I still feel like a newbie with this stuff, but slowly figuring things out.
But that being said… 
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Yeah, basically you have to not be afraid to create new notes out tiny little pieces of text. For example, I used Roam to build a cross-reference library from sermon notes that I took. In Roam, I could just block embed verse references. But in Obsidian, I had to make each verse a separate text file. Ended up being about 30,000 files!
There’s a really cool plugin though called Note Refactor that allows you to highlight text in one note and then break it out into a separate note with a link to the new note in it’s place in the original note. Nick Milo covered it in a YouTube video, here’s the link to the spot in the video where he talks about it: Obsidian Plugins (0.9.10) — My top plugins in the Obsidian app - YouTube
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I’ve been using Obsidian heavily since around July or August 2000. I had been using notion, but I had 1,200+ markdown notes that I had created in NVAlt that just stopped working and wouldn’t connect too files. Notion couldn’t do anything with the markdown and I didn’t want something that was network only, Roam is fancy but not well built and scared me with the developer’s arrogance and lack of understanding basics (want to be cool not make a great app that is secure and has the user’s needs in mind - I’ve lost too much content to similar developers). I also looked at some similar tools that used Zettelkasten method (RemNote and a couple others).
Obsidian stuck as I just downloaded it and pointed it to my two nested directories with my markdown notes and it was all searchable and editable. But, I could also use some of the TextExpander templates I use for book notes and a daily note template. The ease of backlinking is straight out of wiki environment and it made VooDoo Pad (Mac and iOS native wiki) rather old and dated and my TextExpander templates for it worked perfectly fine in Obsidian. I’ve run TiddlyWiki trying too replicate VooDoo Pad, but Obsidian does 90% of what I loved about VooDoo Pad (my favorite wiki I’ve ever used).
With in a month of use I had a lot of interlinked content and was able to go back and work through how to manually find the NVAlt tags (stored in file metadata) and added them to markdown files so I could track “blogfodder” for blog ideas and them made a new TextExpander template for a footer to track “blogfodder” tagged ideas through draft (link to location), and published with a link to the final shared blog.
I don’t write long pieces in Obsidian, but have some draft ideaI that start there. I have a daily dump template with subject prompts that I add to and some thoughts in there become blogfodder. I write longer works in IA Writer and I just copy out of Obsidian and paste intoo IA Writer and put a link to the file in Obsidian draft or blogfodder stub. My only issue is I publish from IA Writer through dragging into Marked2 and grab the HTML and drop it into my old blogging engine I wrote in 2001 or into my other blog in Squarespace. But, I have Obsidian living in Drobpox and soft linked back into my Mac where I have DevonThink index the directories and IA Writer sits in iCloud and I really want to search both at the same time (I may copy my blogged edition back into Obsidian and label it blogged).
I am deeply looking forward to the mobile version so I can use it on my iPad. I picked up Craft to handle some iPad uses, but it isn’t markdown (which most everything I do is) and it is less wiki like than Obsidian, but looks nicer. Craft also doesn’t fit my markdown heavy / centric writing workflow. It may replace then handful of things I liked in Notion that don’t fit into Obsidian yet.
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If you want deep dives track down Brian Jenks on YouTube, but also on YouTube is Effective Remote Work, Curtis McHale (he just switched to Craft as he didn’t think Obsidian would have a full iPad capable option), Linking Your Thinking, and Siv W UK, to name a few.
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I believe that Craft does indeed format in markdown, through it appears as rich text in the editor. Below are screenshots of a test note written in Craft and how it appears in the reading AND editing views of DevonThink.
I do not believe DT is converting the note on the fly, it seems that Craft is markdown though rendered as rich text. Am I wrong about this?
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Just to whet your appetite more – the current limited beta of Obsidian on iOS/iPad OS contains all the features of the Obsidian on the desktop with the exception of certain community plugins that need the macOS environment. The speed and completeness of how this product comes to market is astounding in the annals of software development, IMO.
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Just in case anyone is interested… I recently translated a longer piece on my Obsidian work flow, i.e. how I organize my files in Obsidian. Apologies for any mistakes, I’m not a native speaker. 
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I really appreciate this.
Have you ever shared a behind the scenes on your sermon notes? As a theologian and preacher, I’ve been benefiting from a fairly complex setup in Roam as well. Would love to see how you translated it to Obsidian if you ever have the time/interest.
Just watched the note refactor YouTube - wow. that blew my mind.
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I actually wrote about this (and made a video) here: Building My Personal Cross-Reference Library in Obsidian
Getting the Bible into Obsidian proved to be the hardest part. But @joebuhlig helped me by writing a script that exploded my chapter files into individual verses. There’s more detail about the technical stuff on the Obsidian forum here: Bible Study in Obsidian Kit (including the Bible in Markdown) - #18 by joebuhlig - Share & showcase - Obsidian Forum
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Excellent. Thank you!
Wow; there are more of us preachers here in this one place than I’d have ever guessed.
I’m still very much a pen and paper/word processor guy, but what I really need to develop is a way to find again those thoughts and notes I’ve come across that I want to reference back to. Too often, I’ve come to a text a few weeks later (we’re a lectionary tradition), and I can’t find or remember that thought I had a few weeks prior. Maybe it wasn’t worthwhile, but it might have also kicked off something more.
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That is awesome to hear there are more of us. I bet we could all find some fun in swapping tools, notes, workflows.
So I have generally had mostly a digital workflow in terms of taking notes on texts and writing (I too use the lectionary) and then usually sketchnote with pen and paper a visual outline before writing my manuscript. Anyways, I’ve found that over the years, I forget that I’ve covered ideas, texts, etc. The only thing that has saved me is that I’ve been pretty consistent about sharing my messages on my blog so I’ve been able to use that as a main database but something like what folks are building with Roam and Obsidian would be far more beneficial to me.
Has anyone found the best way to migrate (import, export, move) from Apple Notes to Obsidian? David mentioned that he had moved his notes over but didn’t explain how.
I am very interested in this discussion of trying to do something like Roam’s support for blocks in Obsidian.
Block organization has tempted me to use Roam but the fear of lock-in keeps me away.
For now, I really don’t take a lot of advantage of Obsidian’s linking capabilities. For me, it’s mainly a markdown editor and file organizer, used closely with DevonThink.
As for Craft: I used Craft for weeks and liked it but then I switched to Obsidian. I like Obsidian’s support for plain ol’ Markdown, with the capacity to integrate into DevonThink and the Finder.
Craft very nearly supports Markdown but not quite. It falls short in two ways: You have to export the files; Craft itself uses a proprietary database format. And then you have two versions of documents floating around – the exported version and the working version. Just thinking about that made my head hurt.
And some of the very special features of Craft – I’m thinking mainly of Pages embedded iN documents here – don’t quite translate to Markdown. Pages end up getting exported as document sections topped by headers – not quite the same thing.
Still, Craft is a lovely app and I’m keeping an eye on development.
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Obsidian is proving to be the hypertext language-learning tool I’ve been searching for for ages. (I tried Tinderbox, but felt like I was spending too much time building the tool and not enough time using it.) It’s a snap to build connections between a word, its lexical root, its inflectional paradigm, the finer points of its usage, its synonyms and antonyms, any grammatical rules that apply, etc. I can work from the bottom up or the top down with equal ease.
I’m in the process of turning a library of cumbersome multi-page Word documents into nimble little linked Obsidian notes, and it’s been a joy the whole way.
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You’ll also want to look into this on the Obsidian forum, where the feature not only discussed in depth – but that’s where the developers are. They are responsive.
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Thanks! I’m already active on the obsidian forum. I’ll do a search on “blocks” and see where it gets me.
I know that Obsidian has block support but it seems kind of hacky. And blocks are not the atomic unit, they way they are (I think) on Roam. Documents are the atomic unit of Obsidian.
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