Obsidian

Obsidian is definitely not another note-taking tool! It is an organizational system that will help you put together all your notes, ideas, and written files, in an associative manner, and not a hierarchically distributed one. Although mastering the vast capabilities Obsidian offers might take a while, it will totally be worth the investment because by learning its ways, you will have organized yourself so well, there is no way you will ever understand information distribution the way you used to.

I know it sounds too good to be true, too promising to be real, especially for a tool that helps you organize notes and texts. Let's see what distinctive advantages make Obsidian worth giving a shot and what is/are its unique selling point(s).

Yes, nowadays, we have such powerful devices and so much data to store, it is nearly impossible to find any smartphone user who does not have at least one subscription with any given cloud storage company. Yet, many past events have shown that data stored in one place is subject to the companies’ changing regulations, to altering/loss, and even unauthorized access when poorly handled.

Keeping files in your computer, stored locally, gives you the possibility to create external backups, and to smartly synchronize, encrypt, or transfer them. Basically, you get flexibility and a lot more mobility at the cost of some extra time invested in learning how to become optimal with data management. The advantage? You only need to learn these things once and benefit for the rest of your life.

Obsidian uses Markdown — a plain text formatting syntax. You input text with some extra symbols to achieve things like tables, italic, headline (e.g., for italic, wrap the text in *italic*, for a headline, add a ‘#’ at the beginning of a sentence/word). A super useful resource to understand markdown is here. With Obsidian, you will have all your notes in a Markdown format. Even if you already have notes in other places, your files can be imported and converted by Obsidian (from Zettelkasten systems and Roam Research).

After taking notes, and setting connections between them, these will automatically be arranged in a graph-like structure. Accessing a point/node with a simple click will reveal a complex network of connections between your notes, ideas, and everything you kept and wrote down. It could work in a ton of scenarios, enabling you to see new links and perspectives.

Over 18 core plugins for advanced customizations will offer things like a backlink explorer that helps you see where in your notes things should connect to other ones, a tags organizer, custom CSS, command palette and changeable keyboard commands, shortcuts for presenting notes as slideshows, embedded audio recordings and pictures in your notes, a custom daily node system (for note-taking and date formatting), page previews, a file explorer, and many others.

Obsidian is a tool for those who are willing to put in the effort to organize their work at a very granular level. It is a way to get insights from your files and notes with the help of the advanced connection-making interface. You can explore customizations of all kinds and get full control over your information. It may seem a bit challenging to get started, but it’s worth it.

Besides all of this, Obsidian gives access to a plethora of options and custom-made design themes (downloadable from GitHub), alongside a beautifully crafted interface that works perfectly. The tool has extremely intuitive icons, instructions, an extensive documentation, and even a start guide for those who don't know Markdown language notations.