Obsidian is my long-form note-taking app. It's a text editor with markdown support, meaning it's very lightweight and fast, though it is extremely powerful with options and support for things like plugins and theming, but it can be a bit daunting to get started.

Let's get into it. Now, a lot of note-taking videos on YouTube are a little self-serving. They're they're geared towards content creators, they're made by content creators for other content creators, and I'm here to tell you note-taking is not just for well, content creators.

If you're somebody that just needs to write down a phone number or an address to remember it for later, congratulations, you're a note taker.

That is note-taking. I've been note-taking in all of my jobs, whether it was IT or YouTube or even making pizzas. I personally take notes on a wide range of things, not even just work-related, home improvement projects, presents for people, car maintenance, and car washing tools and things like that.

But yes, a huge core or huge chunk of what I personally take notes on are work projects, whether it's video stuff, Comfort Zone, my podcast, wallpaper packs I'm working on, and even a couple of projects that I'm not ready to announce that I'm working on for the future.

Taking a note really just boils down to, hey, this is a piece of information I want to remember for later. It's not anything special. You don't have to have a super flashy job to be a note taker.

If you just have a piece of information you want to remember it for later, that's what note-taking is for.

Making a note of something just means you're not going to rely on your brain to remember it. Now, the reason why I bring all this up is like I said, I just see a ton of note-taking videos on YouTube and it's all about having these insanely complex systems.

And I'm just here to tell you, you don't have to do that. Obsidian is pitched as this second brain app that you can link things together.

You can use plugins, you can use themes, you can use all this stuff, but I'm here to tell you, you can use as much of this as you want or as little of this as you want.

When getting started with Obsidian, you need to set up your Vault.

This is where all of your documents and notes and everything is going to live. The vault is basically, just think of it as the the main folder.

Now, there are a bunch of different ways you can set up your Vault. You can set it up completely local, so it's just on one computer.

You can put that folder, your vault, in a cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, whatever, or you can use uh Obsidian Sync and that is Obsidian's proprietary syncing system.

Now, I've tried using both third-party cloud services like Dropbox and iCloud and I have tried Obsidian Sync service and Obsidian Sync service is the fastest.

Uh, I don't have conflicts when it comes to syncing documents, like if I was working on something on my iPhone and iPad, I've never had any conflicts or anything like that, but it is something you have to pay for, so just keep that in mind.

But ultimately, this is completely up to you where you put your Vault. Wherever you store that folder, it's not going to affect what you can do with Obsidian, it's just going to affect where those documents are available.

Just keep in mind if you put that Vault, that main folder when you're setting up Obsidian, if you put it locally in your computer and you don't pay for Obsidian Sync, those documents aren't going to sync anywhere.

So really, you should either do like a third-party cloud service or Obsidian Sync. One of those two are going to be your best option.

Now, this may sound a lot for a note-taking app in 2024. Most note-taking apps just handle sync in the background.

You don't even have to think about it. Uh, but Obsidian is focused on being a lightweight text editor, and it's just a bunch of text files and folders, and because of that, it enables quite a bit, but they had to kind of come up with a robust syncing service.

And at the end of the day, what's really nice about this is because it's just text files on your computer, you have you own all of your data.

It's not stored in somebody else's cloud and you don't have to get some like OPML file or something like that to export all of your notes or anything like that.

You literally could just copy all of your text files out of the folder and put them wherever you want.

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Keeping logs defeats the purpose of using a VPN. With Surfshark, you're also able to change your country location.

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In fact, it's a service I paid for myself a few years ago, and I just, I'm going to continue to pay for it. I'm so happy with it.

I'm going to put some links in the description below to where you can go check out Surfshark, use code LLY at checkout to get an extra 4 months for free.

My thanks to Surfshark for sponsoring this video. Now, after setting up your vault, the next thing you have to do is figuring out your folder structure.

And I don't really have a strict methodology for this. Uh, I just break everything down into the different parts of my life, so personal and work, and then create folders for the different kind of stuff I do, like house maintenance, projects, research, scripts, travel, things like that.

I also have folders for files and archives. In Obsidian, you can add stuff like images and PDF documents to your notes, but they need a place to live, and that's what the files folder is for.

Archive is a place where I store all of my notes that I'm done with but could possibly need for later.

I'm not a big fan of deleting things in this digital age.

Uh, keeping a text file costs you nothing. They're, they're kilobytes. Too many times in the past I've needed to reference like a research document or a script or something to pull a bit of information out in the past and I deleted it.

So I just decided moving forward I wasn't going to delete things anymore, but I will put them in an archive folder.

So this way it doesn't clutter up my active project folders.

So when I'm done, I just move a document to the archive folder and I can search for it at any time.

There's two different types of plugins for Obsidian. There are first-party plugins made by the developers behind Obsidian, the app, and then there are community plugins.

And then on top of that, there's also themes as well. The community plugins, the third party plugins, are made by people outside of the Obsidian dev team.

These can be used to tweak or add features like tables to Obsidian. One of the community plugins I have installed is Iconize. This allows you to assign icons to folders and note documents.

To set these up, you go into settings, community plugins, then click on browse. You can then just type in Iconize, then click install and then enable.

If you want to tweak the settings for a plugin, you can go to the main settings page and scroll all the way to the bottom.

Here you will see all of the community plugins. You can go into each one of these to see their settings and change their behavior.

There's a lot I do with these plugins, but we're going to get into that kind of as we go.

throughout the video with Iconize, I give every single one of my folders an emoji. I also did this with a few staple notes documents as well because I used Iconize instead of just typing the emoji in the folder name, it doesn't mess up the alphabetical nature of the folders.

This means they appear in the right order and search isn't thrown off as well. The other type of plugin I mentioned is themes. I currently use a community made theme called Border but have heavily customized it.

Under settings, appearance, I changed both the text font and monospace font to Jet Brains Mono.

This is a third-party font, so you'll need an app like Fontcase on your iPhone and iPad to install it. This is a monospace font and it fits perfectly for text editors like Obsidian.

I also tweaked the color scheme of Border. Instead of going over every tweak, I will put a config file and everything else I mentioned, including plugins, in the description below.

In order for this to work, you'll need to install a plugin called Style Settings, then just copy and paste the text from the config file into the Style Settings options and it will go ahead and handle configuring the whole theme for you and it'll make it look just like mine.

All right, let's get into note taking. Like I mentioned at the top of Obsidian is a plain text editor with support for markdown.

Each note in Obsidian is just a text file. If you write in markdown, it will render that for you, but at the end of the day, it's still plain text.

Personally, this is the way I prefer to write.

If I need to copy something out of here, I don't have to worry about weird formatting or having to do paste and match style.

I have different automations that take this text, edit it, and put it in different places, which is not something I could do easily if this was a Rich Text note taking app like Apple's Notes app.

If you're not sure what markdown is, that's totally okay.

I will put a guide in the description below kind of explaining how markdown works, but the kind of quick TLDR of why you would want to use markdown is one, it's plain text, so it's still fast, but you're able to quickly add things like headers, bold, italicize, underline, uh, add links, add images, code blocks, all sorts of different things you can add that right into plain text, which is not something plain text normally supports.

Now, all you're doing is typing symbols. For example, you're just doing the uh, the pound sign if you're doing a a header or two underscores on either side of a word or phrase if you're going to italicize something.

The core idea of this is you're keeping your hands on your keyboard while you're writing and you're not constantly, you know, going to the trackpad and picking something from the menu to get italicized or bold or header or something like that.

I'm not not trying to get too heavy-handed into the uh, philosophy of note taking and all that stuff like some people do, but I I would say if I you know, I had to pick a philosophy, my philosophy is just write everything down.

If there is a piece of information you know you're going to need later or you're not even sure you might need that later, just write it down.

With a digital notetaking app, it costs you nothing. I I write notes for like ideas for presents for my girlfriend, whether it's her birthday or Christmas or whatever, to mapping out big projects that I'm working on, whether by myself or with other people.

Now, in Obsidian, I have a folder called Quick Note, and I put an underscore in front of this Quick Note so that way this folder is always at the very top of my list.

This is the folder I have new documents default to. This is something you can change in settings. Now, I just use this as a place to quickly capture notes and ideas.

I go through this folder about once a day, delete stuff I'm done with, like if it was like, hey, you need to go to this particular address for this thing and it's like, okay, I'm never going back there, I don't need to keep this address.

That is something I'm okay deleting. Uh, if I had uh an idea for a project or I finished up a project or finished up with a note or something like that, I'll archive it, or I can take that note that's in Quick Note and put it in the proper folder for whatever subject it retains to, whether it might be a script or travel plans or something like that.

Now, I built a shortcut that I run from the dock of my iPad or from the action button on my iPhone. This gives me a text field and I can just quickly write out a note.

If I have a Safari page open on either of these devices, it will automatically add a link to that page to the note.

Once done, it takes the first line of the note and makes that the title and then saves it to the Quick Note folder.

A big part of Obsidian is being able to link notes together. In Obsidian documents, if you type two open brackets you will see a list of your documents, just start typing the name and hit enter, whatever you see the document you want to link.

This will put a deep link to that document in your current note.

You can also use this to embed files you have stored in Obsidian in your document as well. Just type the exclamation mark first, then two open brackets, and then start typing the file's name.

When you see that file, hit enter. At the bottom of the document you're currently in, you will see all of the notes that that document is linked to.

You can also see this on the right side pane as well.

This is a way to see how things are linked together. Now, one of the core features of Obsidian is its tab and split view system.

This is a way to have multiple notes open at once. Now, on the iPad, Obsidian does not have the the system multi-window feature, which is a huge bummer.

It's actually the thing I dislike about Obsidian the most, and was one of the things that took me the longest to get over when using this app.

In fact, I put off using Obsidian for so long because it doesn't have this feature.

I personally like to have multiple different notes windows opened and paired with different apps and different stages, but with Obsidian, you just can't do that, so I'm moving this one window around a lot, but I can kind of get around this with some built-in features in Obsidian, like tabs.

In Obsidian, you can open a new tab by tapping the plus button or using the keyboard shortcut command T.

From here, you open up a new document or an existing document, but another handy multitasking feature that Obsidian has built into it is its split view support.

So you can either long press or right click on a tab or a document and you will see an option that says either split down or split to the right.

Uh, split down will put your two documents on top of each other. Personally, I prefer the split right option where it will put one document on the left side and one document on the right side.

These two windows will have independent tab controls, but you can drag and drop tabs between the two.

I often use this when I'm working on a big script or document and I want to reference like a research note where a place that might like have a bunch of unorganized thoughts, links, PDF documents, images, whatever.

Obsidian has a decent built-in quick switcher tool for quickly pulling up different documents, but one issue I have with it is it doesn't look at what's in the file, it only looks at the file names.

So I've been using a plugin called OmniSearch, and this looks at everything when you start searching, including every word written in that note.

When searching, it will filter down through your documents. You can even enable fuzzy searching in settings.

What this means is if you start typing something and maybe the wording isn't perfect, it will still show results for that. When searching for something, you can hit command enter to open that document in a new tab, or you can use the shortcut command option enter to open that document into Obsidian's built-in split view.

This is a much more powerful way of searching and opening documents in Obsidian. Now, one plugin I can't live without is Home Tab.

Home Tab replaces the view of a new tab screen. It's very straightforward. You just start typing in the text bar for the document you want.

to open and just hit enter. If you type a name of a document that doesn't exist and hit enter, it will then create a new document with that name you typed as the header.

My Obsidian Setup: The King of Note Taking Apps

My Obsidian Setup: The King of Note Taking Apps

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