Why and how you should switch to Obsidian.

Foreword

Download it and try it: https://obsidian.md/download

First, don’t be afraid of obsidian when you first start, the hotkey page may seem overwhelming, but, eventually, you will want to go there after spending time doing repetitive tasks within the editor. That’s the key to obsidian! You will grow your own hotkeys over time. Obsidian has hundreds of hotkeys listed which is amazing, but also intimidating. To make it less daunting log a task you have to do and automate it! Maybe that’s setting a reminder or renaming a file. Take whatever feels repetitive and automate it in obsidian, don’t worry about doing complicated tasks with hotkeys yet keep it simple. This will help build confidence and if you start doing this you may find yourself just creating your own snippets without realizing it.

Second, don’t be too worried about learning obsidian. It took me several weeks to really appreciate Obsidian because of my bad habits with using Markdown before using Obsidian, but once they were gone I went all in on using obsidian as my main editor mostly because I could build obsidian to fit me, my preferences, and what I aim to acomplish.

Don’t be afraid to try things out don’t worry about messing anything up, but do save/backup your files before every big change you make! (big changes being a new plugin or plugin setting) Here is a keystroke that I’ve found most useful in the past. Plugins can enhance your overall experience in obsidian. All the plugins I talk about are available on obsidian’s built-in plugins system.

Ctrl + , Goes to the setting page where the hotkeys are(it is most likely the command key on mac) ** Warning ** - Remember that if your obsidian file doesn’t have focus (you are interacting with another window) you won’t be able to manipulate obsidian! Your hotkey shortcut is activated when obsidian has focus! Speed for Customizability The idea of having a tool that grows with you is important in part because it allows you to increase your speed and performance as you become more familiar with the tool. A customizable environment is important because it allows you to tailor the tool to your own needs and preferences. GPU support is also important because it can greatly increase performance, particularly for users who have many plugins enabled or who have media-rich vaults. While the default appearance of obsidian is not bad, it lacks personalization. The selection of community-generated themes is out of this world. But, if you would like obsidian can easily be styled through the use of CSS. I’ll post a blog about this if there is interest. Syntax Highlighting, Formatting, and Other Text Enhancing plugins Obsidian comes with syntax highlighting for many languages as well as plugins for markdown, and other ways of formatting and displaying text. These help to display your notes in a way that is much more legible and visually appealing than a standard text file. As well they help you to see what language or context you writing in so you can organize your thoughts better.

Themes for Obsidian

Want to spice up your workspace a lot? Obsidian makes that possible through its community themes. Their community is so vast that you will never run out of themes. Learn how to use themes here. (Video)

Steps to change your obsidian theme: 

1. Open the settings panel
2. Select Appearance from the scrollable titles on the left
3. Go to the page that popped up and select community-themes
4. Select a theme by Clicking apply!

You can easily make your own custom theme to suit your personality or preferences through the use of CSS. More about this and a few CSS snippets that we use regularly to follow. Community The above benefits have enticed a large community surrounding this text editor. This engagement has led to the development of thousands of secure plugins available through the app itself. This great community compounds the greatness of obsidian considerably as there is definitely someone wanting or willing to answer your questions.

There’s also a dedicated and active subreddit that you can subscribe to.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/

The subreddit is quite active every day, with users posting news, comments, concerns, and memes.

Connected Notes - Your Second Brain

The Zettelkasten note-taking method is a great way of building an interconnected web of notes. I highly suggest reading more about that here.

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ To summarize the Zettelkasten note-taking method: it helps you to take better notes by allowing you to link related ideas together. This, in turn, helps you to better remember the information and makes it easier to find when you need it. There are a few key things to keep in mind when using the Zettelkasten method:

1. Every note should have a unique identifier (e.g., date or title).
2. Every note should be linkable to other notes.
3. Notes should be organized in a way that makes sense to you.
4. You should review your notes regularly to keep them up-to-date and useful. This can be accomplished by refactoring notes or using your notes on work or homework. Capturing and documenting Gifs and Video I am able to embed screen recordings of my work within obsidian as well as embed gifs, and even record with my webcam or microphone right inside of obsidian. The obvious use cases of these features are lecture note-taking, demonstrations of obsidian itself, presentations, and more. Offline Capability Because obsidian runs on your local computer as an application, the avenue for some outdoor or Wi-Fi outage note-taking on my favorite app. The offline capabilities of obsidian is unmatched by similar apps. Where Roam Research uses servers to allocate servers and storage, Obsidian use the local file directory of your choosing. There are three benefits of the offline capabilities of obsidian that stand out: Access, Security, and powers inherited from git. The Access and Security of the offline capabilities indicate that since your files are stored locally, you have total control over where they go and who sees them. For example, if you do not want people to have access to your local files, you can restrict access via a variety of means like having a password or encrypting the file. Alternatively, if you do want others to see your files or for easier form collaboration then you can choose to put them on other media like iCloud Drive or Dropbox. The offline features of obsidian also piggyback off of git ability for tracking changes in the GitHub repository. While this feature alone is amazing for those who are collaborative writers (or designers) it also has tremendous potential for cross-referencing different versions of files based on context which makes double-checking a whole process more pleasant. Access While initially daunting, obsidian’s note system locking you down seems like a downfall on the part of the app but through git you can easily switch between devices with sufficient bandwidth and commit/pull settings. More about this to follow! Security Obsidian hosts everything on your device locally. This means that you are actually editing regular text files within a folder on your computer. Making them easily access able through folder explorers and system explorers alike. There are many benefits to this approach. One is that you own your data. You can easily back it up, or move it around, without worrying about losing access to your notes. Security: Any security issues or concerns that come up will be presented to the obsidian team and dealt with asap. Currently, authorship within the git is not remotely authenticated so anyone who has access to the machine can commit or pull changes, however, this might change if obsidians grow into something more significant than its current personal scale project. The only other security issue would be if someone used the directory structure for nefarious purposes - once you set it up though you should be fine. Powers inherited from Git -File Recovery -Automated Backups -Security The next major issue that people encounter is that they need to collaborate with developers and writers on other systems. To deal with this problem, Centralized Version Control Systems (CVCSs) was developed. Examples of such systems are CVS, Subversion, and Perforce. CVCs have a single server that contains all the versioned files, and a number of clients that check out files from that central place. For many years, this has been the standard for version control. However, in 2005, a new approach to version control called “distributed version control” was introduced with the release of the Git revision control system. In a distributed version control system (DVCS), there is no single central server; instead, every developer has a complete copy of the repository, including all past versions of every file. Examples of DVCS are Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, and Darcs. This approach has a number of advantages:

• There is no need to be connected to a central server in order to work on files; you can work offline and then sync up when you are online again.
• If the central server goes down, there is no problem; developers can continue working and then sync up when the server is back up.
• Since every developer has a complete copy of the repository, it is very easy for them to experiment without affecting other developers. Heard of Github? I would just describe it as a platform where developers can share code, work collaboratively, and build amazing things. I encourage you to go look at www.github.com. GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. It is written in Ruby on Rails by GitHub, Inc. It offers all of the distributed version control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. Good Plugin/Website idea! Hub for sharing obsidian vaults using git and git lfs If unfamiliar with GitHub We recommend reading this guide.  Key ideas that you should be familiar with before trying to back up your vault using git.

• Create and use a repository on GitHub
• Start and manage a new branch on GitHub
• Make changes to a file and push them to GitHub as commits
• Open and merge a pull request If you are working on a project with someone else, you can simply share the folder containing your notes, and each person can edit the files locally on their own computer; or rather, a git repository can easily allow collaboration and sharing but the process is made plain simple by excellent documentation from Github. Student Prototyping and Visualization Obsidian allows me to allocate all of my workings on my computer into one place for logging and for use in revision. As an electrical engineering student and a computer science student CircuitsJS Within the electrical engineering class that I am taking, I am having to draw a lot of circuits. Looking for a way to take notes in this class, I discovered the circuit plugin. CircuitJS I am able to embed circuits directly into my notes using a plugin that integrates circuitJS into your code blocks and renders them on the page. Not only that, I can measure simulated circuit values such as current, Voltage, and resistance seen by sources. This allows for assurance during the learning process and prevents waiting for circuit homework answers to be released. Code Within my computer science class that I am taking, I need to write java code, and the execute code plugin allows me to run the code directly in my notes. It is useful because I can write the code and then execute it to see if it works without having to go to a separate IDE. I think the plugin is great for quickly testing out code snippets and seeing the results immediately. It is also helpful for sharing code because they can see the results right away without having to compile or run the code themselves. Execute Code within your notes ExecuteCode This plugin allows for you to run virtually any programming language within your obsidian notes written into a code block. able to create and run code within customized environments right within my notes because of a code-run plugin. CodeBlockEnhancer https://github.com/stargrey/obsidian-better-codeblock or (pick your preference) https://github.com/nyable/obsidian-code-block-enhancer This plugin attempts to enhance the visual presentation of code while within code blocks. ##These plugins currently do similar sets of the following:

• Language With Additional Syntax Highlighting support,
• Line Numbering enable/disable, and 
• Syntax Highlighting Stylesheet. Not all details are included in this document. Please refer to the source code (https://github.com/Loghorn/jekyll-codeblock-enhancements) for more information and allowed values for specific directives/etc…

Copy Code Blocks

This plugin allows easy copying and pasting from your programming notes into any possible application. Lesson on vi / Vim Vim is a modal text editor; it has two primary modes of operation: insert mode, where everything you type is inserted into the document, and command mode, where you can execute Vim-specific commands to manipulate text. In command mode, the keyboard keys have entirely different functions than in insert mode. There are four main movement keys in command mode: h (left), j (down), k (up), and l (right). Training to map a familiar relationship similar to the awsd keys on the keyboard worked best for me for conceptualizing these key presses/commands. There are also a few other movement keys, such as 0 (beginning of line), $ (end of the line), G (end of document), and gg (beginning of the document). To enter insert mode from command mode, press the I key. To go back to command mode from insert mode, press the Esc key. Some basic Vim commands include:

• i: enter insert mode
• o: enter open line below mode
• O: enter open line above mode
• esc: exit insert/open line mode
• p: paste text after cursor
• P: paste text before cursor
• :set filetype=python set the filetype to python
• :syntax on turn on syntax highlighting
• :set nu show line numbers
• :set hlsearch highlight all search matches
• :w - save
• :q! - quit and don’t save
• :e [file] - edit file
• :w- write changes to file
• :q - quit vim
• :wq - write changes and quit vim Learning this modal style of the editor will, once proficient, enable text editing and creation because you will not be using the mouse every 5 seconds taking your hands off of the keyboard.