Why I Use Obsidian

Last updated Jan 16, 2023 Edit Source

• Obsidian.Md
• Apple

Obsidian.md is a ’tool’ for creating, organising and working with notes, thoughts and lots of other things inbetween. See the official website for a much better explanation and example.

If you are like 99% of other people, you come across information in your day to day life that you want to remember. Our brains are good at remembering things - mostly but there is a limit. This information could be somthing you read in a book, a thought that just popped in to your head, a website, a YouTube video, a podcast you would like to refer back to. The list goes on and on.

For many years I used Evernote for most of this, then the software got rather bloated, it seemed to lose its way, I even think they got bought out by somebody? I switched to Apple Notes for several years and this worked well but something bothered me. Those notes, thoughts, images, they might be mine, but where are they? Can I just copy them some place else, say one day I fall out with Apple and want to shift to Windows (that day is not likely to come - but you get where I am coming from.) With Apple Notes, Evernote and most of the other tools for this sort of thing, you can’t easily get at your data. With Obsidian though, your notes are held on your computer, they are in plain text, well Markdown, but its pretty much just plain text.

Some things that attracted me to Obsidian and made me start using it:-

• The data is mine. I store it, I own it - hey, I have to back it up!
• The data is in plain text, I can do what I want with it.
• Obsidian has lots of features built right it, but also has 3rd party plugins.
• You can link between notes, thats where a lot of the power comes from with Obsidian.
• It’s multiplatform. Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS, Android.
• It’s free. (not a deal breaker for me but maybe for some).¹

It’s a place to create a PKM - a Personal Knowledge Management system. A place to record things and remember things. A reference library for your brain. I tried using Obsidian first maybe early 2021, however, there was no mobile app back then and it lacked polish and features. I then came across Craft and got distracted. Now, October 2022 I am back with Obsidian - I used it to write these simple web pages.

(you can also produce these really cool graph views which show you the links between your notes.)