Thread by @jessejanderson

Obsidian 101

There's a lot of excitement in note-taking apps and personal knowledge management, but many solutions are unapproachable to most people.

Here's a quick guide to get started with Obsidian for complete beginners.

🧵👇

Visit obsidian.md and click the "Get Obsidian" button.

Once you download and install, create a new vault (location doesn't matter for now).

Now let's get started creating your first note:

• cmd-n to create your note (or click the page icon)

• name it something like "Home" so it can be your starting place and press enter

Now you have your home note, but before we start typing, we need to talk about Markdown...

Obsidian is a Markdown editor, so you need to know the basics for your formatting.

You may have seen variations of this in other apps, but the basic idea is using plain text to format your text.

Preview Mode

Once you've done some formatting with markdown, you can toggle Preview mode to see the formatted text in a non-editable format.

You can click the page/pencil icon to toggle between them, but pressing cmd-e is an easy shortcut to toggle back and forth.

Markdown Basics

**bold text**

_italic text_

# large headline

## medium headline

### small headline

> quote


--- divider line

Markdown List Formats

- list item

1. numbered list item

- [ ] todo item

- [x] completed todo item

Markdown Link Formats

[external link text](http://website)

[[internal link]]

Internal Links

The [[internal link]] is where the magic happens.

This is also called a bidirectional link because it creates both an outward and inward link.

Basically, this means:
• If Note1 links to Note2
• then Note2 also links back to Note1

Let's see it in action...

Simply surrounding some text with [[ and ]] creates a link to a brand new note with that text as the title.

Let's go ahead and try it out in our "Home" note.

Click in the large text area under the title and type this:

"I am learning how to use [[Obsidian]]"

When you type [[ Obsidian will automatically insert the closing ]] tags.

It will also open a search menu for selecting an existing page, but you can ignore that for now.

You can either type the closing ]] tags manually or press enter to complete the link.

Now you have a link to a new page called Obsidian, but it doesn't exist yet!

Clicking the link won't work while we are still in Edit mode.

You can switch to Preview mode (cmd-e) and click the Obsidian link, or stay in Edit mode and cmd-click the [[Obsidian link]].

Clicking the internal [[Obsidian]] link will open up this new page and you will see "Obsidian" listed in your sidebar as a new note under "Home".

Good start!

Now let's see the power of bidirectional linking.

There is a right sidebar in Obsidian that will be closed by default. Click on the ❮ in the upper right side of the window to expand the right sidebar.

You should see a section called "Linked mentions" and underneath that is the text from "Home" which links to this [[Obsidian]] page.

We can see that another note linked here, and we can click on that text preview to be taken to the original link source.

With time, as you create more and more notes that link to each other, you develop a network of linked notes and can traverse without needing to rely solely on search.

You'll begin to find interesting connections between unrelated topics that have things in common you wouldn't have previously seen.

I hope you enjoyed this basic Obsidian 101 guide!

If you'd like to know more, you can sign up at obsidian101.com.

If you found this helpful, a retweet would be much appreciated. 🙇‍♂️

Here's the start of the thread:

https://twitter.com/jessejanderson/status/1403034583352758272