Obsidian

Obsidian is at the heart of my personal knowledge management. It turns plain-text notes into a networked system of thoughts — minimal, powerful, and fun to use.

Why I love Obsidian

• Cross-platform: Works across Android and desktop, even on Linux.
• Organizing notes is fluid and intuitive
  • Folder management and note refactoring are fast and frictionless.
  • Wiki-style links ([[note-name]]) are a game-changer for interlinking thoughts.
  • Daily Notes and my own BuJo-inspired rapid logging method keep everything grounded in time.
  • Tags are more than decoration — they’re central to connecting, filtering, and navigating content.
    • Hierarchical tags are essential for structure and scale.
  • Structured frontmatter is handy — especially for publishing notes via Hugo — though its role in pure PKM is still evolving.
  • Templates help scaffold new notes with repeatable structures — something I’ve missed in other editors.
• Themes and syntax highlighting help me read and scan more efficiently
• Local-first, Markdown-based — exactly my kind of setup.
• Note-taking has never been more enjoyable. I’ve always loved documenting, but Obsidian made it truly pleasurable.

What could be better

• A fully open-source license would be ideal.
• A self-hostable sync backend: while WebDAV/Nextcloud works well enough, sync conflicts still happen.
• A web app, even just for intranet use, would help keep personal and professional vaults fully separated.

Plugins I Use

Less is more. Keep it simple, stupid.

• Iconize: Folder icons help with quick visual recognition.
• Remotely Save: Syncs my mobile notes to my NextCloud instance.
• Tag Wrangler: Makes tag management more sane and consistent.

Before Obsidian

I’ve used Markdown for notes for years — in Vim, VSCode, and NextCloud Notes. The switch to Obsidian was effortless. Thanks to tags and wiki-links, my old collection of notes quickly transformed into a real PKM system.

Plaintext never felt so powerful.