obsidian

last updated: oct 28, 2025

video:

why obsidian?

first why use obsidian, over say apple notes or notion?

• those note taking apps are great and I do occasionally use apple notes since it’s native on my ios devices, but the main reason why I mainly use obsidian is because of the following reasons

1. file over app
• unlike most note taking software, you don’t own your notes. to move to another app, you must export them (sometimes not supported)
• all your notes with obsidian exist on a file on your computer. with other software where all your notes are on their servers, if their servers go down, so do your access to your notes (happened before with aws outages)
2. no subscriptions, no bloat
• you can opt in or out of any features you don’t want to use, including core features. most note taking software especially ones that raise money will add more bloat over time and you cannot opt out of it.
• there is no subscription to use obsidian. they have a $4/mo option where they will sync your notes for you to all your devices, but you could also do that yourself with a bunch of other options for free. and if you stop paying the subscription, you can still use it
3. open source extensions
• obsidian isn’t open source, but they have a huge open source community for plugins (which is going to be the next section)
• very likely whatever you want to use obsidian for, there are some plugins that will make it easier.
• this also makes obsidian feel really community led versus company/founder led (which I like)

favorite extensions I use

• notebook navigator
• actual game changer extension which makes your vault more similar to apple notes, a way more intuitive and clean UI
• auto template trigger
• when you create a note, it asks you if you want to select from a template you created. for me this makes it useful for creating stuff like restaurant notes, people notes, etc.
• copy inline code
• i use this for numbers, addresses, and code in my vault. it just makes it so if you put the tick ` around some text, there’s a button to copy to clipboard
• double shift
• makes navigating through the vault super fast because I just hit double shift to search or create a new note.
• map view
• custom map view that you can use to mark coordinates onto a map. you can even use google maps as the overlay. super useful for any location based notes like restaurants, hotels, etc. (i take those notes so that the next time I go, I know what I ordered or some tips I may have learned from last time)
• markdown furigana
• useful if you have any japanese in your vault
• super simple time tracker
• in my template for creating a youtube script/outline, I have this at the top which I use to track how long I spend writing, editing, etc.
• various complements
• instantly adds recommendations for backlinks when you’re just typing, helpful so you don’t need to remember every single thing you took notes on, it’ll just recommend it to you
• thumbnails
• nice thumbnail embed for my youtube video notes
• view counts
• track view counts for each file and you can rank them. kinda cool

obsidian web clipper

• you can use obsidian web clipper to quickly save stuff like youtube videos, books, articles, or tweets into your vault locally
• I use it mostly for two things - books and youtube videos
• I use it to create a note with a custom template, saving stuff like the author/creator, date published, link.
• I also use interpreter, which allows you to connect it to a LLM (local one works too!) for a custom prompt. I just have it do a 250-350 character summary at the top of the page for books and videos, and then I have my own notes below. this just makes it so that in the future when i reference it I can quickly see what the content is about
• here are my settings that you can import
new-book-template-clipper.json1 KiB
new-post-video-template-clipper.json1.2 KiB

stuff I take notes on with obsidian

• people
• i use obsidian as a rolodex. i have a person template which I use for people in my life or people I learn from, such authors, entrepreneurs
• for me its useful to have a rolodex (maybe because my memory isn’t great), to look back on stuff like meeting notes or things they have mentioned
• meeting notes
• related to that, i also have a meeting note template whenever I have a meeting. at first I just took these notes in the daily page, but i found it way easier to categorize if I created a dedicated note, which is how this was born
• I also started to create a note for any appointment, like bank appt, doctor visits, physical therapy, and sometimes even hangouts
• just is a cool way to reference things mentioned or to track activity over time (for me it takes about 1 minute to create so it isn’t a hassle for me, but I can imagine for some it may not be worth the cost)
• book and video notes
• this is used with combination of obsidian web clipper as explained above
• i also recently upgraded my book library in obsidian to have this view (you can just click on it to view the book notes) (setup guide here)

• daily notes
• stock trades
• company analysis (for investing)
• etc etc

to be updated more.