Transcription
Obsidian is my long-form and note-taking app. It's a text editor with markdown support, meaning it's very lightweight and fast, though it is extremely powerful with options and support for things like plugins and theming. However, it can be a bit daunting to get started with. This video is sponsored by Surfshark. Let's get into it.
Now, a lot of note-taking videos on YouTube are a little self-serving; they're geared towards content creators and made by content creators for other content creators. I'm here to tell you note-taking is not just for content creators. If you're somebody that just needs to write down a phone number or an address to remember it for later, congratulations, you're a note-taker. That is note-taking. I've been note-taking in all of my jobs, whether it was IT, YouTube, or even making pizzas. I personally take notes on a wide range of things, not even just work-related—home improvement projects, presents for people, car maintenance, and car washing tools, and things like that.
But yes, a huge core or huge chunk of what I personally take notes on are work projects, whether it's video stuff, Comfort Zone, my podcast, wallpaper packs I'm working on, and even a couple of projects that I'm not ready to announce that I'm working on for the future. Taking a note really just boils down to, "Hey, this is a piece of information I want to remember for later." It's not anything special; you don't have to have a super flashy job to be a note-taker. If you just have a piece of information you want to remember for later, that's what note-taking is for. Making a note of something just means you're not going to rely on your brain to remember it.
Now, the reason why I bring all this up is, like I said, I just see a ton of note-taking videos on YouTube, and it's all about having these insanely complex systems. I'm just here to tell you, you don't have to do that. Obsidian is pitched as this second brain app that you can link things together; you can use plugins, you can use themes, you can use all this stuff. But I'm here to tell you, you can use as much of this as you want or as little of this as you want.
When getting started with Obsidian, you need to set up your Vault. This is where all of your documents and notes and everything is going to live. The Vault is basically just think of it as the main folder. Now, there are a bunch of different ways you can set up your Vault. You can set it up completely local, so it's just on one computer. You can put that folder, your Vault, in a cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, whatever, or you can use Obsidian Sync, which is Obsidian's proprietary syncing system.
Now, I've tried using both third-party cloud services like Dropbox and iCloud, and I have tried Obsidian Sync service. Obsidian Sync service is the fastest. I don't have conflicts when it comes to syncing documents; like if I was working on something on my iPhone and iPad, I've never had any conflicts or anything like that. But it is something you have to pay for, so just keep that in mind. Ultimately, this is completely up to you where you put your Vault. Wherever you store that folder, it's not going to affect what you can do with Obsidian; it's just going to affect where those documents are available.
Just keep in mind, if you put that Vault, that main folder, when you're setting up Obsidian, if you put it locally on your computer and you don't pay for Obsidian Sync, those documents aren't going to sync anywhere. So really, you should either do like a third-party cloud service or Obsidian Sync; one of those two is going to be your best option.
Now, this may sound a lot for a note-taking app. In 2024, most note-taking apps just handle syncing in the background; you don't even have to think about it. But Obsidian is focused on being a lightweight text editor, and it's just a bunch of text files and folders. Because of that, it enables quite a bit, but they had to kind of come up with a robust syncing service. At the end of the day, what's really nice about this is because it's just text files on your computer, you own all of your data. It's not stored in somebody else's cloud, and you don't have to get some OPML file or something like that to export all of your notes or anything like that. You literally could just copy all of your text files out of the folder and put them wherever you want.
This video is sponsored by Surfshark. Surfshark is a VPN service that not only protects you but your privacy. Now, I worked in IT for almost nine years, and I know I've told this story before, but it's an important one. One day, we decided to set up this fake coffee shop network, and we wanted to see, like, "Hey, could we snoop on other computers? Is that actually a thing?" Turns out it is, and it was kind of scary the amount of data we were able to pull.
Now, with Surfshark's VPN service, it will protect you from that. Your data is completely encrypted from the source—your computer—to its destination. Now, this isn't about a "Well, I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to lose" kind of thing. Data is the new gold, and scary people will do scary things to get a hold of it.
Now, one thing I really appreciate about Surfshark is they don't keep logs. Keeping logs defeats the purpose of using a VPN. With Surfshark, you're also able to change your country location. So say you're traveling abroad and you want to finish the show you were watching on Hulu, or if you're like me in the United States, you're like, "Hey, I want to check out and see what UK Netflix has." You can do that as well. I really like Surfshark. In fact, it's a service I paid for myself a few years ago, and I'm going to continue to pay for it. I'm so happy with it. I'm going to put some links in the description below to where you can go check out Surfshark. Use code LLY at checkout to get an extra four months for free. My thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this video.
Now, after setting up your Vault, the next thing you have to do is figure out your folder structure. I don't really have a strict methodology for this; I just break everything down into the different parts of my life—personal and work—and then create folders for the different kinds of stuff I do, like house maintenance projects, research, scripts, travel, things like that. I also have folders for files and archives. In Obsidian, you can add stuff like images and PDF documents to your notes, but they need a place to live, and that's what the files folder is for. Archive is a place where I store all of my notes that I'm done with but could possibly need for later. I'm not a big fan of deleting things in this digital age; keeping a text file costs you nothing; they're kilobytes.
Too many times in the past, I've needed to reference a research document or a script or something to pull a bit of information out, and in the past, I deleted it. So I just decided moving forward I wasn't going to delete things anymore, but I will put them in an archive folder. This way, it doesn't clutter up my active project folders. So when I'm done, I just move a document to the archive folder, and I can search for it at any time.
There are two different types of plugins for Obsidian. There are first-party plugins made by the developers behind the Obsidian app, and then there are community plugins. On top of that, there's also themes as well. The community plugins, the third-party plugins, are made by people outside of the Obsidian dev team. These can be used to tweak or add features like tables to Obsidian. One of the community plugins I have installed is Iconize. This allows you to assign icons to folders and note documents. To set these up, you go into settings, Community plugins, then click on Browse. You can then just type in Iconize, then click Install and then Enable.
If you want to tweak the settings for a plugin, you can go to the main settings page and scroll all the way to the bottom. Here, you will see all of the community plugins. You can go into each one of these to see their settings and change their behavior. There's a lot I do with these plugins, but we're going to get into that kind of as we go throughout the video. With Iconize, I give every single one of my folders an emoji. I also did this with a few staple notes documents as well because I used Iconize. Instead of just typing the emoji in the folder name, it doesn't mess up the alphabetical nature of the folders. This means they appear in the right order, and search isn't thrown off as well.
The other type of plugin I mentioned is themes. I currently use a community-made theme called Border but have heavily customized it. Under settings, Appearance, I changed both the text font and monospace font to JetBrains Mono. This is a third-party font, so you'll need an app like Fontcase on your iPhone and iPad to install it. This is a monospace font, and it fits perfectly for text editors like Obsidian. I also tweaked the color scheme of Border. Instead of going over every tweak, I will put a config file and everything else I mentioned, including plugins, in the description below. In order for this to work, you'll need to install a plugin called Style Settings. Then just copy and paste the text from the config file into the Style Settings options, and it will go ahead and handle configuring the whole theme for you, making it look just like mine.
All right, let's get into note-taking. Like I mentioned at the top, Obsidian is a plain text editor with support for markdown. Each note in Obsidian is just a text file. If you write in markdown, it will render that for you, but at the end of the day, it's still plain text. Personally, this is the way I prefer to write. If I need to copy something out of here, I don't have to worry about weird formatting or having to do paste and match style. I have different automations that take this text, edit it, and put it in different places, which is not something I could do easily if this was a rich text note-taking app like Apple's Notes app.
If you're not sure what markdown is, that's totally okay. I will put a guide in the description below kind of explaining how markdown works. But the kind of quick TL;DR of why you would want to use markdown is, one, it's plain text, so it's still fast, but you're able to quickly add things like headers, bold, italicize, underline, add links, add images, code blocks—all sorts of different things you can add right into plain text, which is not something plain text normally supports. Now, all you're doing is typing symbols. For example, you're just doing the pound sign if you're doing a header or two underscores on either side of a word or phrase if you're going to italicize something.
The core idea of this is you're keeping your hands on your keyboard while you're writing, and you're not constantly going to the trackpad and picking something from the menu to get italicized or bold or header or something like that. I'm not trying to get too heavy-handed into the philosophy of note-taking and all that stuff like some people do, but I would say if I had to pick a philosophy, my philosophy is just write everything down. If there is a piece of information you know you're going to need later or you're not even sure you might need that later, just write it down. With a digital note-taking app, it costs you nothing. I write notes for ideas for presents for my girlfriend, whether it's her birthday or Christmas or whatever, to mapping out big projects that I'm working on, whether by myself or with other people.
Now, in Obsidian, I have a folder called Quicknote, and I put an underscore in front of this Quicknote so that way this folder is always at the very top of my list. This is the folder I have new documents default to; this is something you can change in settings. Now, I just use this as a place to quickly capture notes and ideas. I go through this folder about once a day, deleting stuff I'm done with. Like if it was like, "Hey, you need to go to this particular address for this thing," and it's like, "Okay, I'm never going back there. I don't need to keep this address," that is something I'm okay deleting. If I had an idea for a project or I finished up a project or finished up with a note or something like that, I'll archive it, or I can take that note that's in Quicknote and put it in the proper folder for whatever subject it pertains to, whether it might be a script or travel plans or something like that.
Now, I built a shortcut that I run from the dock of my iPad or from the action button on my iPhone. This gives me a text field, and I can just quickly write out a note. If I have a Safari page open on either of these devices, it will automatically add a link to that page to the note. Once done, it takes the first line of the note and makes that the title, and then saves it to the Quicknote folder.
A big part of Obsidian is being able to link notes together. In Obsidian documents, if you type two open brackets, you will see a list of your documents. Just start typing the name and hit enter. Whatever you see, the document you want to link, this will put a deep link to that document in your current note. You can also use this to embed files you have stored in Obsidian in your document as well. Just type the exclamation mark first, then two open brackets, and then start typing the file's name. When you see that file, hit enter. At the bottom of the document you're currently in, you will see all of the notes that that document is linked to. You can also see this on the right side pane as well. This is a way to see how things are linked together.
Now, one of the core features of Obsidian is its tab and split view system. This is a way to have multiple notes open at once. Now, on the iPad, Obsidian does not have the system multi-window feature, which is a huge bummer. It's actually the thing I dislike about Obsidian the most and was one of the things that took me the longest to get over when using this app. In fact, I put off using Obsidian for so long because it doesn't have this feature. I personally like to have multiple different notes windows opened and paired with different apps and different stages, but with Obsidian, you just can't do that. So I'm moving this one window around a lot, but I can kind of get around this with some built-in features in Obsidian.
Like tabs, in Obsidian, you can open a new tab by tapping the plus button or using the keyboard shortcut Command T. From here, you open up a new document or an existing document. But another handy multitasking feature that Obsidian has built into it is its split view support. So you can either long press or right-click on a tab or a document, and you will see an option that says either split down or split to the right. Split down will put your two documents on top of each other. Personally, I prefer the split right option, where it will put one document on the left side and one document on the right side. These two windows will have independent tab controls, but you can drag and drop tabs between the two.
I often use this when I'm working on a big script or document and I want to reference a research note where a place that might have a bunch of unorganized thoughts, links, PDF documents, images, whatever. Obsidian has a decent built-in quick switcher tool for quickly pulling up different documents, but one issue I have with it is it doesn't look at what's in the file; it only looks at the file names. So I've been using a plugin called Omniarch, and this looks at everything when you start searching, including every word written in that note. When searching, it will filter down through your documents. You can even enable fuzzy searching in settings. What this means is if you start typing something and maybe the wording isn't perfect, it will still show results for that.
When searching for something, you can hit Command Enter to open that document in a new tab, or you can use the shortcut Command Option Enter to open that document into Obsidian's built-in split view. This is a much more powerful way of searching and opening documents in Obsidian.
Now, one plugin I can't live without is Home Tab. Home Tab replaces the view of a new tab screen. It's very straightforward; you just start typing in the text bar for the document you want to open and just hit enter. If you type a name of a document that doesn't exist and hit enter, it will then create a new document with that name you typed as the header. But I can't live without this plugin; I absolutely love it. It just makes everything faster in Obsidian because you can just open a new tab, and it puts the insertion point right in the search field so you can just start typing right away and open whatever document you're not having to open a new tab, open the folder pane, and try and find that document. If you're constantly creating new notes, this is an extremely fast way to do that as well.
One of my favorite features about Obsidian is something that I've been wanting just about every iPad app, first and third-party, to get forever. It has the ability to assign custom hotkeys to it. You can go into settings, hotkey, and you can scroll or filter this list. Now, for example, I assigned Omni's search to Command O instead of regular search. I just disabled the regular search keyboard shortcut and put Command O for Omni search. I also enabled Command Control T to insert a template. This is a pillar feature, and if you're somebody that's using a lot of third-party plugins or even like first-party commands or something like that, and you're constantly using the toolbar at the bottom, I highly recommend you come in here and enable a keyboard shortcut or figure out what keyboard shortcut might already be assigned to that command.
Now, Obsidian also has a command palette as well for accessing all of the stuff that you could assign a hotkey to, plus more, just right from a command palette. You can pull down on the screen to access this or hit Command P on a keyboard. This is also great if you haven't already assigned a hotkey to a command, but from this command palette, you can access plugins like Omni's search, or you can use first-party commands like inserting a template. Just about any tool that is in Obsidian can be accessed through this command palette. You can type to filter the list of commands, or you can just scroll through it.
Now, personally, I prefer keyboard shortcuts; it's just faster. I'm typing away; I don't have to start scrolling through a list or typing a name through it. I just know my keyboard shortcuts, and I'll do that. But if you're using Obsidian on an iPhone or an iPad without a keyboard, the command palette is invaluable because of just how important commands are in Obsidian.
Now, another plugin I use is one called Auto Card Link. This allows you to paste a link, but it pulls the metadata and displays it in card form. This will pull stuff like hero images, titles, summaries, and of course, the link. If you tap or click on it, it will open that link in your browser. Now, I assigned a hotkey for Auto Card Link of Command Shift V. This way, I still have my standard paste—that's Command V—or I could just paste and have this in card form.
Now, another plugin I use for pasting links is called Well Paste Link. This takes the link and inserts it in markdown format, so it puts all the proper brackets around the URL, but then it takes the insertion point and moves it right to the spot so you can start typing a description of your link or whatever you want that link to be labeled. It just moves it right there. I assigned a hotkey of Command Option V to this. Now, this is something I use a lot whenever I'm making lists, putting together the descriptions for videos, or putting together my notes for the podcast or whatever. This is something I use a ton because markdown links are really important to me; that's how I write everything.
Like I've said, I write via markdown. One of my staple documents I always have open is called Launchpad. This is a document that has links to everything that I am currently working on. It's a dashboard for all of my work. This uses the plugin Data View; it's one of the most popular plugins for Obsidian. It pulls notes from specific folders, so I don't have to manually update all of these headings. Data View can get really complex, so I'm actually going to do a whole video around it just because this video is long enough as it is, and I don't want to rush through it. But Launchpad is one of my pinned notes. You can pin a note by long-pressing or right-clicking on it and selecting pin, and it will always stay open. I also do this with my Final Cut for iPad editing note document. I keep all the presets in here because you can't save presets in that app, so I just keep all of the setting presets in here so I can just quickly reference that.
Now, another plugin I use is called Recent Files. What this does is it gives you the ability to change the view on that left-hand side from a folder view to all the recent files you've recently worked on. This is great when I'm jumping between documents and stuff like that. I'm kind of surprised this isn't built into Obsidian, but it's just great for jumping between things quickly. Most of the time, I'll open things up in tabs or split view, but every once in a while, I'm just jumping around quickly, and having recent view is nice. This is especially handy if you just want to start linking a bunch of notes together.
Now, the final third-party plugin I want to mention is called Trash Explorer. What this does is it gives you a view in the same area that you can see all the notes you recently deleted. We've all made mistakes. Like I said, I don't delete a lot of notes because I've kind of learned from my mistakes, but every once in a while, I might click the wrong thing, hit the wrong button, and something goes away. I'm kind of surprised this isn't built into Obsidian. This just gives you a kind of UI element in Obsidian to view the trash folder that's actually just kind of hidden in the Vault folder that we talked about. From here, you can restore any document you want. It's just a handy thing to have because you never know when you'll accidentally mess up.
Now, I've made mention of this already, but Obsidian has a built-in templates feature. This is handy if you do any kind of repetitive writing at all. I use this a lot for building my video descriptions, so I have a template here for all my standard links I want in there and kind of the different headers and stuff like that. I have something for promoting Comfort Zone—all sorts of different things that you could use this for, really.
Now, you can just insert a template right from using the command palette. You just type "insert template," select that, and it'll give you an option of all your templates, and you can insert it right into your document. I went ahead and set up a hotkey, though, of Command Control T, and this brings up a list of all my templates, and it will just insert one right there.
Obsidian is really big into daily notes; it's a big part of the application. You'll see a lot of community plugins around it. It's a big part of it, and it's a feature I really like, but I'm going to make a whole dedicated video about it because, again, this is a big feature that you can go really deep on, and it's very powerful in how you can do this. But what's really cool about daily notes—I'm going to mention now—is you can assign a template to your daily notes. So you can build out a template for different sections you want in there or links or whatever, and when you go to open your daily note, it'll have all of that stuff propagated with that.
Now, I got some inspiration from the Cortex brand journal on how to build my daily note. I really like this as a general scratch pad. I get a new document every single day, and I can just kind of put links there or meeting notes or whatever right there. Then, if something I want to keep, I can copy and paste it to someplace else. Now, I set up a hotkey of Command Shift D to automatically jump to my daily note every single day, and if I haven't opened a daily note already, it will go ahead and create a new daily note and put it in the right folder for me. It'll pull from my template as well.
So that's how I've been using Obsidian. There is a lot you can do with this. I realized as I was making this video that I'm going to have to make some more dedicated videos about Obsidian to really go into some details. So if you want to see more Obsidian videos, be sure to subscribe. My thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. If you liked this video, hit the thumbs-up button, subscribe if you haven't already, and have a great day!