AC Capehart/Obsidian Discovery

Created Thu, 14 Oct 2021 09:24:23 -0400 Modified Thu, 14 Oct 2021 14:31:47 +0000
502 Words

Obsidian Discovery

I came across Obsidian recently, and I’m in love! 😍

I’ve been journaling for a couple of years now. And I had been enjoying using the bujo-like digital journal that I found out about when I got my PaperLike (which I also like!) I really enjoyed hand-writing my notes. I do believe in the benefits to memory and cognition, though I have not read the original paper. 😔 However, it’s much slower for me to hand write, and my handwriting is poor enough that the OCR included with Notability (which I also like!) rarely comes close enough to be actually useful. But most critically, it’s somewhere between hard and impossible to link concepts.

I’ve tried a number of other things like Tiddly Wiki, a personal Confluence instance, Coda, and Notion. Each are great in their own way, but have their drawbacks — storing personal documents on someone else’s service being a core problem for everything but Tiddly Wiki.

Enter Obsidian

Writing notes in Obsidian is EASY.

  • You get to use the power of markdown. It’s easy to write in, and easily read both in “raw” and “formatted” forms. IOW all the power of a .txt file, but with much of the prettiness we’ve come to expect in the modern age.
  • The files are stored locally. I don’t have to count on someone else keeping their platform up, or their SaaS business alive, or their systems safe from mal actors.
  • It’s cross platform. I can start journaling on my Mac and pick it right back up on Windows
  • No, it’s really cross platform. I’ve not yet hooked the sync up, but you can even edit from your mobile device

Writing notes in Obsidian is FREE

  • It’s free for personal use. (I’ve purchased a license because, did I mention, I’m in love?)

Templates make it even easier

I have templates so far for my daily journal – which helps it be bujo-like, as well as for books I’m reading (or listening to) so that I have consistent, easily digestible information available for when I refer back to something.

The editor makes it even easier

While I groove on MacDown for my day-to-day markdown editing (like for this post!), the Obsidian editor makes it really easy to include other content. Want to refer to an image? Just paste it into the editor. It’ll get stored and included right in that document. Include a pdf? Just drag it into the editor from the finder. Same thing.

Plugins and community make it even more betterer

Want it to do something it doesn’t do out of the box? Like most good software, it’s nicely modular. There are plugins available both from the core team (the daily journal capability is a plugin), as well as from the community.

Summary

While there are occassional affiliate links on this site – buy yourself a nice M.2 SSD! (affiliate link) – I get nothing but a delight in sharing a fantastic find when I recomend that you try out Obsdian!