Obsidian - My Markdown Editor

What is Obsidian.

I wrote earlier that Markdown is the perfect format — today I’ll show you the tool that harnesses its potential: Obsidian.

Obsidian is a tool for creating, editing, and managing Markdown notes. It’s available on Linux, Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS, making it universally accessible. The app is free, and notes are stored directly on your disk in .md files — which means, as the Obsidian creators themselves emphasise on their website: Your thoughts are your own.

After installing the program you don’t need to create any account. No login prompts. You simply choose a folder for your notes. Obsidian looks a bit like a rich text editor with a file browser on the left side.

Not just note-taking

Obsidian allows for much more than just note-taking — through the file browser you can add folders and files, which helps organise your thoughts, and if you create links between your notes, you can display all the connections using a graph. Quick-link buttons let you rapidly add a daily note — with the date in the name — open a table of all notes, or view your entries in the aforementioned graph format.

Once you’ve mastered the basic features, you discover Obsidian’s plugins — and then you realise that half the programs shipped by Microsoft are simply unnecessary. Maybe not quite that extreme, but if the core plugins are manageable at a glance, the community plugins are a true goldmine of tools ranging from “why would anyone even make this?” to “wow, I can’t live without this.”

You’ll find a calendar, emojis, a plugin that turns notes into Kanban boards, mind maps, or a daily planner. There are plugins for integrating with LLMs (ChatGPT, Copilot), a Git plugin for version control, and even a free version of the sync plugin for synchronising notes across multiple devices. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if someone found a plugin that turns notes into a website — after all, Markdown is a format that’s easy to parse into HTML.

All of this means the program can be used for many different tasks.

What tasks do I use Obsidian for?

The most important plugin for me is the Community Livesync plugin — thanks to it, I take notes on my phone, laptop, and tablet and everything syncs together.

My next favourite thing is daily notes — this way I easily create a daily plan, especially since Obsidian turns square brackets into a to-do list with the ability to check off completed tasks. For larger projects I create Kanban boards, and lecture notes I organise into mind maps.

My latest discovery is the Git plugin, which lets me edit this blog directly from my phone, and I recently came across an interesting idea online: using Obsidian notes directly as a knowledge source for a personal AI agent.

Obsidian isn’t the be-all and end-all.

Obsidian is one of many Markdown editors that deserves special attention for its community plugins, but other editors have their pros and cons too. In my use case I see no downsides, and out of habit I won’t be thinking about switching any time soon. And you — do you have your favourite thought organiser? If not, you might be interested in a video comparing it with another popular program — Joplin.