Explain to me Markdown and Obsidian for taking notes or doing anything else. Also word processing preferences

In My Humble Opinion
1

Continuing the discussion from Anyone write in shorthand (e.g. taking notes at meetings)?:

Wiki: Obsidian (software) - Wikipedia

Obsidian is a personal knowledge base and note-taking software application that operates on Markdown files. It allows users to make internal links for notes and then to visualize the connections as a graph. It is designed to help users organize and structure their thoughts and knowledge in a flexible, non-linear way. The software is free for personal use, with paid commercial licenses available.

I can understand not wanting to do everything in Word, including jotting down notes or organizing one’s thoughts. In addition to Word, I use LibreOffice Writer, a word processor that doesn’t fight me when I just want to get my work done and Textpad, a text editor which is lightweight and good for coding, stripping out excess formatting, and writing notes. Most use Notepad++ (a solid program, also installed on my compter) for this but I reach for Textpad due to its familiarity. Sometimes I want a lightweight word processor, something situated between LibreOffice and Textpad: for that I edit .rtf files in PolyEdit, last updated in 2010. It gives me bolding, italics, underlining, and cross-outs. Its unicode version is still in beta: I haven’t tried it. I occasionally use other programs, but those are the main ones.

I use Word mostly for its grammar checker.

What would Obsidian do for me? When people use Markdown, they don’t code [u] or [i] by hand, do they? What features of Obsidian do people use the most? What features of Obsidian do people like best? Do people make drafts of web pages with Obsidian/Markdown? Does Obsidian use floating text boxes like OneNote?

2

Markdown is a sorta-standard. There are a dozen+ dialects.

The formatting here on SDMB is about 90% Markdown with some added BBCode for backwards compatibility. One * means italic, two ** means bold, leading blanks or ` or ``` means code format, paragraphs automatically run on until you double-enter, etc. All of that is Markdown.

Here is a Markdown Cheatsheet I use. Most of these items work correctly on SDMB. There are many other cheatsheets & user guides and tutorials out there for other dialects.


I know exactly zero about Obsidian so can offer no help. But as to Markdown, you’re already using it, so the learning curve ought to be small.

3

I’ve been using Obsidian for about a month, but I’ve been writing Markdown for years. I mostly like Obsidian’s ability to organize and cross-link notes. I like that everything’s not buried in a database someplace; they’re just plain text files in directories. Obsidian provides a really nice interface to those files, but I could migrate to something else with zero effort.

Obsidian has menus and configurable keyboard shortcuts for typical formatting, but I usually just type the characters that @LSLGuy showed. Markdown was invented to be easy to write and easy to read, but to enable conversion to things like web pages and PDFs.

If your webpage is mostly text, then typing Markdown and converting is much easier than writing HTML. Tools like MkDocs enable pretty sophisticated end products.

I have no experience with OneNote’s floating text boxes, but I don’t think Obsidian has anything I would describe that way.

4

I think there’s a couple different questions getting bunched together here, maybe?

Markup and Markdown

When you want text that can be bolded, italicized, etc., the programming jargon term for that is “rich text” (as opposed to “plaintext” without any formatting). “Hypertext” – as in “hypertext markup language” (HTML) – is similar, basically rich text + the ability to link to other documents.

HTML is what powers the web, with code like <strong>this is a bold <a href="example.com/blah">link</a></strong>. But that’s kinda hassle to write, right? Which is how we got BBcode like [b]this is a bold [url="example.com/blah]link[/url][/b]. Microsoft Word has its own markup language (a dialect of XML), LibreOffice does too, etc.

But that’s all needlessly complicated. What if you just want a simple way to do basic formatting plus links? That’s the whole idea behind Markdown, replacing overly-complicated markup with simple marks like **this is a bold [link](example.com/blah)**. There, same effect, but much shorter, and easier for humans to write.

That’s all it is. There are various dialects of Markdown, as @LSLGuy mentioned, but that’s really just a technical implementation detail that you don’t really need to worry about unless you’re a programmer.

These days, especially, there are many editors (not just Obsidian, but also Google Docs, Macdown, and a bunch of others) that let you make simple Markdown files without the hand-coding. You just click bold/italic/link/etc. like you would in Word, and it automatically generates the Markdown for you. You can see a simple online one here, with a side-by-side code view and “what you see is what you get (wysiwyg)” view.: Free Online Markdown Editor | WYSIWYG GFM Editor | JekyllPad

WYSIWYG is an old 90s/2000s term for “software that shows you a live preview of your actual output, as you’re typing, rather than making you wonder if your code is right”. These days it’s kind of an obsolete term because most consumer software is WYSIWYG by default.

Different kinds of editors

Editing text can be done by all sorts of different software, but they have different specializations.

Word, LibreOffice, etc. are word processors. They focus on layout, typography, etc. Sure, you can use them to take notes too, but it’s overkill.

Text editors are kind of the opposite of that spectrum. They are good for editing plaintext, but don’t always make formatting easy. Importantly, they usually don’t include any sort of built-in organization, autosave, linking, etc… that’s all up to you to handle, using filenames and folders etc.

In between them are “shitty wannabe word processors” like Wordpad, TextEdit, etc. They’re not really good at anything, and should be avoided entirely, lol. But people historically used them for notes when they didn’t want to deal with the complexity of a full-blown word processor, yet needed something more than a text editor.

But these days, an entire category of note-taking apps exists. Not just Obsidian, but also OneNote, Evernote, Goodnotes, or at the company/enterprise level, things like Clickup, Notion, etc… They can handle basic formatting and linking, but importantly, they also help you organize your notes and keep track of them, and takes care of mundane things like auto-saving, cloud backups, etc. (sometimes) so you don’t accidentally lose thoughts.

Obsidian is just one of those many note-taking apps. Its speciality is in using Markdown, which keeps your notes as simple standard text files on your computer (meaning no database or cloud server needed, and you can easily copy those to a USB drive or whatever). Markdown, being relatively standard, is easily opened and edited by other software too. So there’s a very good chance the notes you write today will still be openable in 20 years.

But if that doesn’t really matter to you, software like OneNote might offer you similar note-taking and organization capabilities, but also automatically take care of cross-device syncing (you can view all your notes on your laptop, phone, desktop, web browser, whatever), as well as easily add drawings, diagrams, math formulas, etc. It’s a great tool for school/college.

All this software all have subtly different features, strengths, and weaknesses. But they focus on making the note-taking experiencing easier, as opposed to document layout and desktop publishing. If want to organize a jumble of thoughts, these tools will work better. If you want to make a nice-looking flyer, they’re probably not the right tool.

5

(As a web developer) Yes, we frequently encounter Markdown on the web. Not just drafts, but often entire websites depend on it. Github is the largest community of computer programmers on the web, and all the communication there is written using “Github Flavored Markdown”, which, like it sounds, is just a variant of Markdown. (Markdown has many dialects, the same way English has many dialects… though Markdown’s are usually a matter of use-case specializations rather than regionalism).

Markdown is also widely used in the “content management system” space as a way for non-coders to easily write rich text to share with the public. Software like Astro (and others) makes it easy to turn markdown files into real webpages; there is a sibling discussion over at Which website building services meet these criteria? - #11 by Reply that briefly discusses this… (edit: but you’re already in that thread, lol)

Anyway, it is especially useful for teams of mixed coding ability; i.e. programmers can set up Astro, but the actual editors/academics/copywriting staff can produce all the content in Markdown.

From a programming/computer parsing perspective, Markdown is dramatically safer and easier to work with than HTML or XML, so it’s a good “common ground” markup language to use for basic documents.

It can. It doesn’t have to. It offers a “Canvas” feature that you can use if you want: Obsidian Canvas - Visualize your ideas

It is saved as a “JSON canvas” file format, which is not Markdown, but another open standard that Obsidian invented for this use case.

6

Awesome post there @Reply. You broke down the issues, gave a great taxonomy, and stayed layman-appropriate throughout. Would that we all could do that every time.

As to this snip …

I mentioned that because one of the frustrations of Markdown as an end user is this or that cheatsheet doesn’t match what this or that messageboard or app actually supports. And apps or boards are terrible about providing a current, fully accurate, fully comprehensive help system for their installed Markdown interpreter.

Everybody does bold & italic and does it the same way. Once you get into tables, internal and external crosslinks, and my personal bugbear, nested outlines, feature support is all over the map.

My comment was meant to warn the OP that if this code they read about here doesn’t work in that app, the problem is very likely not user error. Markdown isn’t a single thing; it’s a collection of mostly overlapping similar things.

That quibble aside, I bow to your excellent explanation.

7

Yeah, that’s a decent description of PolyEdit: it’s a better version of Wordpad. I use it for jotting down notes, when I want a little formatting but not too much. I’ve used OneNote when I’ve had use for floating text boxes, but I never really found it compelling. I suspect I could learn to like Obsidian - it seems like something that’s worth a download for me.

Thanks to all for addressing my jumble of questions.

8

Long rambling response coming.

Ok. I’m a serious Obsidian user.

I am an enterprise app troubleshooter at work and therefore deal with multiple new apps that I never heard of every week (Huh? Something called XYZ app is running in a hospital in Brussels, with half of it on vendor hardware and the other half on our proprietary software? And there’s a segmented network involved?).

I used to handle all of this with a big physical note card index, with all applications and systems indexed. If an issue arose in XYZ app I’d grab the app’s cards from my index before starting on the call.

Now, I create links between topics at the click of a double [[ and have a complex interlinked index of the past few years of my work. Anywhere I happen to work on XYZ app, I can embed a link to that app’s Obsidian page. Anywhere I work on Postgres or SQL Server, I easily embed a link that will take to my cheat sheets for those two DB technologies. Obsidian will show me the linkbacks on those DB pages so I can see everywhere I have seen them.

That kind of spontaneous creation of new pages is what I like. OneNote has too much MS and binary files in it, and not enough linking between them. Obsidian will even show a fancy link graph that you can interact with that shows you all of your pages with nodes, making it obvious which pages are important ones.

In Obsidian, I just want to type a link and have it become a new page out of whole cloth.

One feature I use literally daily is the autogeneration of a daily page. I have a hotkey that automatically creates a fresh page with the day’s date.
On that page I add auto-generating links for whatever is coming up that day. I’ll add:

# 2025-01-19
## [[XYZ App]]
Meeting with vendor to discuss network traces

## [[ABC Project]]
Blah blah blah

Obsidian does not show this text as you see it above; rather, it shows it as it will appear. Only the line you are currently editing shows “how the sausage is made”

Obsidian does Markdown in spades. It is very smooth, and there are tons of plugins, both from Obsidian and from outside contributors, that handle all of the things you might want.

As an example of Obsidian’s smooth implementation of Markdown, consider writing math:

\sum_{x=0}^{\infty}\left(\frac{1}{e^x-\pi}\right)

That can be inlined with single $ or centered in a block using $$ pairs. You don’t see the gobblydegook unless you are right on the line.

Like code syntax coloring? Just enable it, or install a plugin that does it the way you like.

For images, I can paste in an image from Snagit and Obsidian handles putting an image in a designated folder and handling all of the links.
Then, with an image handling plugin, I can click on it and zoom or pan as desired.

Tables are fairly smooth (compared to raw Markdown tables), similar to working with basic tables in Word.

Best of all, it’s nothing more than text, and anything else that can read Markdown can ingest my files if some day Obsidian fails me.

9

Sounds fantastic.

I understand the Obsidian works with its own directory structure. Can you distribute Obsidian directories across your pre-existing file system? Or if not, can you easily create a shortcut to the appropriate Obsidian master file? I’m thinking of a case where an MS folder has a pile of incremented text files for coding and you want to create some documentation files or rough drafts of memos. What’s the best way of organizing such folders?

Also, how well does Markdown port to LaTeX?

Since we’re discussing word processors, I’ll note that while Lyx is a decent program in many ways, the LaTeX code it produces is a mess in my experience, so don’t expect to edit your file later with a LaTeX editor. I suspect Markdown might be a decent substitute for Lyx.

10

Oh yeah, that’s a good point. Markdown is more portable than many other languages, but not entirely so. Tables are a common headache.

Oh, and thanks for this… sometimes I worry that I ramble far too long (and I do), but hopefully some of it is helpful to someone, somewhere, sometime :slight_smile:

You can have one or more Obsidian “vaults”. A vault is just a “master” folder, and it’s up to you how you want to organize them. It mirrors the actual folder structure on disk:

So it’s up to you whether you prefer:

  • Different vaults per project, like Coding\MyCodingProject vs Documents\RandomNotes, etc. They can live wherever you want.
  • Or different subfolders within the same vault, like Documents\ObsidianVault\MyCodingProject and Documents\ObsidianVault\RandomNotes.

Each vault can have its own themes, plugins, sync settings, etc. If you don’t care about any of that, you can just use one vault for everything and make as many subfolders as you need.

PS when you say “a MS folder has a pile of incremented text files for coding”… what does that mean, exactly? Coding, like computer programming?

I’m only asking because if that’s your primary use case, there might be a better type of software to use altogether, namely an “IDE” or integrated development environment. Are you already familiar with those?

Depending on the language you code in, there might already be established standards for how/where to keep notes and docs alongside your code, which might save you from having to reinvent the wheel.

11

Stata code. My copy of Textpad has syntax highlighting. The implementation of syntax highlighting might be slightly better in VScode, so I’ve downloaded the program. I haven’t messed around with it yet. My understanding from Reddit et al is that Stata’s built in program editor is perhaps slightly better than Notepad++, but only recently and not decisively. So I’m not optimistic about VScode for Stata, though it would be good to familiarize myself with it anyway.

I am intrigued by Markdown and Obsidian. Thanks for the reply: I didn’t realize that you could choose to have more than one vault. I’m thinking of scrolling through a couple of tutorials, then designing my own Obsidian framework for myself.

12

Ah, gotcha. Sounds like a plan!

13

I am entirely gobsmacked by the possibilities of Obsidian. The program is lightweight - it doesn’t get in your way, unlike say MS Word. The program is flexible - it has attracted an enthusiastic open source community that produces plugins and how-to videos and websites. The program is robust: relying on Markdown provides both a solid entry point and exit if the company collapses. Which is less likely to happen over the next 20 years, as the founders seem to be eschew venture capital funding and have a viable commercial subscription base.

The program has a core function - notetaking - but also ancillary functions such as being a markup editor or a lightweight minimal formatting word processor - essentially a substitute for how I used PolyEdit. We’ll see how happy I am with it. (ETA: well when I paste the text into the SDMB, the double brackets are NOT stripped away, so I guess I’ll keep using a text editor for SDMB posting.)

So what’s the BFD? The BFD is bidirectional linking: highlight a word or set of words in Obsidian and you can get a list of the documents that also included that term. Most people write notes that are never read later. To be fair README documents are reviewed a lot: they provide a guide to an MS folder that I may have created months or years ago. That works. The problem is when you have cross-project concepts like, for example, recalling how you coded something in the past. That will require some combination of digging into your file system and wheel reinvention. Bidirectional linking allows you to indicate a concept you might want to refer to in the indefinite future. Unlike search mechanisms it’s curated, so it’s more likely to be helpful. I think.

Here are some resources I found helpful when starting to use Obsidian. The program has a small bump in the beginning of the learning curve since it doesn’t use menus and the possibilities of bidirectional linking might not be apparent. But then the learning curve flattens and reports say you can just create your vault system on the fly. Which I have begun to do.

I would start with a You tube vid by Sergio. You-tube vids often get on my nerves, but this guy doesn’t waste your time. No fluff. He edits in images to make his points clear and provides outlines for where he is going. In other words, he provides a solid lecture, but it doesn’t look that way because of his skill. FromSergio.

Sergio has a series of vids on Obsidian: I’ve only watched the first one. I figure I can watch the others at my leisure. I liked this one page web tutorial: Getting Started with Obsidian Notes: A Beginner’s Guide
My current favorite Markdown cheat sheet is here: Basic writing and formatting syntax - GitHub Docs , also mentioned by @Reply.

I might get burnt though: that guide presents Github’s syntax: I haven’t tested whether it all applies 1:1 with Markdown. But the top part contains what I want, bolding, italics, bolded italics, and strikethroughs. I see that underlining is discourages as it is used for linking.

14

If double brackets link to other Obsidian notes on your computer, what would you like it to do when pasted into a SDMB post? Since it’s just another file on your computer, do you just want it to un-linkify it and paste the text without any link, or…?

As for “Github-Flavored” Markdown, yes, technically it’s a superset, but most dialects of Markdown share the same basic formatting for bolding, links, etc. It’s only the site-specific extensions (like table formatting or BFD) that’s different between the dialects. And I really wouldn’t worry about it too much… if you just follow Obsidian’s official Markdown syntax, that would make sure your notes are in a format it likes*. If they go kaput and you need to export all the notes to some other dialect or format altogether, don’t worry, Markdown is super easy to work with and convert.

* PS I love the built-in Mermaid support! Mermaid is another lightweight language, used specifically for describing and generating flowcharts.

15

Here’s how my text looked when I pasted it in:

I am entirely gobsmacked by the possibilities of [[Obsidian]]. The program is lightweight…

So I had to go back and manually strip out the double brackets. No worries, it’s just something to deal with. In the future, maybe double brackets could become a standard part of message board discussion, though it would require software that manipulates author IDs.

Mermaid: huh, I was just thinking that flowcharts might be useful in a knowledge management app. Mermaid cheat sheet:

Thinking out loud: coding like this would be helpful:

Man that program [[Obsidian | software]] is really great: as a working geologist, it really helps me analyze volcanic rock like [[Obsidian | geology]].

I suspect someone has thought of this.

16

On You-tube, Sergio’s 2nd and 3rd Obsidian episode were as refreshingly concise as the first one.

Do any Obsidian users have thoughts on the slip-box method? Do you create short notes? Do you take care to link them to other notes? Or do you just make use of the double-brackets [[ ]] for bidirectional linking? Or do you ignore this aspect entirely?

17

I mostly use links and folders. I have some tags as well, but I rarely use them. Some of my pages are just a collection of back-links - all the places where that topic came up. I imagine if that list got too long, I’d have to look into organising it more.

18

One poster at the Obsidian forum also mostly uses double bracket links. He uses tags for meta-information. So he might use double brackets for a concept, topic, or term and tags will be used for whether its from a you-tube video, lecture, book, or whatever. Examples include #article, #recipe, #person, #book, #meeting. I don’t know how well that system works. You could also use them for broad concepts such as #software or #geology: that would deal with the synonym problem I alluded to above.

Another great thing about centering the software around Markdown, is that you learn a transferable skill when you work with Obsidian. And if you already are familiar with some version of Markdown (eg you post on this message board) you get a gentler learning curve.

Ok, I’ve gotten started with Obsidian and am happily taking various notes. I’ve watched 5 Sergio vids. Is there a good web page for beginner to intermediate users? Sergio is great and I highly recommend the first vid for everyone, but I really prefer the written word.

Also, there’s a great book to be written on Obsidian and the second brain. It would be straightforward to write badly or even at a mediocre level. A great book would be more than an owner’s manual. It would trace a number of use cases, providing noobs and intermediate users with a number of conceptual templates and showing the power and flexibility of this tool. I can easily see something like that becoming a best seller and moreover a highly lucrative path to lectures and followup books. It’s a competitive space though: there are a number of You-tube Obsidian productivity gurus of which Sergio is one. But there are no decent books to my knowledge.