Obsidian- For note taking

    Obsidian is a note taking tool as well as an oraganizer. Using obsidian you can create notes using its markdown editor and organize them into folders and subfolders. It revolutionize the way we use notes for studying, researching and you name it.. Considering how fuzzy our notes on different subjects can gets , it is required to have a one place where we can save our notes.Obsididian is one of the many note organizing softwares. Unlike many in Obsidian you  don't worry about  cloud storage getting filled!! because files are stored in local directory. Which means the files are not going anywhere, its completely your property.

Obsidian is available in windows, Linux and mac. You can start by installing the software, for personal use obsidian is completely free.

You can download using this link https://obsidian.md/

           

In obsidian you can have multiple vaults. Each vaults are different directories and also they are not interlinked and can have different settings also. You can switch between vaults easily. As soon as you either open an existing vault or create a new vault you can start with your setting up your notes. There will be already a help vault available, In that you can get familiar with obsidian features. I recommend everyone to  read it before using. It comes really handy.

Walk through

In the left pane there is file explorer, Search and various plugins . The file explorer contains all the folders, subfolders and files sorted by alphabetically and we can also the change the sort order. Search feature can track contents inside all the file or the current file only. There is a hotkey for both search features.  There are 2 views available for a file, one is where you can edit and one is the preview of the text file. So the synataxes will not be seen in the preview window. We can toggle between the views by "ctrl+E". It is possible to split the screen horizontally and vertically. This comes really handy when one is in editing view and other in preview. Throughout the articles i will be using this split screen feature.There is a  backlink feature in the right pane. Back link will direct to the file from the internal links in this files are used.

Basic note taking

The note taking in obsidian is based on markdown. Every files are markdown files. Unlike word or another notes in Obsidian we have to use syntaxes to format the text. If you are not familiar with such a way of note taking don't worry. Its easy to learn and use and much less complicated than Word.

Lets get familiar some basic text formatting.

Use "#" before a text to make it heading 1

Use"##" before to make it heading 2

and "###" for heading 3 and likewise as much heading as you want.

Type  text between two "*" to make it italic and between two "**" to make it bold and we can use the hotkeys available. Also we can combine both bold and italic.To find the hotkey assigned to a feature look in the setting also there is a command pallate where you find the hotkeys also the commands. Press ctrl+E for opening command pallate.

Eg:  

Italic:	*Hello*	_Hello_
Bold :	**Hello**	__Hello__
Bold and italic:	***Hello***	___Hello___

The underscore can be used instead of "*".

One another feature is Text highlighting ,

Type the text between two "==" for highlighting.

Eg: ==Hello==

Lists

We can create lists and To-do lists 

Just type "-" before the text and enter a space and for numbered list enter "1. " or "2."...

Eg:

- Hello 1	1. Hello1
- Hello 2	2. Hello2

 One of the best feature is the ease of creating To- do list,

It helps in keeping the tasks checked. To create a to- do list,

Type "- []" before the text  for unchecked items 

Type "- [x]" for checked items

Tables  

You can create tables by assembling a list of words and dividing them with hyphens `-` (for the first row), and then separating each column with a pipe `|`.

(in the above screenshot screen is split horizontally)

Slides

It came to be a surprise. We can actually create a slide and then also view the slides as presentation. Thats a really awesome feature.

To use it we have to enable slides plugin in the settings. Separate slides by 3 hyphens"---", to view the slides click start presentation option .

Eg: This is just one slide

---

## Hello

- Hello1
- Hello2
- Hello3

---

This is a screenshot of a slide show.

Attachments

You can insert images(png, jpg, jpeg), PDF and audio files(mp3, webm, wav, m4a, ogg, 3gp, flac). There is a plugin to recording audio. The attachments can be stored in a single folder, a default folder can be set for inserting all files can be inserted by dragging in the file or by paste or by pasting it in the vault directory. We can access the attachments using internal links. Links are the most important feature of obsidian.Files in the same vault can be accessed by typing "[[]]", then an popup will show where you can find the attachments or even any headers in any files.

We can just create a link by "[[File name]]" or create embedded link by"![[file name]]", adding an exclamatory mark before it. The name displayed can be changed by"[[internal link|name]]".

You can embed all links except a PDF. Also we can open the files in default application, this is really useful for PDF files, even though obsidian has a default PDF viewer i prefer comfort of other pdf viewer. 

External links can be pasted inside "()". and the name of the link cab be changed by "[ name ](link)".

Graph view

In graph view we can see the connection between various files. I never had any use with this particular feature, but to be franks it looks so cool. Sometimes the most impressing features found to be not so useful. Still some of you found it to be useful.

Further editing

    The text editing features in the obsidian are not much. But you can edit more by editing the css file. you can open the obsidian.css file by "ctrl+shift+I". I dont know much about this and i dont know how to edit css file. But i thought someway find this helpful.

Portability

You might want to access the files in various devices. Even though local directory is safe and secure portability is very low compared to when we use it in cloud storage. What i do is i Place the local directory in one drive folder. The files automatically gets uploaded and since the one drive folder is like any other folder on your system, no worry about its security either. You just need a markdown file viewer or obsidian itself to view the file from other locations. 

Obsidian has plenty more features and tweaks available. You can search in the help vault or you can comment here any questions.