Taking Notes

Information Storage

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I mentioned in a previous post that I started seeing the value of documentation thanks to the great and fantastic Arch Wiki . It truly did save my life (and my laptop’s) multiple times across my learning journey. So while I broadened my horizons, I made sure to try my best to take note of anything I thought would be useful. Unfortunately, it was a bit too messy to navigate and get any sort of knowledge form. So, I decided to take a look at some ways to get everything organized so that I could (eventually) condense it into some useful documentation. And that’s when I found Obsidian.

Let me preface this by saying that I am not going to go through any of the philosophies behind note-taking, like Zettelkasten or anything like that. Not because I don’t think they’re useful, but mainly because I don’t know enough or have enough experience to be able to talk about it. So today, we will go through what’s in my Obsidian vault, and how I got it set up.

To the Nether!

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So what is Obsidian? A note taking app. Done. Thanks for attending my TED talk. Jk (about the TED talk, not the note taking). But yes, it’s a simple note taking app with some niceties that I like to take advantage of. The main thing I like about Obsidian is the fact that it is basically just a text editor that uses markdown. No proprietary bs, completely local. Need it in another device? Backup the entire folder (they call them vaults here. Much cooler) to Google Drive or a USB drive, grab some glue and just paste it onto wherever you need it. Oh, and it’s free.

For those who don’t know, markdown is basically a way to write text that can be easily converted to HTML. Fun fact, the contents of this entire website is written in markdown (we can cover that another time). But basically, it also means that you can format all your content (tables, images, links, etc.) to look good in Obsidian, and if for whatever reason you want to move to another app, it would most likely support markdown as well. Boom. Perfectly formatted notes. If you want to know more, check it out here .

Actually covering Obsidian

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So for some context, the above is basically what a normal Obsidian note would look like (ignore the other garbage on the left). As you can see, we have a title and some content. I don’t think Obsidian looks like this by default, so lets quickly skim through the actual contents in the markdown format and go from there.

---
index:
  - "[[../Indexes/Obsidian|Obsidian]]"
  - "[[../Indexes/Plugins|Plugins]]"
tags:
  - Obsidian
  - Plugins
---

# Personalized Productivity with Obsidian Plugins

The [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzi1o-BH6QQ) is about...

So you can see that we have some properties at the top (index, and tags) along with the rest of the content. The properties are particularly important for me because I actually use it to navigate my vault. If you have taken notes before you would have either:

1. Created a bunch of folders and subfolders to categorize and organize your notes
2. Put them all in one folder and just searched for them

Neither off these are particularly great options. The first option is not only a pain to maintain, but it also only works if each note you take belongs to exactly one category. Where do notes that don’t have a category go? If I had some notes on a course on programming stuff when I have folders for “Learning” and “Programming”? The second option is basically just a mess to navigate. So how do I get around this? With tags! And better yet, indexes as well.

How my mess is organized

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So here, you can see I have some folders. We are going to ignore the “BMO” folder as it is specific for a plugin that I occasionally use. So here’s a quick rundown of the folders:

Hopefully, the way my notes are structured makes sense. A couple of quick FAQs:

Q: Why separate folders for attachments and diagrams?

Attachments are for screenshots that I can easily just move to another app. Diagrams use something called Mermaid to generate diagrams from text, so I keep them separate so that I can convert them to images later if I need to. Separating them will help if that ever happens.

Q: What are Indexes?

Basically the same thing as tags, but I also use them so that I have a dedicated place to see all the notes that I have for a specific topic. It also has the space to allow me to also link other related index notes together. Here’s what the actual index note looks like.

My Settings

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Obsidian has a lot of community plugins that you can install to enhance your experience. This ranges from simple things like relative line numbers and calendar views, to more complex things like Kanban Boards and even Excalidraw . This section will only cover the default settings I have. These are taken directly from my vault (fun fact, your settings are stored in the vault as well).

// app.json
{
  "attachmentFolderPath": "Attachments",
  "alwaysUpdateLinks": true,
  "newFileLocation": "folder",
  "newFileFolderPath": "Notes",
  "showInlineTitle": false,
  "newLinkFormat": "relative",
  "useMarkdownLinks": true,
  "showUnsupportedFiles": true,
  "vimMode": true,
  "showLineNumber": true
}

For core plugins (these are extra plugins that come with Obsidian), I have the following enabled:

• Backlinks
• Command Palette
• Graph View (looks cool)
• Properties view
• Slash commands
• Templates

There are a few more core plugins (and WAY MORE community plugins) you can check out, but this should be enough to get you started if you had no idea how to start.

Off to find your own config

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I know I didn’t really cover everything there is to know about even my own configuration, but the aim of this post is to give you a quick overview of some of the things that I found to be the most important for my note taking experience. Yes the other stuff is extra fancy and can be very helpful in specific cases, but just the settings above should be more than enough to get you on your way to taking notes in a nice and organized way. And to sort of bring the point home, here’s a screenshot of another note that I have in my vault that hopefully shows how much better it gets once you do decide to get your toes wet.