Obsidian (Software)

Obsidian - Manifesto

We believe that your data should be future-proof and easily accessible, no matter where you are. That’s why we use simple, open file formats that prevent lock-in and ensure that your data can be preserved for generations to come.¹

Editorial Team @ Ness Labs

Obsidian is the IDE for thought. It’s a functional, extensible front-end for notes that you have total control over.²

Editorial Team @ Ness Labs

An IDE, or integrated development environment, is what programmers use to write code. It provides many advanced functionalities like code auto-completion, syntax highlighting, and refactoring. Although being super powerful, the great thing … about it is that it works by opening a local folder of code files (basically plain text).²

Future-Proof Your Notes

kepano

Obsidian stores your file in a local folder on your device, so that you always have control over them, even offline.³

kepano

Obsidian notes are stored in simple, plain text files, which have been in use since the dawn of computing. If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, we think it’s important that your Obsidian notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.⁴

File over app

Excerpt from kepano’s “File over app” (July 3, 2023)⁵:

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.

The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to crave them.

The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs.

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on server, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems. …

You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.

Features

Obsidian Publish

Editorial Team @ Ness Labs

One of the strengths of Obsidian Publish is being a natural extension of Obsidian. You’re already building a private digital garden in Obsidian, and Publish lets you easily open up part of that garden to the world.²

Plug-ins

Editorial Team @ Ness Labs

The extensibility of code editor like Visual Studio Code inspired Obsidian to be customizable in almost every aspect.²

Erica Xu (Obsidian’s Co-founder)

IDEs are … extensible by design, probably because programmers always want to customize things for themselves and they have the technical know-how to do it too. Coincidentally this is also what we aim for with Obsidian.²

Mobile App

Erica Xu (Obsidian’s Co-founder)

Originally, we wanted to make a lightweight mobile app that acts as a companion of the desktop app. It lets you view your notes and do some quick capturing on the go, and that’s about it. However, our users have made sure to let us know that they don’t want a half-assed mobile app. If it can only view and capture notes, how is it any better than the existing Markdown editor apps?²

Review

Because all the files are store offline on the devices, it will take the space equal to the amount of all the files you have. The image attachments will also shown up in Gallery app, which may cluster as the images mixed in with the other images on your devices.

Tips

On mobile: pin “Quick Switcher” in “Command Pallete” for easy note switches.

Go to “Settings” -> “Core plugins” -> “Command pallete” -> “New pin command”. Here you can pin any commands you want for quick access when open Command Pallete.

F.A.Q.

Does Obsidian Sync work in the background?

No. Obsidian Sync is work while Obsidian is in the foreground only.

References