Obsidian — notes and a personal knowledge base

Obsidian is a program for creating notes and managing a personal knowledge base. It lets you not only save information but also link separate notes together, forming a system of interconnected ideas.

The program positions itself as a “second brain” — a space for storing and organizing knowledge.

Obsidian is free for personal use, including access to plugins and the API. No registration or account creation is needed to start. Commercial use is listed as paid in the original version of the article.

Obsidian can be used for:

• visualizing links between ideas;
• creating a personal knowledge base in a wiki format;
• collecting notes and materials on topics you study;
• organizing records and resources for regular meetings and projects.

How Obsidian helps with notes

Obsidian suits different tasks: from keeping to-do lists, diary entries and recording brainstorm results to working with complex texts and research materials.

The program works with notes in a standard text format. You can create direct links between them or use tags to mark connections.

This is especially useful when working with large volumes of information, when you need to compare different ideas and research viewpoints.

Obsidian also lets you view links between notes as a graph. Such visualization helps see how separate materials relate to each other.

The program’s interface can be customized for your own tasks. Different themes, changing the layout of windows and organizing the workspace are available — from minimalist to rich in tools.

In addition, Obsidian works offline. The user controls where files are located and stored.

Backlinks and link visualization help find new relationships between ideas, structure the information you are studying better and use the accumulated materials when creating content.

Obsidian as a Markdown editor

Obsidian saves notes as ordinary Markdown files that can be stored locally.

This approach lets you work with text files without being tied to a special app format.

The main feature of Obsidian is that Markdown files can not only be opened and edited but also linked to each other. As a result a network of interconnected notes is formed.

The initial setup of the program, according to the original description, takes less than ten minutes and is done in a few steps.

Advantages of Obsidian

One of the main advantages of Obsidian is the use of local Markdown files. Unlike apps with closed storage formats, here notes remain ordinary text documents.

Other features of the program:

• Encryption. A paid end-to-end encryption option is provided.
• Synchronization. Local files can be used with version control systems or synchronized through cloud services. Obsidian also offers its own paid sync.
• Plugins. The program’s functionality is extended with additional tools.
• Calendars and kanban boards. Plugins let you organize notes by date and manage tasks in a board format.
• Working with data. Add-ons help you regularly return to learning materials, access metadata and build charts.

So Obsidian combines a simple text editor with tools for organizing knowledge. The chance to link notes, customize the interface and extend functionality makes it a flexible tool for working with information.