How I use Obsidian (2023) | Hacker News Reader

How I use Obsidian (2023)

stephango.com

203 pointshisamafahri94 comments

Just for context, Steph Ango is the CEO of Obsidian. His approach to notetaking in his own app made the rounds in the PKM (personal knowledge management) community for how _counterintuitive_ it was.

He eschews a lot of the common wisdom pushed by influencers in this space who tout "the one true way™" to stay organized. File splattered in the root? Sure. Unresolved links to notes that don't exist and probably never will? Why not! Blank daily notes that aren't carefully manicured journal tomes? Heck yeah.

His point is "perfect is the enemy of good." You could carefully curate and perfect your pkm...or you could have a life.

Half of my tasks are in my people folder and half my people are in my tasks folder and it all works out fine in Obsidian.

I think this is my favourite thing about obsidian, it feels so unproscriptive. I have a pretty well thought out folder structure because this is how ive always managed my documents, but every new note goes in a junkyard folder to get sorted if I ever come back to it again. I sometimes use backlinks, but this is generally localised within project folders. I enjoy seeing everyone elses equally chaotic way of using it.

I feel like organization it's not as important now with search in computers. Like you can search anything also there is tags.

Search becomes useless if you drown in results. A good organization should assist in shortening paths, but if you start the path manually or through a search doesn't matter much.

But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N?

Using a hybrid of traditional and semantic is so trivial to implement these days that I think we have past the point of needing good organization.

> But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N?

Maybe if you are Google, having well paid teams and excessive data on what people with your profile are usually searching at the moment. Obsidian is lacking all this, so the search-quality is very depending on the amount of files and results.

The basic search one gets out of the box is closer to regex matching than search. IMHO something like omnisearch should be sherlocked next.

People who do lots of work and ship lots of projects tend to have a certain level of mess in their workshops. Creation is repeated cycles of trial, play, reflection and tidying.

For anyone thinking about trying out Obsidian, here are some problems I have solved with it:

- Remembering where I met someone, what we talked about and then connecting up with them at a later date. My ability to remember names is easily 10x because of obsidian.

- Seeing who in my family's birthday is coming up soon and their address so I can send them a card.

- Graphing how far I've run for each day/week and any quick training notes.

- Showing me friend's restaurant suggestions on a map when I've got a free evening and I want to try something new.

And all of this stored locally and synced onto many devices.

If you're curious I highly recommend starting simple. Don't worry about plugins, just write a quick daily note every day about the information that is important to you. When you feel like you're outgrowing that, adopt a structure that fits you and solves your problems.

How do you use it to remember names?

Not the OP, but I've got a "Names to remember" evergreen note in my Reference folder. Within it, I have a few headings (e.g. neighbours, or locations), and a bullet point for each person, with context that will trigger the memory. That might sound like there's a lot of structure, but it's really the act of writing it down in the first place that helps me remember.

It'd be cool to write a little script that dumps them out into an Anki deck for spaced repetition.

There's plugins for that: https://obsidian.md/plugins?search=anki

I use Obsidian for the same purpose as the sister comment. I have a long old note where I add the name and a minor info for new acquaintances. Mine is charavterised by the environment of acquaintance, i.e Work/Town/Rave/Hobby/Online. Rarely need to refer back once ive written down.

I have stub notes for people I've met, and link to them in the journal section of my daily note when I've met them; I can then check the backlinks on that person's note when I want to check where I've seen them before.

I make a new card in a folder called People whenever I meet someone. Then I add information like email address, phone number, connections to other people when relevant.

I find engaging like this helps my memory already on its own, but if I'm ever really stuck with a name I just take a quick look at my phone. The person is usually linked to the event where I first met them or similar.

how do you do graphing/maps? I'm guessing it's some plugins?

if you mean "graphs" as in "plots", you can just use matplotlib with some Markdown parser. the Templates plugin (built-in) helps maintaining cohesive structure that helps both parsing and human comprehension.

for maps, there is an Obsidian Maps plugin. recent addition, built-in as well. I personally don't use it much, but I know the kind of person who would be very happy about it!

and then there is an up-and-coming Obsidian CLI, which is in paid beta. the license is cheap, around $25 for forever access to current and future betas, but it's optional.

I use the Tracker plugin [1] to make charts of things like running distances etc.

For maps, I have a folder called Places and each markdown file in there is a place. I add latitude and longitude to the frontmatter and then display them on a map.

[1] https://github.com/pyrochlore/obsidian-tracker

I've been using obsidian for about 3 years now and the only thing I've used are daily notes. I'm unsure where I should go from that.

The problem is there's "mess" and then there's mess, and it's nontrivial to distinguish the two.

Ultimately, it comes down to: can you find something you're looking for? For most people, this will require some amount of organization as they will not be able to remember the location of every individual thing, but what this organization looks like may seem inscrutable to someone else.

Many thanks to Obsidian for reinforcing the strength of file-over-apps in daily computer use. Consider this as a baseline for your entire setup, and you will spend much less energy fussing over finding the optimal programs, operating systems, or ecosystems. Just manage your files, and everything else can come and go.

I ~like~ love Obsidian. I also like Steph Ango and his philosophies. In fact, a lot of his ideas shaped and improved mine. His approach is opinionated.

So pick the good ones you like and make your own.

For instance, I’m pretty well-organized, and I like it that way. This leads me to native organizations using folders and some patterns that I learnt aloong the way. Nothing more complicated. One day, if I have to walk off Obsidian, I can, and I will still know where things are.

Right now, my organization is a loose combo of PARA[1] and Johnny Decimal.[2]

Obsidian is another tool; it just happens to be one hell of a good tool.

1. https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/

2. https://johnnydecimal.com

The PKM pipeline is :

Discovering PM solutions upon entering the workforce and deciding to use them for your personal life.

Shortcomings drive you to discover PKM software like Notion and Obsidian.

Picking either one or the other.

Switching from Notion to Obsidian or vice versa.

Starting to write your own PKM.

There is no class of software more entropic because everyone's requirements are so specific to the individual.

Only todo/task apps have the same churn.

Good point, I overlooked this because the overlap is huge.

I use Emacs/org-mode to do the same and much more, without tying myself to specific third parties, but the point remains valid and largely ignored by most until recently: the heart of our information is plain text with potential binary attachments, and managing it as freely as possible, with search&narrow access and the ability to turn it into hypertext, to compute inside text etc is essential to "unlocking" or truly harnessing the power of the desktop computing. This model of personal computing has been denied for ages due to commercial interests in selling countless walled gardens that do only one thing, "UNIX-style", but without the IPC of the Unix CLI.

Obsidian is very flexible, and what a lot of these "how I use Obsidian" tutorials miss is to give a reason why the person is actually using it the way they are using it. Seems like this guy is using it mostly to store meeting notes or journaling. Of the many influencery Obsidian tutorials on Youtube, 99% of them seem to be using it to keep notes for creating Obsidian tutorials.

Would be interesting to have differing perspectives from people with different problems and how they use it for those cases.

I manage project documentation for work + personal projects using it. So I tend to have one folder per project with very little linking across folders. Then I have a personal folder that contains all non work stuff with varying degrees of structure, then a junkyard folder on the root where new notes that dont currently have an obvious category go, and if i come back to them they get sorted.

You don't think those exist? Obsidian forum has a lot of individual use-cases and more than a couple academics. erazlogo's public vault was as influential to me on how I use it as K. Healy's exposition of his use of R in emacs.

It’s great for sheet music and for DnD DMing. I also use it store all things I write. I don’t use links though, I’m a barbarian who uses folders and canvases

Don’t over complicate this everyone.

This is the best file-explorer GUI ever made hands down.

All your files map 1-to-1 with the OS filesystem. No double clicking files over and over again. No getting lost in endless unsorted directories. Launch any file extension type straight from the same explorer GUI.

I use this app less as a second brain and more as a personal document vault. (Markdown is ugly sorry about it) I get lots of pdf’s and such so it’s all in one place.

Cool, end of speech. Peace out

> This is the best file-explorer GUI ever made hands down.

besides norton commander and its clones

I use Calibre to maintain my PDFs. I've even got my taxes in there, but have been thinking recently that they don't belong in a library and probably should just be printed and stored with other important things like passports and birth certificates.

But every PDF I download, ebook, academic article, it goes in Calibre and out of my Downloads path.

I didn't know that Obsidian worked that cleanly; I occasionally flirt with it but have been using https://zim-wiki.org for about a decade longer, so my muscle memory is there. I keep looking for reasons to switch but so far nothing yet has done that?

Any good filemanager is better. Out of the box, it's also very lacking in necessary abilities. There are also some errors around the edges, like hiding vault-internal links, which makes it a bit questionable for good filehandling.

But sure, when all you have are supported filetypes, then it can be useful.

I tried Obsidian to build a “second brain”. But eventually just reverted back to notes on my iPad (handwritten) and Vim (markdown) for typed notes.

I actually think Obsidian is a great tool, but I just need something as low friction as possible to quickly jolt something down. Vim and Goodnotes does the trick for me.

Same, all projects get a .notes folder where plain text goes. Home directory gets a .notes folder also. It helps to have good command over text based search tools.

There was an exception though, where text just didn't cut it, which was a brief period where I was importing vehicles from Japan and needed lots of images, documents and comparisons up on a big digital whiteboard. I used LogSeq for that.

Obsidian is amazing on my desktop environments but I shared the same sentiment with you, on mobile I use Apple Notes and transpose to Obsidian if its worth doing so...

I like the desktop app, but the android app is such ass. It's bad enough that I wonder why they even bother.

Similar to mine. I use Apple Notes for quick, ephemeral notes and for Shared Family Notes. If they are the ones that are more important, they go into the plain-text notes in the Obsidian folder.

The Notes folder(s) is sync with a Cloud Service. So, I use iA Writer[1] (a brilliant Notes App) to have a pleasant writing experience on other mobile devices. They are just Markdown, so I can open them in any Notes App that supports Markdown. I paid for iA Writer once, like 10+ years ago.

1. https://ia.net/writer

This is a project that's always on my mind that I never take the time to flesh out. I can't put my finger on the scope. I don't know if I want a full, Johnny Decimaled PKM platform for my entire life, or topical, dense information about things that interest me.

I tried it several times and the one thing that got it to stick for me was having a structure to the markdown. I have an AST parser for markdown body grammar and validate the frontmatter. The structure helps me keep things sane and organized because my brain is all over the place. Beyond that, unlike OP I attach these schemas to folders in my vault per schema.

I use yellow legal pads and 4x6" notecards... and probably ship more substantive writing than 96% of people on the planet.

The 4% that are more substantive writers than you dont waste their time with complex industrial technology like note pads and flashcards. The weakness stemming from your addiction to modern tools shows even in your short comment.

How I use Obsidian

It’s a truly remarkable app you and team have built. I’m going to use the term _simple_ but please understand that that’s high praise.

To me, obsidian is a thought-taking app, not a notetaking app. Thoughts are amorphous and incomplete no matter how much you embellish them. They don’t belong in only one place with only one label or pinned to only one date. They reach out to each other. Merge and split. They sit inside each other sometimes.

Obsidian gets that. It offers _just enough_ structure and automation and operating system (of a kind) to force the binary file system on some silicon to work like our brains do...and not the other way around.

Hacker news strips 'how' from the beginning of submission titles. It can be readded (and seems like it was)

I tried Obsidian a couple of years ago when all those „Hack your brain with Obsidian“ videos were flooding YouTube, I even had a subscription.

Turns out my brain is beyond saving, while the program was pretty neat, having to have an extra window open was just beyond my attention span. Now I use a notebook, it is chaotic and has coffee strains but I actually use it.

ever since I first heard about Obsidian, the vibe I get is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Every use case I get pitched, there's a better solution, or it's a "problem" that doesn't need to be solved.

If you aren't a researcher in a field, why do you need personal knowledge management? Even when I learn a subject, I find just...taking a flat note file to be way better than all these Zettelkasten stuffs. It all feels very pomodoro to me. It is useful for some people, but influencers have hyped it up into the Grand Unified Solution.

Same with mind mapping. I don't see the benefit. Maybe being AuDHD has something to do with it? Like...if it's an area I want more expertise, I'm already hyperfocused on it and remember everything. If I don't want expertise, I don't need PKM. I keep trying to use them, but it feels superfluous. Like I never have to refer back to it.

It's literally just a folder of markdown notes with a handy search and file list if that's what you want it to be. That's all I use it for. I think the hyper-organisation stuff is more of a hobby. It's not about productivity it's enjoyable for its own ends.

> Maybe being AuDHD has something to do with it

I used to live my entire life in emacs org-mode. My memory is shit, if I don’t have a reminder of a task I need to do it probably won’t get done. If someone asks me “hey, do you remember that thing we talked about in that meeting last week?” the answer will be “no, not at all”. If I go “damn, what was that recipe for those pork chops I made last month that were really good?” I will draw a complete blank about what even made them special, but I’ll be disappointed because they were good.

I miss org-mode but as my life became more mobile-phone-centric, it stopped working for me. I ultimately ended up replacing it with two things: Todoist for task management and Obsidian for notetaking.

Maybe the difference is that I use Obsidian for basically two things: keeping track of things that have happened (meeting notes, design decisions, debug sessions) and for things that are a work in progress (software projects at work and for fun, home renovation plans, things that temporally are going to evaporate from my brain before they’re done). It’s a tool that lets me remember what I was talking to people about last week, and a tool for picking up the project I was working on last month. And it syncs great to my phone and iPad Pro for when I’m out of the house.

I haven’t ever gotten to appreciate Obsidian’s task management stuff but Todoist tickles my brain just right for that.

For me as a engineering manager

I keep a weekly folder where I toss notes in My todo list exists here my performance log for employees

I've been using Cursor / Claude Code to open my Vault folder, or a sub-folder in the vault; since Obsidian is stored in .MD files you can chat with your LLM about whatever info is in there. I used this to review and prepare for interviews, and it was extremely effective in helping me land my new job.

Curious how people here are using obsidian when taking notes during meetings in the context of AI note taker. I find myself incapable of using features like links as I'm interacting with say a client. I've found AI note takers to be really powerful to help free my mind during meetings though.

Either someone or I, of course, turn on a Note Taker that can transcribe the meeting notes. That file can go into Obsidian.

Unfortunately, most people don’t refer back to it and would wait for someone to do it as part of the spec or project tasks assigned by the Project Manager.

However, I love taking notes in meetings using graphs, arrows, boxes with text, etc. Sometimes, I use an iPad with the Pencil, but I prefer a pen on Paper. This one is usually the one that gets shared, and people seem to like it for understanding the context or for referring back to what they heard during meetings in a simpler, yet faster/easier way.

My methods are inspired by Dan Roam’s Books. I browse/re-read the books pretty often. https://www.danroam.comhe

Thank you for that reference, that's really cool. I started watching his napkin academy series right now. So plenty of thanks!

I just realized the website referenced has a spelling error. For the record/archive, it should be https://www.danroam.com

Back when I was looking for a new PKM system, I remember a "competitor" (now irrelevant) of obsidian making fun via Quote tweet of the Files over app manifesto, saying something like "nobody cares about the way the notes are stored". Ironically, that mean-spirited tweet made me discover Obsidian, and I've adopted it since then as I strongly agree with the philosophy of sovereignty over the content by them being plain files.

I do care about how files are stored, felt trapped with OneNote proprietary format, and seeing what happens to Evernote, now care even more.

More recently, Andrej Karparthy succinctly captured what's great about Obsidian: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456

And with the new LLM powered, I find having tight control over files to be extremely powerful

Thank you kepano!

>And with the new LLM powered

The what now? Did I miss an update

Missed a word: LLM powered tools (CLIs, etc.) that can work over files easily. Nothing in Obsidian itself, though I'm sure some nice plugins will exist

oh good, thank you!

My PKM is writing in Org Mode and never using any Org Mode features to look things up.

FYI, firing up Claude Code or Codex inside your Obsidian repo location is a game-changer

Can you expand on your usage this way? Still haven't picked on that.

Well, it has helped me reorganize my notes and add appropriate links based on context (which AI is good at, of course) since I tend to still use it like a glorified notepad (which it's also good at, but really doesn't take much advantage of it)

You can also use it to ask questions like "which of my business ideas might have legs?"

I ended up copying Steph's layouts, I added some Github actions that pipe out files that have specific tags in them and create blog posts in another repo. It works very well for me.

Since it is just markdown files and a tiny bit of JSON meta data, it’s trivial to use Obsidian as the GUI for a static site generator. I have some thin ruby scripts that compile my notebook to HTML and upload to my blog via SSH. I removed my previous static site generator library and just use simple markdown rendering libs now. https://rickcarlino.com/notes/

I use the app for two things mainly: DnD DMing and sheet music. I think it’s deep but I mostly just make canvases and copy paste in images and then move those around to a useful shape. I put in tables, text, images, and all on canvases. I don’t use links really, I probably should but I use the known Folder structure to get to whichever canvas I’m working on.

Having tried different systems since the days of Evernote, the _only_ thing that is consistently useful like obsidian is... emailing myself whatever info I have to look up later. I even used to do this for reminders.

Google search in Gmail continues to just work.

But also I want something better than email, so I've been a happy obsidian user for a while now.

Love it. I try to follow an absolutely minimal process. Even more minimal than this.

I even built my own “second brain” tool to make my own writing absolutely frictionless.

A dump of all files in one folder is the only thing that keeps me sane. I do not want to sort.

I Use Workflowy. The features it adds over plain text/markdown are worth the slight added complexity. I wish it was cheaper and supported tables, but I'll never go back to non-outlined notes.

This was me until I discovered Logseq. I still use Workflowy to collaborate with others, but combining notes and todos with a powerful query system is what makes Logseq my goto note and todo management tool.

I tried Notion, Obsidian, and various other note taking tools before I came to accept that I am simply not a note taking person. I just don't see the value in it I suppose.

More like a remembering things person? I envy that!

> I avoid folders because many of my entries belong to more than one area of thought

This is the reason why I find Trilium Notes so liberating, where one note can have many parents.

When obsidian can allow for a dynalist-style configuration, please tell me.

Why the downvotes? Dynalist is from the same creators as Obsidian. If they didn't open source it, I expect them to integrate into Obsidian eventually. Until then obsidian will continue to be my 30tons markdown editor [0].

0: https://github.com/ronikbhaskar/obsidian-editor

I use Obsidian, but would never use someone else's Vault template; as these are script files, you neverknow what can be in there without reviewing this. Just a friendly reminder to be cautious

This guy is the CEO of obsidian so I would trust him imo

While I know this, that was not the point. Kepano Everyone makes mistakes... And this argument even normalizes the behavior to run install scripts as root when a CEO says it?

How does it compare to notion

offline first, so much faster, no terrible pricing model. Hugely better in my opinion

No databases, views, nested pages, automations, or collaboration. It’s a flat list of files with folders. You can supplement these features with plugins but it’s not the same. Notion is objectively more powerful but if you care about data ownership or minimalism you might prefer Obsidian

Views were added in Obsidian 1.9 (Aug 2025)

https://help.obsidian.md/bases

Collaboration was added in Obsidian 0.14 (May 2022)

https://help.obsidian.md/sync/collaborate

I really want to like obsidian but it’s just unusable (for me)

So I built my own thats a bit more lightweight. Think nvalt meets markdown. thats native, iOS and Mac with I cloud sync, and open source.

Check it out if it sounds interesting!

iOS app is still in review ;(

https://hashy.ink/

> a bit more lightweight

I don't want to be overly negative, but no plugins are mandatory, there's no "47 step setup guide" unless you want to heavily customize.

And as far as I can tell you mostly replaced some of the weight with AI?

AI "Search Notes", "Organize Notes", "List and filter, tags", "Clean up notes"

I guess I just see this as weight in a different area? You've pushed a lot of the weight and plugins to cloud-based AI?

I am, on principle, very much a fan of "native app, not another Electron view".

It’s a BYOK so the ai is optional. (And if you really don’t want it it’s a package in the open source app that can easily be pulled out) Since it’s markdown and on filesystem you can just edit your notes with Claude code if you want similar to obsidian.

By lightweight I mean it’s not a super heavy and bloated electron app on desktop and a slow and janky capacitor app on mobile that takes 10 seconds to launch and that the project can be greppable in a day to build on

I appreciate the feedback - being a bit more modularized like this makes more sense!

And yeah, if you're referring to the whole Electron stuff there, I entirely agree!

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