Settling on Obsidian

Software
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I used Apple Notes replacing Evernote during 2022-2025. It was overall fine but the deal breaker was being unable to search some notes even though the keywords matched the title.

After trying Bear, Craft, Notion and other note-taking apps, I moved to Obsidian.

My experience of Obsidian may be different from others because I have had a falling demand in using plugins. At the beginning I was exploring themes and plugins but I mostly settled on the settings, ending up using Minimal theme with its two related plugins: Minimal Theme Settings and Style Settings. I also tried official Map plugin so that I can check my notes when looking at my world’s map, and a plugin which can turn my markdown image link to wiki link so that I can also view images on iA Writer, where I use it for writing when I want to have a clearer interface. I also try Base, one of the core plugins.

The reasons for choosing Obsidian is file over apps, with easier management of attachments like images and pdfs especially when the links among notes can be automatically updated when I rename my notes and attachments. When deleting a note, the app will also ask you if you need to delete the images which are not linked to other notes. The live preview of the editor is close to WYSIWYG and it has been improving.

I found the app itself is sufficient for me. I don’t need the map or base because I spend much time on tagging in order to show my notes there, which needs unnecessary management while I ended up not reading it. I also don’t bother to canvas and graph views. While Minimal themes with more configurations like colourful headings are great and beautiful, I found the default theme much more comfortable simply because of better contrast for better readability. Thus I deleted the plugins I don’t need, and I ended up using without any community plugins.

I simply let iA Writer connect to Obsidian vault so as to write in a more comfortable interface just in case.

The only functions I started using recently, are Daily Notes, tabs/split view, templates and random notes. The former with a widget provided on my iPhone and iPad allows me to take note easily just in case, with templates including some checklists. Tabs or Split View allows me to handle multiple notes at a time when executing projects. Random notes let me review notes I might have forgotten (Bear also has one but you have to use their widget and wait for new contents coming out, so I can tap a button to show notes randomly for me).

In short, my experience is not how I am obsessed with using plugins but increasingly opposite to the trend.

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Obsidian remains, and will be, a fantastic choice for your notes!

I am using it with joy every day as the living brain to my personal life and work life. I have also carved out some time this summer to retool my vault. This is mostly to leverage Bases which I’ve never used, and I don’t have any YAML to speak of in most of my notes. But some testing suggests that I can easily convert the tags and my home-made metadata that I did create, to the new standards of Properties at the top of every note file. Maybe I will use Claude – also a new one on me (I know, I am the slow one at the back of the queue, and that suits me just fine). I use the minimal theme, like you (but with colourful headers).

I’ve really enjoyed poking around the starter vault that @mikeschmitz has kindly made available (at https://vault.practicalpkm.com). I am no stranger to PKM, but loved seeing a great example of how to make good use of the Properties with Dataview (his habit tracker). But these things are all optional extras for me – more a hobby than a daily necessity.

I am still avoiding Obsidian on the phone (I have a smallish screen on the Iphone SE 2nd gen, and it just looks awful), and use it sparingly on the iPad.

For me, Obsidian’s superpower is how beautifully it scales from simple to complex when you need it. The other plugin I rely on religiously are the Workspaces: a way to quickly load a workspace of relevant notes, often a single project note on the left hand side, and on the right a collection of other reading notes and other such things. It’s such a time saver and puts me immediately in the right frame of mind.

Enjoy!

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I worked with Obsidian for a year, but I increasingly noticed that all the possibilities the program offers were distracting me more and more. I went through something similar a few years ago with OmniFocus. Now I’ve ended up back with NotePlan—it suits me much better, and my workflows are simpler and faster again.

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I love Obsidian. I have it open on my desktop all day to my Daily Note, plus I have been using it as a Readwise Reader replacement, and it has been great for that. I even have Claude create internal links in the articles I save to my existing notes for reference. I do wish it felt more Apple native, and I wish I could pull up notes, and open them in Obsidian via Spotlight, but I love the app.

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TLDR: Use Claude. (Or your model of choice, of course.)

One of my Obsidian vaults is a giant glossary of terms related to the visual arts: everything from the vocabulary for things like color, line, and form to descriptors like “encaustic” or “dye-transfer” to artistic movements and styles like “pictorialism.” I wanted to use it as a knowledge base to help me prepare formal analyses of works of art as part of a course of study and to think more deeply about my own work.

But … all I had was a collection of notes that was barely more useful than a Google search. None of the notes had a YAML header, and my feints at linking were at best half-hearted. On a whim I fired up Claude and asked for help. I explained what I wanted to use the vault for, and in great detail—i.e., not “I want to use this vault to help me analyze works of art” but rather, exactly the kinds of questions I would be asking as part of the process and what a good result would be—and asked Claude to help me rebuild the vault into a useful tool. Claude helped my pull together a YAML schema that would enable generating bases specific to each part of the process as well as a plan for strategic linking. Then Claude suggested that I get out of the way and let it re-work the notes to prune out duplicates; split or merge notes as needed; populate the YAML; and add any links that made sense. Claude even added something I probably wouldn’t have thought to do: cautions about terms that are often misused. The vault still needs work—I’ll be adding images, for instance, as well as links to the web—but the scaffolding is there and it’s ready to put to use.

My advice is to use Claude to help you structure your vault, but to arrive at some clarity about how you plan to use it first—otherwise you’ll end up with something that follows generic best practices rather than a tool suited to your specific purposes.

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Thank you – that’s a wonderful example. I will have to give this a go.

I already have a well structured vault. At least, in the sense that I have SNs (structure notes), CNs (concept notes: multiples or related notes are gathered in a SN, or I guess what’s called a MOC these days…), RNs (reading notes), PNs (person notes), and ZZs (project notes that lead to outputs, in my case, academic writing in the humanities). I wouldn’t trust Claude to deal with the ZZ notes, because they are highly specific to my writing projects and therefore grow organically with need.

Where I think I may have gone wrong is that several of these notes have turned into paragraphs, chapter chunks, mini projects, etc and ‘atomicity’ isn’t exactly a feature in all areas of my vault! I try to keep a distinction between it and my Scrivener drafts, but that didn’t always hold up. At some point, even Obsidian doesn’t really scale to book writing, and so I’ve moved across to Scriv again now.

So yes, step one will be to let Claude Co-work loose on a copy of my vault to see what it could do for me, and to retrofit my homespun metadata to real Properties. I am inspired by your example to have it go further and deeper. I know for sure, for instance, that I’ve often omitted linking to a person at first mention in a note. Actually these PNs are often a sort of crossroads, rather than holding any sort of biographical information about the person.

Where I have most friction is that I write about medieval and renaissance poetry. There is no ‘one source of truth’ about what a text means, as this keeps shifting depending on the context of my thinking. You will be able to relate, I am sure, with your art historical work. So I also have a large DEVONthink repository with primary and secondary work (often annotated); and a large library of real books. Obsidian is an appendage to these things, a structuring mechanism, and yet, the real magic of the thinking and the writing doesn’t always happen inside of it, if you know what I mean. The notion that you just plonk your atomic notes into a Zettelkasten and out comes your writing seems to me one of the great fallacies of the PKM movements. Thinking is just as hard as it always has been!

But Obsidian is a great place to outline projects, compile reading lists, take reading notes and concept notes (my RNs respect the flow of argument of any one source; my CN synchronise by concept/theme/idea). I’ve dallied with visual notetaking, e.g. Canvas, but with varying success.

Thanks again.

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I’ve tried all these expect for Craft and Notion. I used Obsidian for a few years but grew tired of its….macOSlessness. What made you drop Notion? I’m thinking about giving it a try, particularly for projects that require collaboration with teammates.

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I get around this by having more than one vault. My “glossary” vault is completely independent of my “concept” vault: they’re centered around the same subject matter, but have different purposes, so I keep them separate. I also have a separate vault for task management and purely administrative matters.

For me at least, Obsidian is something I work with, not in. I suspect that’s because I was doing graduate work when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we did everything with notecards in longhand.

Just curious: what language(s) are the works you study written in? My graduate work was in English literature, although the furthest back I was able to go without relying on a translation was the Gawain poet.

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One of the things I love about Obsidian is being able to work with my notes in different apps. I variously open my vaults in Obsidian itself, DEVONthink, Typora, and, if I’m working in them with Claude, VS Code.

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I tried it 6 years ago. When I opened the attachments inside a note, a web viewer popup with links that everyone can see the contents without any permission when they get those links. I asked customer support and they said this would last for 24 hours.

I thought as a productivity app everything inside should be absolutely private so that third-party was impossible to access. I left mostly because I couldn’t accept such security design, partly because I felt like I was building a digital garden rather than making my work and life better.

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I tried many and settled with DEVONthink.

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Yes – mostly Middle English, Older Scots, and more (early) modern varieties of English. Plus some Latin which I am finding hard! Mind you, the Gawain poet isn’t for the faint of heart – if not a translation, then a glossary is pretty indispensable. I might be teaching that poem again come the next semester, it’s wonderful.

Blockquote
Obsidian is something I work with , not in .

Point taken, and maybe it’s semantics – but I like ‘working with’.

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Now I’m confused. My vault lives in a folder on iCloud in order to access it across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Links can be internal to other notes or external to other sites. Who are these “everyone” that can see the contents of your file structure, and how?

AFAIK, vaults live either on a local drive or on a cloud connected drive. You manage access like you would any other folder, right?

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I am referring to his question of what made me drop Notion and so I am talking about Notion.

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Ah, OK - now get it!

Thanks!

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If you can read the Gawain poet without a translation you deserve kudos. That’s half-way to reading Beowulf without a translation.

And I still do hand written notes on cards.

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I’ve used Obsidian regularly since it first arrived on the scene, having used Dynalist from the same duo for years before that. I have a comfortable set up, two main vaults, and some built in reminders to show me what I was writing about a year ago and two years. I enjoy the Obsidian clipper. I enjoy opening linked websites in new tabs. I enjoy my configuration of the Prism dark mode theme. I just enjoy spending time with such a clever app.

Also, I jettisoned all interest in zettlekasten, PKM, PARA or any of the other must-have trendy approaches that seem engineered to create stress instead of value. (As well as selling expensive courses, videos, books, field guides, or whatever.) I just do what I want, in peace.

Katie

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I did need to keep a glossary handy and it sure was harder than Chaucer! Our professor spent the first couple of classes walking us through some of the key features of that particular dialect of Middle English, which helped a lot. He also had us read passages aloud, which made us see the point of struggling with the original. I did take a semester of Old English, but let’s just say it took me longer than it should have to get through The Wife’s Lament, much less Beowulf.

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“…Also, I jettisoned all interest in zettlekasten, PKM, PARA or any of the other must-have trendy approaches that seem engineered to create stress instead of value. (As well as selling expensive courses, videos, books, field guides, or whatever.) I just do what I want, in peace…”

Thanks, I needed that. I thought I was the only one!

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No, I’m pretty much doiong now what I did with HyperCard, except it’s a small, local, hand-coded HTML site.

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