Over the last 2 years I have been using Obsidian to make and record my notes on things. I have found that using Obsidian has been really helpful. The main reasons for its continue use is that I am able to link information and context together within one place, it offers a display preview live format (this allows you to see how it will look when you work on the papers), It integrates with multiple writing markdown languages (like Markdown, HTML, and others), and that it integrates with my IDE vim, there are other benefits beyond this as well.

Mind Palace: A Second Brain

Using Obsidian is a mind palace. Yes I got this term from watching Sherlock. You can use tags to identify key areas of interest that can be aggregated and linked across many and all domains in your documents. This is especially nice when you need to link concepts and ideas, Pages, or just sections of pages.

You can link things using the following ways

  • Tags- Using the hashtag #<tagname> Just like Twitter (X) or any other social platform you can use the hashtag to make tags of concepts so that you can search these things to together.
  • Pages - Using the double brackets allows you to link pages. [[<path-to-page>]] These are pages you already have in the program. The program has an autocomplete, so it is not entirely difficult to find the page that you want to link to as well. This is great, as now you can create a wikipedia like document of your ideas, and concepts. Another thing is that you can change the text of the Page link as well using a horizontal bar and the text you would like to add ([[<path>|text]]).
  • Internet Links/URI links on my machine - Using the brackets with parenthesis ([Display Text](URL)) this is a great way to make references to internet material and other material on your machine. Just link it and have it ready for next time that this information becomes relevant in your day to day again.

Markdown

Obsidian allows you to utilizes both Markdown language and HTML with CSS capability. This will render elements on the page as if there were actually HTML or Markdown. And the format of the styling for Markdown is quite nice and highly suggested.

Live Preview

Obsidian has this really nice feature called Live Preview that will allow you to view and edit the page, using the rendered display of the markdown language and of html language all in your page as you are working on the page itself. This is immensely helpful feature. So as you work on the page, most of the page is rendered as it should be rendered in the language format that you specified that section of the page to be written in. Only when you highlight an area with your curser does the rendered elements change to there raw text form (un-rendered form, the markdown language raw text) so that you can make changes to the file that you are working on.

Here is a link that goes over the markdown of Obsidian.

Live Preview is an amazing tool, when you work on a line of text, you will see that line of text as text. But when you move to the next line, you will see it change to the format that it will actually be displayed in the Live Preview. This allows you to work and view in real time the Contextually Rich Text format that your documents take shape. This is an awesome addition to any tool.

Vim

If you don’t know what Vim is, I’d would recommend it. It is an text editor that allows you to do anything without the use of a mouse. There are so many functions in the modes and keystrokes functions of Vim that allow you to fully control all functionality, and move throughout a document with ease. I highly recommend anyone that writes a lot to use this, even if you do not write code. I love the ability to go into my files and utilize vim in the editor tool. It really has given me the ability to utilize the commands and power of vim.