I wrote this article in English for 3 reasons: first, my advisor saw me taking notes in Chinese several times and strongly suggests I use English instead; second, a few days ago I saw a blog from a newly graduated Ph.D. student - she is Chinese but she writes long English articles which inspires me a lot; third, it’s a great time to compare some grammar checking tools, like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, etc.

Back to our topic, I start using Obisidian last August, at the beginning, I just want a writing tool that has a better typing experience. Although I know Typora provides an excellent experience, I prefer a writing app with a workspace that can help me manages all the files. When I transferred from MarkEditor to Obisidian, I indeed got a seamless experience. So that’s it! Unlike most people, I got attracted just because of the good writing experience, rather than their selling point - bi-directional links.

During the first few months of trial, I use Obsidian in a primitive way. But things have changed in 2021 - the booming of community plugins make it different. Up to now (2021-05-15), 197 community plugins can be found on the official search engine. With these powerful plugins, I got an unparalleled writing and note-taking experience. In this article, I will introduce 10 things I like about Obsidian and I can’t wait to share all this with you!

1. You own your data

The notes in Obisidian are stored in your computer locally and they are in the markdown format so it’s compatible with the default file system. This strategy makes it easy to transfer your data if you would like to use another note-taking app. Also, you won’t worried about losing your data if the developers stop developing this product anymore.

In addition to full control of your data, Obsidian officially introduces the “File Recovery” feature, which lets you restore recent snapshots to recover from accidental data loss. You can customize the snapshot interval and history length in the corresponding settings. Before “File Recovery” was introduced, I used git to do the version control. Although there is a third-party plugin to help me with it, I always need to check the files to be committed is what I want using a terminal, which is not convenient. But with “File Recovery”, things become easier.

2. Great writing experience

If you ask me what made me transfer from MarkEditor to Obisidian, it must be the writing experience! When typing in the Obisidian, I feel comfortable. Maybe it’s related to the typing response latency, typography, or the interfacial design? The thing about writing experience is hard to describe, different people have different feelings and you must play with it to get your own opinion.

I see some people complain about the separation of editing mode and preview mode. They like Typora’s idea - what you see is what you get. The development team said they would consider it in future versions. From my point, we can use customized CSS to make the editing mode similar to the preview mode. Now I made a theme based on ITS theme and it looks good. Thanks to Ozan Tellioglu’s work on Ozan’s Image in Editor Plugin, we can view the images and pdfs directly under the editing view.

Putting aside pure typing, there are lots of plugins to make it a perfect workspace. We have a search box and command box, similar to VSCode, and make note switching easier. I really like this box-like interaction. Regarding showing multiple notes that are currently working on, what comes into my mind are the tabs and I never expect there are sliding panes. The kinds of interaction are amazing and it seems like you are flipping a book. Besides, we can have the recent files plugin to switch files.

For a better reading experience, we have remember cursor position plugin. With this plugin, when you open a note you read before, you will be directly moved to the line you read to the last time. Many famous writing apps have motivation mechanisms, for example, you can set your writing goal in Ulysses. In Obsidian, you can use obsidian-vault-statistics, obsidian-activity-history and other third-party plugins to visualize your efforts.

3. Tags

Former note-taking apps either don’t have tags or not easy to deal with tags. For example, Evernote adopts a note-level tag and when tagging a note, you must go downwards, find the tag bar and tag it. The operations are quite complex compared with Obsidian. In Obsidian, we can tag anywhere in a note and tagging is the same as writing, you just begin with # and there is a pop-up to give you suggestions.

The tags can be more useful in line granularity. You could use it as a mark, say you don’t understand a point and you will think about it later. You could use it to describe the topic of this line. You also could use it traditionally - categorize the note content in a note level.

Having tags and use the search box to search them, is that all there is? No! There are several advanced plugins, like Dataview and Obsidian Query Language. You could leverage them to play with your tags, let your imagination run wild!

4. Daily Note

I didn’t notice the power of daily notes until the January of this year. At first, I tried to add some todos and write short diaries and found it was great. So I stick to it until now. I use the daily note with the calendar plugin and a real calendar view motivates me to keep writing. I also tried a timeline plugin, which looks good but not suitable for my workflow so I gave up using it.

A daily note is a good place for me to plan my daily life, watch how I spend my day, and write daily diaries. Imagine one year later, you can see what have you write on the same day as last year. Interesting!

5. Template

The official core plugin provides a “Template” and in the community, there is one called Templater which is more powerful. Just as the name suggests, I could make a note as a template and created a new note based on the template. The cool thing about the Templater is that you can have some variables and functions in your template notes and it will be executed and changed to what you what when using the template, which distinguishes itself from template functions in other note-taking apps.

Now I use it for creating weekly repeat todos and add them to my daily note. For more user cases, you could check GitHub Discussions and Obsidian Forums.

6. Note Connection

Bi-directional links could be one of the major features of Obsidian. As said in the Obsidian’s homepage, making and following [[connections]] is frictionless. Just simply enter [[, we can create a connection to a note, a header, and even a block. Based on these connections, we can build a graph of your whole notes. Maybe we could leverage the graph to find some subtle relationships and forgotten notes.

Apart from the global graph, we can also obtain the local graph of the currently opened note. Honestly speaking, I think it’s much more useful than the global graph since it’s simple and makes you focus on one thing.

Adding ! before the note reference makes it expandable. This allows note reuse, which means, you only need to modify once and see the changes in all the places.

Although the bidirectional reference does a pretty good job, it still has a lot of room for optimizations. For example, when you refer to a list item with child items, it only shows the parent one. I believe that this problem will be solved in the future version.

7. Kanban

Kanban is a community plugin that lets you create markdown-backed Kanban boards. A common use case is to use it to manage your tasks (e.g. 3 columns - todo, doing, done). But I have already used Trello for some time and I don’t want things to be all-in-one. Another user case I could think of is to categorize the notes, either by the topic or the status of the notes. The Kanban plugin is still in continuous iteration and we look forward to seeing better application scenarios.

8. Spaced repetition & Recall & Random notes

People are forgetful - if you don’t review the notes, they’re like hidden treasures that will never see the light of day. When you are preparing for an exam and you must remember something, you could use Spaced repetition or Recall to add the things you want to review later. If you have no mandatory requirements for review, you could just your official plugin “Random notes” or Smart Random Note from the community to refresh your memory.

9. Dataview & Query Language

Both two plugins can search your whole notes, filter the data you want and display them in a well-formatted view. They are advanced and complex to use, but they are undeniably powerful. I mainly use Dataview so let me take it as an example. You can easily create a table that shows the files you have recently created and modified. With syntax like from and where, you can filter out the data you’re not interested in. If you happen to know Javascript, you can make a more advanced query about your notes with the Obsidian API.

Currently, I use it to show files I created and updated today and yesterday. I also have some special markers to infer the status of my notes. Using Dataview, I can find all the notes with the specific marker. Someone use it to display the countdown. Basically, you can do everything you want if you have some ideas.

10. Powerful community & More and more plugins support

To be honest, I never see more powerful community support like Obsidian. Not only developers, researchers, writers - almost people of all kinds are gathered into such a community. We have official forums and Discord to discuss everything related to Obisidian, note-taking, and note management. When you meet some issues you can post them on the forum and there always be someone to help you. Besides, some people volunteered to host a talk or a workshop, from their sharings, we can learn a lot. Developers, not only the official ones but also the community plugin’s developers, put great efforts into developing and listening to the user’s feedback. When you see their GitHub contributions, really inspiring! Hats off to them!

If you don’t have a satisfactory note-taking or writing app, try Obisidian! Believe me, you’ll like it!