stack): “alt+<-” or “alt+->”
If you want to learn more about Obsidian, I recommend checking out Brian Jenks and Linking your Thinking Youtube channel. Particularly, these videos have been very helpful to me:
- Obsidian for beginners series by Linking your Thinking: Great place to get started outside of this blog post
- Obsidian Outlining by Linking your Thinking: Introduces some common keys and features that are helpful with speeding up your workflow within Obsidian
- Obsidian workflow by Brian Jenks: Great insights into how Obsidian can be used
- Obsidian templates by Brian Jenks: Excellent video on creating Obsidian templates to automate writing out things you repeatedly write out
Conclusion
As a developer, something that you have to get used to is getting things done from your keyboard as much as possible. I have to admit, before using Obsidian, I wasn’t utilizing my VScode shortcuts as much as I could. After getting used to the command palette in Obsidian, I notice my own workflow in VScode speed up tremendously.
Another thing about Obsidian is that you don’t have to think too much about formatting. This is something I liked to do in other apps but in reality, it is a metatask that does not add values to one’s workflow.
To me, the goal of a note-taking system is not just to put things down but to also retrieve them and also synthesize my own thoughts. Obsidian is able to overcome these obstacles in a way that I don’t see in any other systems. If you are a developer, give it a try and let me know what you think
Links
Download Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/
Brian Jenks Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfhSB16X9MXhzSFe_H7XbHg
Linking Your Thinking Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC85D7ERwhke7wVqskV_DZUA
