intro to obsidian

obsidian is a closed source PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) and note-taking application that operates on markdown files.

it runs on macos, windows, linux, ios and android.

it is a great information storage system, and its file structure is similar to that of a wiki.

on all platforms, obsidian offers features like plugins and themes, which makes its editing experience greatly powerful and customizable

features of obsidian are differentiated between core plugins, which are released by the obsidian team, and community plugins, which are open-sourced through github and are contributed by users. plugins make obsidian a powerful tool

to quote, “obsidian can be as simple or as complicated as you need it to be.”

what do you use it for?

obsidian is for personal knowledge management, meaning that you can write, read and store anything you want in obsidian…

a digital garden is a great way to store your notes and thoughts, like this one obsidian with its many features is very useful for making a digital garden.

you can say thet digital gardens are similar to wikis; there are many notes that link to each other. this way, it’s useful for keeping notes, writing your journal, writing documentation, organizing projects…

what’s so special about obsidian?

first of all, it’s very important to acknowledge how obsidian stores information - in markdown files - actual human readable files on your computer. why, no you don’t need to launch their “latest version app”, “sign in to your account”, “import your previous database file” and wait for your notes to render. your notes are accessible even if you don’t have any apps. this is one of the most important things an information keeping app should have.

as for the features of a high-end information keeping app, obsidian has the most. with the use of plugins, obsidian is the most valuable tool for all kinds of information keeping.

comparisons to similar apps

obsidian is known for being similar to siyuan, an open source PKM app.

albeit their similarities, obsidian and siyuan are very different. like notion, siyuan does not operate on markdown files; instead, it uses its own data structure, stores paragraphs in content blocks like notion, and equipped with the ability to export in markdown format, albeit this causes much loss of information.

other note taking apps like onenote, evernote, apple notes, you name it, are so painstakingly inaccessible and rigid - is organizing my information into a clear structure too much to ask? sorry for the ramble, but i really cannot use apps that don’t let me set my keyboard shortcuts!

conclusion

obsidian is a very useful app for many things and you should give it a try. see if it’s better than all of the other stuff.

well, i promise i will publish a guide for using obsidian someday.