Getting Started with Obsidian

1. Introduction: Welcome to my course called Getting Started with obsidian. My name is Curtis and I use obsidian on a daily basis to capture work notes, to record notes on some of the books you see over my shoulder and they go bookshelf over to the side to make more connections between them. In fact, I just used this weekend as I was reading a book called The Devil's curve. Two. Some ideas from that book to a book I read two or three years ago called The fish today the whale about the 1930s banana massacre and how that works with the fruit companies. And it was just one thing that highlighted because I used obsidian well and took lots of notes in it. I've really found obsidian to be an invaluable tool to help connect my notes and to just to help me think and keep things organized long-term. So now you're asking what is this course going to cover? It's really broken up into two main sections. First up, we're going to go through the basics of what obsidian is, everything from why you should choose it to installing it, getting your first of all, set up basic settings and tour of the interface, just the things I think you need to know to get going with your obsidian setup. And the second chunk, we're going dive into plug-ins are going to dive into some of the more advanced settings in obsidian. We're going to look at themes and just how I do more of my setup and make it work forming and some of the advanced stuff. And then we'll finish off with a tour of what I have in my OCD involved so you can see how I use it and some of the ways that I make connections long-term with my notes so that I can continue to increase my knowledge. If you like the course, then you can go to Curtis Mikhail dot ca slash YT, or you can find my YouTube channel and there I show up how he's obsidian, how I use task management and how I make connections in a lot of the resources that I read. And I actually show you a lot of these connections as well. 2. What is Obsidian: Now the first question you really have is, what is obsidian? You may have heard of it, you've probably heard of it if you're coming here. But obsidian is more than just a note-taking tool. It's a tool for thought, for network thought. Oh, here for our maps of content MOOCs. It's a tool that does more than just take notes like Apple Note. Apple Notes is great. We use it in my family, my wife and I share a note on like with our kids are sick, stuff like that. The temperature is what time we gave the medication, everything so that I have one of us takes a child to the doctor. We can pull out our phone, we can look up all the notes that we have as of that moment. Well, notes can be good for that. Other note-taking tools can be good for just taking notes or that nature. But obsidian is really there to step beyond that and just help you start making connections with your notes. Now one of the other good things about it is unlike other apps that help you make connections like Roam Research. With obsidian, you really do own your files. We'll talk more about why you should choose obsidian and they are yours to have. They're not off on the web somewhere, they're yours to have files and folders on your computer for you to work with. Ultimately, obsidian is just a good app to help you take notes. It's plain text, it's portable all over. You can use multiple different apps to interact with the files in your obsidian database. And it's just a good app to use to help you continue to make connections to monitor the backlinks. We'll talk more about backlinks and the future of video. And just help you get the most out of what you are consuming. And the next video we're going to talk specifically about why you choose obsidian versus some of the other tools out there. Why I think it does a really good job at this, why it's the best option for your note-taking needs. 3. Why Choose Obsidian: In this video, we're going to cover why I think obsidian is the best option for your note-taking needs. Now first off, in my mind, the goal of any good note taking note connecting application is to help you produce more content produced thoughts that you're going to use with other people. That doesn't mean you're going to do videos like I do, or write books or anything like that. But you're going to share your knowledge with other people so that there is some benefit out of it long-term, It's not just to be a collector of knowledge, is to be a connector of knowledge that you then use to better yourself. Become a better parent, become a better person. One of the biggest selling points of obsidian is that you own the files. You can put other tools at your files like log SEC for awhile on the iPad before there was a mobile app, I used one writer as my interface to the same files and obsidian so that I could still continue to take notes while I was at my iPad because I actually do most of my work there. I can also point AI writer at it and automate my files in my folders without needing to look at some proprietary database format. This makes it a special, robust long-term, because if the developers of obsidian decided to shut down right now you don't lose anything. You've got all of your connections right there. You could pull up logs that you could pull up some other tool and interface with those files with really no issue whatsoever. The next really strong point for obsidian is that it is entirely cross-platform. If you're on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, or iOS, you have an option to use obsidian natively for your platform. I'm Mac, Apple software mainly. But if I go over to Linux or when I go over to the next thing I do play in it, sometimes they enjoy it. It is still the same application there. That does mean for some purists of their operating system, it does not look exactly like a Mac app. It does not look exactly like a Linux app. It looks like obsidian. And even on your iPad OS device, your Android device, it looks like obsidian. So it is still an operating system, operating application that is consistent across operating systems. But you can take it anywhere you want. You don't have to ask anyone has just there for you. Next up, obsidian is highly extensible. This isn't one of the superpowers it has. It is built on web technologies. There are lots of developers out there who are writing JavaScript, HTML, CSS plug-ins for obsidian, I'll use many of them, some of which we will talk about as we go through this course, from building a kanban board for my content because that's just the easiest way to track it. Same with tracking the content for this course. That's the easiest way to track it. To, you know, checklists, to calendar systems. Two things that I think her little too much for obsidian. It actually still has the power to do it if you choose. That it is the right application for your task management to their plug-ins for that. Finally, one of the great things is that obsidian is really, really fast. I have about 2500 note, so my database and there's no issues whatsoever. It forms just as fast with 2500 notes as it has with a 100 notes that when I started. And that's why I think obsidian is just the best option for your note-taking needs. Now there are other options out there. There's Roam Research and it's reasonably pricey to many people. I think if you're really going to get the, the functionality out of it, you're really going to make connections with it then yes, it can be a good option. But it also relies heavily on daily notes. If you don't like that, It's what it relies on. Whereas an obsidian, you can turn almost every feature off, but you don't want. So if I don't want daily notes, I just click a box done. I do not have daily notes. And other option that people turn to is Devin think it is available on Mac OS only, Apple devices only, but it does wiki linking, which is what obsidian does to track its backlinks. It even has some AI to help you. Surface connections that literally don't exist at all. Things that may be similar but you don't actually know. So cinnamon, synonym searching. But if you're on Windows, Linux, Android, there's just no option for Devin think. And even the iPad, iPhone OS version of Devin think is not as robust as the desktop version. So you're giving up a lot of functionality if you go with one of those options. For me, I actually use it. I use as my read it later service Devin think is my spot for other people's thoughts. Obsidian is a spot for my thoughts. A final good option is craft. I use cramped for awhile when Obsidian didn't have a mobile app that was going to be stellar and they were saying they were not going to ever have one. And craft was a good option. If you're really designed, focused as well. If you'd like a good, pretty visual layout, you want to be able to tweak the layout a bit, and you want to be able to have more visual interaction with it, then obsidian. Obsidian is really purely text-based. Then craft can be a great option for you. Not decent note portability as well. I actually moved to a craft for awhile and then back to obsidian a couple of months back, and moved about 2000 notes, no problem. It came in. Everything works really fine. The only issues were issues that I created for myself by trying to be smart about what I did and I should have just been smart. So I actually have another video that I've put up on YouTube. If you search, migrating from craft to obsidian, you'll find that video where I tell you the pitfalls that I've found. Now, the problem with craft those you can't use your favorite Markdown editor. It is craft all craft in. That's it. I can't use IA, writer or log SEC or anything else. If Kraft goes away, in many ways, I lose my data. Yes, I can export it as marked down, but I can't just keep working with it exactly where it sits. For you. You might be wondering, Hey, you didn't mention some app that you think is excellent. And you're right, I didn't, I tried to number of applications over the last two years as I've been really looking at this, there are some that have stood out there have some that are interesting, but they don't have enough extra features over top of obsidian for me to really look at them. So ultimately, I say you need to choose whatever option is for you. But I think obsidian is the best option for most people. I think the runners up are the ones I've mentioned. And the next video we're going to go over installing obsidian and getting your first Vault setup. 4. Installing Obsidian: And then if you're doing, we're going to talk about how to install obsidian on your machine. The easiest way to do this for your platform is to go to the obsidian WMD site. You can see right here. And then it should highlight the button right here for the specific app that works for your platform. Otherwise, you can go to city in MD, downloaded or slash download. And then you can look and see all of the options for platforms, right? If your windows, you doubled the 64-bit installer Mac OS. And right, we download them MacOS installer and your Linux. We can go to app image, snap or flat pack. And then if you're on iOS or Android, you would download it from either of the app stores, which you can find the links right here, downloading the app store from Apple or download on a Google Play. Next up is creating your first vault. Once you've installed the obsidian and opened it, you will be greeted with this screen to create a new Vault. We can create. We can put it wherever we want. Let's make this my course vault. And you can pick my location. Depending on how you want to sync. It. Can matter if you put it in iCloud or not. I'm just going to put it on my desktop because that works for me for now, for my demo vault for this course. And then I would create. And you can see I have a file folder over here with my vault in it. Now if you have multiple volts like I actually do, I can click Open and other vaults. And I can open my actual obsidian, a vault for everything that has all of my notes in it. We actually just call it iOS vault. I'm going to keep safe mode on and we'll talk about Safe Mode and Community Plugins later. And you see it just switched over to my other Vault, which is fine. In fact, I can have both vaults open without issues. So this is the one with my course in it. Currently the course you're taking and this is the one that we'll use for the course. 5. Interface Tour: Now to get started here, Let's look at my vault because it has a bunch of data populated already as we do our interface tour. On the left side you see I have what's called the file browser. And we can hide and show that by a little arrow here to expand and collapse. And I can browse through all of my different books. And you have the notes. I have my boards and some kanban boards in here, which we'll cover later. I create a new folder or a new note, the keyboard, or it can change the sort order of anything here, can also do searches here. So this goes from matching things that have a certain path and the filename to exact file name matches, searching for tags or actually searching for two words that occur close to each other on the same line of text are in the same section, which in this case it'd be a paragraph and said the surgery also have a bunch of different stuff. Explain search term is a good thing to keep on because it'll explain as you go what you're actually searching for it. And once you change the language down below in this gray pop-up for you to actually see. We can change if we collapse, results, show more context, change the sort order, and copy the search results because we can do other things with those later in a query. Now I have my main note here. This is a one about 10 percent toy, 90 percent kid, and a good toys mostly about the kid and not about the toy. And this is a book free range kids. You can see over here we have our backlinks panel. This is showing me any backlinks and if I had any unlinked mentions to this note, would also show me that. Then I have a calendar set up in here, which is an external plugin. One important thing to remember is that these are draggable panels. So I could actually put this anywhere I want and set it up how I want so that I can customize the interface to what I like. Next up is the graph view and see I have a lot of stuff on minimized my sidebar. So you can see it. I felt that this out to search for basic income, which is a research topic I have. But if I reduce the search, you can see I have lots of different things in here and I can color code them by group. I can also do the same search parameters you saw earlier. I can decide how I display the arrows, the direction of search or not. I can talk about fading of the texts and node size forces. So this is what you see a lot of people use or show off as the cool thing about obsidian. And yes, it can be cool to have a graph and sure they look at him, look really pretty as you go. But I think that they are most useful when you start color-coding them, right? So if I look search for tag note and I search for basic income, income, I can start to see connections and start to see notes in here, right? I can say the color of law is one about this, where it talks about basic income. This is about how the laws of the US as pertaining to zoning laws, really deals with racial inequality. Next up, let's look at settings. You can get to that by the little cog here. You say I have a lot of things on already, but we have our editor settings and we'll go through some that I think are the best settings for you in a bit, right? We can turn our spellcheck, line breaks and a bunch of different settings for just the basics of it. We can look at how we deal with files and links. All right. If we want to confirm deletion, I have that off, but I do move the deleted files to system trash that way it can recover them later. We do want to automatically update internal links that's important to know. We can specify a default location I put mine in my inbox for new files. That way I can sort them later because I know they're not processed if they're in there. My new link formats, how wiki links also have our appearance settings, like a dark theme, but you can change that to light. And I'll update really easily for you. Or you can actually choose. I'm using a custom theme called cybercrime, and we'll talk about themes specifically later. Customize your hotkeys in here, and these are all filterable, searchable as well. So about stuff here, core plugins. So these are all the core standard features of obsidian. And some of these will be off or on depending on what you want, what you like. I do like daily note, so I have those turned on. I don't do start notes. That's one thing I don't do. I don't do this that'll cast and prefix or either or the random note because I have another solution for that, which we'll talk about later. And then the other thing that is important, which we'll cover later, his art community plugins. So when safe mode is on and say I don't have Community Plugins, my turned off. I do have Community Plugins and come back and now I have all these Community Plugins was talking about sync again later, but you can actually sync all your plugin settings and all the plugins that are active in everything. If you use obsidian sink and everything below that is the different plugins we have setup right? Between events, tables, down to some that are actually daily notes, right? This is a core plugin and with some of its settings and you can change where you put everything. Another important thing that you'll use regularly is the command palette. So on Mac axis, so it's Command P. And now I can do anything I want. I know that I have day planner right is installed for me and so I can actually change around what I want to show or if I want to thank I do regularly is split vertically. And so now I can have a pain on each side and I can open up a new note, right? I can look at my research dashboard for keyboards over here. And I could go keyboard, right, keywords. So I'm looking at keyboard on one side and I can look at the moon lander on the other. You can also change how we split. If we want to split vertically. I'm looking at two different keyboards as we go. Those are the big settings I think you need to be aware of and a general user interface tour. Clearly there is more setup on my obsidian installed and you will have when you start, but this is because I've customized it long-term. We will get into things that I think you should customize for your obsidian setup. And in our next video, that is actually what we'll cover the basic obsidian settings that I think you should set up for yourself so that you can just get the most out of it right into the box. 6. Basic Settings: In this video, we're gonna look at some of the basic settings that I think you need to set up to just get your obsidian Vault working properly. To get to your settings, you can click the gear icon in the bottom left-hand corner. And then you can turn on spellcheck if you want that. It currently only works for American English. And there are some projects two, that are going forward with other languages. But I also read that the API is not free anymore. So if you have a free API, people want to know about it. So you have things you really want to turn on it, make sure it's turned on is the auto pair of brackets and auto pair Markdown syntax. That will mean if I'm creating a link that it auto pairs the markdown I need for that. Now there's actually a link and we'll cover markdown in a bit. We also want to smart indent lists and then fold heading and fold indent are usually off by default, but you do want them on. They're going to allow you to create a heading. Heading. I have content in the middle. I can actually fold the heading. And this actually fold through any subheadings. So this is a third level heading. And now if I fold the parent heading to it folds that as well. That can help your organization just stay cleaner for your documents. And also works with lists. And now I can fold these two that are indented. That can help you just again organize your lists better. And the rest of them are really up to you in here. Whether you want the shadow line number in the gutter or not, you want to line number in there? I don't generally worry about it. I don't care about the line number. And your files in links. You need to turn off confirmed deletion if you want to as well. I prefer inside where you want this, if you want to have a folder, go to your a deleted the file, go to your system trash or you obsidian dot trash folder. I leave it to system trash. And one thing you internalize automatically update internal links. So that will mean if I create a new file and we'll talk her cover exactly what this is doing and a bit. So I've created this file, and again now I've created it, but I want to change it. Other file, not actually updated and would update across your entire database. I've done this across many hundreds of links are changed to filename because it was a misspelling or anything like that. And it updates very well all the time. So two other things that I like, and we'll cover this again in our next video. We'll recover the basic of city and folders you need is in the box. And I also like ZZ assets and those are for anything that you would inbox for any files need to be processed and assets for any images or other things that you upload them, then that lets me change right here. My vault folder, default location for your notes. I can change it to mine inbox that way. Anything in my inbox I don't need to process still. And then default for no attachments. I would change it to in the folder specified below and assets. Now any new image, any new assets PDF will get uploaded to this location on a medically, and that's it. In the next video, we'll cover some of the basic files and folders that I think you need just to keep your obsidian vault organized. Two of them, we've already covered your inbox in your assets, will dive deeper into some of the other ones that I like for my vaults. 7. Starting Folders: In this video, we're going to look at the folders that I think you need to organize your obsidian database just to make it easy to work with long-term. First off, let's just look at the inbox. We already mentioned this. I would use this for any file that needs to be processed. So I actually set obsidian it to always default new files to my inbox than anything in my inbox is generally for me either currently being worked on active project or active file. So like a book I'm reading currently and taking notes on or something that's come in new that needs to be processed. Next up would be daily. This is what I use for my daily notes. So in the core plugins, who would come in and turn on our daily plugin. One nice thing about the core plugins, you can just search them. I'm trying my daily notes. And you can see down here it turned on daily notes. And I can choose where I put it new file location and put it in daily notes. And template file location. Choose the file to use as a template and then you can actually choose your file. So I could choose inbox or other file, that's the only file that I have. Or this is what I would use my daily or my template for. And then create a new template. And make sure that is in, we'll use the command palette. Move to another folder, move it to templates. So my daily template, and I put in here what I wanted. So I often have meetings in here. And then if I create a new daily file, open today's daily note, and should it create it with my daily template? Once I have that set. So I had to come back in here daily template. And I can go to daily and even delete this now. And then. Hope today's daily note meetings in there. Next up is notes. Notes I use for taking notes on books, notes on other people's thoughts. This is where I would have my atomic notes, a small snippet of something from a book and put it in my notes, tags. We'll talk more about the difference between tags that later and actually show you how I use them in my vault. Specifically what I call tag notes. And that's where I put anything that lets you look as a hashtag tag. So if I was talking about something about city structure, I'd put city structure in there, but I'd use it not as a show or not as a tag city rupture. That's not how I do it. I'd actually go city structure. And I'll do that because later on, it can now mark this as a tag note. And I can move it to tags. And then I can use my graph you later to highlight my tag notes and see which tag notes are getting more and more traction so I can produce more content with them later. Next up, templates, That's where any template file that you want to use would go for work. That's where I put all my work notes and then ZZ assets I use easy just to sort of at the bottom, this is for any assets, for images, for stuff that I uploaded, although I don't upload very many. Now one of the reasons I do this, and I'll show this to you later when I talk about the advanced random note plugin is to allow me to search my notes and excludes certain folders, certain types of files I don't want to see later. I also add some stuff here like books I've read or a books to read lists that I can include or exclude those folders based on different search parameter. You don't have to have those. I think those the folders I've shown you today, daily inbox notes, tags, templates, work if you need to work one, and assets are a good way to get you started with your obsidian database structure. And the next video we're gonna go over basic marked down instructions for obsidian so you can see what the basics so that you can just mark up your content properly and easily. Looking at one spot. 8. Markdown: In this video, we're going to cover the markdown basics for obsidian. So you know how you can mark up your content. If you're familiar with markdown. Most of this will be repeat until we get to later in the video where we start talking about links and some of the special stuff that's specifically for epsilon. One of the first things you can do is create headings. So everywhere from one heading all the way up to really as many as you want headings. But it will stop actually doing any type of syntax highlighting at heading 6. Now inside headings you can also fold, which I've shown you already. Heading to things like unfold everything from Heading 1. Those are all subordinate headings. If I did another heading to all right, My Folder inside heading six calls a two-fold between Heading 2's. Next thing to do is create lists. So we can have lists, list, list for bulleted lists. I can also indent as we want. An indent a list, we can do list. If you wanted to convert this list, I can select it and then I can type numbered list. Let me toggle that to number and see it didn't quite do it properly. We can actually will start remembering data analysts if we adjust it. So it would also do here. Now what should remember all the list, so I hit Enter, right, all the way to 36. We can indent the or numbered lists as well. You can see it updates how they work. How they're styled lists we can do is a what's called a task list. With some of your plug-in, this will actually produce or lets you query based on the task that you see. And again, we can indent tasks for subtasks. We could even say there's a task list, but we have just a bullet inside task and instructions. And it was because you have folding, we can actually just fold to see our task instructions. Next to have various markup options that are just inside markdown. We can use blockquote. So this you might use if you're actually creating a quote from a book. Two asterisks is bulb, as is two underscores. If we do a single, italics, single underscore is Alex. Next up we have equal sign that will highlight things. So I do want to highlight a document, highlight something in a sentence. You can do the double equals sign to highlight. You can use double tilde for strikethrough. If you want to cross something out because you've made a change. And I'll see you back tick for a single word of code. If I was writing this, I would say, your best is right. I could put inbox in here to highlight that this is actually a file folder or some sort of file instruction. We also use three back ticks if you have a lot of code. So I would do this in programming function thing. And then I can put in here what I wanted. Now I will not do syntax highlighting now the way that this PHP code, but it will not actually do syntax highlighting for me. Another thing you can do is footnote if you'd like that. So a foot note is with square bracket one. And then if I go down to the bottom, and there are plugins that make this easier for you or you can use a single keyboard command to produce a footnote. There's no underlying because for accessibility reasons, you link should be underlined anytime you see them. So there's just no underline and mark down. To produce a link, we can use a square bracket. This is our link text and other square bracket and then I round bracket. And the URL that will give us a link and mark down. Now embeds, embeds are fairly easy. We can do an iFrame with anything. Let's see. Let's grab some lo-fi hip hop. And if I was going to share this with an embed, I would literally just copy the code here, drop it into the city n. And now we have an embed. And if I preview it, you see the video showing up right here in my document. So to preview, you can toggle it with the document icon right here. Just a toggle back and forth. I use Command E to change back and forth quickly. And you can create iframes with any type of content, really any site that's out there. Now markdown tables are a bit of a tricky thing. I generally use online markdown table formatter because this is the type of syntax you need to use. The pipe character dashes. And then if I grab it or use copy to clipboard on this one, I have a table and I can put headings in here. And this is why it gets a little tricky because I've put some data in here, one, and we can preview it. Now. It actually, you can see we do have a table here, but it's really hard to work with. There's actually a plugin called advanced tables that I use to help me manage my tables because they are tricky in Markdown for sure. Next up we have what is probably the power feature of obsidian, that is WikiLeaks. So there's two ways we can do this. We can use double square bracket. It's going to start searching for us. And I could say, look at my untitled note, right? So that is a link. If I preview, All I see is a link. Next up we can see is by using an exclamation point at the beginning. And we can do untitled. Now if I preview that actually has included the note right here. So if there was content in my untitled note, if I add content here, and then open up my markdown basics and we'll preview again. And you can see it has actually added the content in. This goes so far as it will split, split horizontally. I can come back in here and open untitled. And I can even say heading, content below heading. If I come back up to my untitled document here, I've hit a pound sign and locks. You search and showing my headings. So when I preview it, it was actually included just the content below my heading. So this one is called transclusion with the exclamation point, and this one is called linking. In many ways, it's personal preference, how you want to see it. I generally only use links, but I almost never use the preview pane. I almost always just view it in Markdown mode or an edit mode. And that's it. That's the basics of Markdown for obsidian. The linking with a wiki links that double square brackets are really the special features to obsidian. And you really need to get to use those and know how to use those and use them lots, because that's where you're going to build your knowledge graph, where you're going to really get the power of obsidian at one of these knowledge management tools. Just using basic markdown isn't going to give you those extra features that you can't get out of obsidian. In the next video, I'm gonna show you my vault and I'm going to talk you through what I call tag notes specifically and show you why I use them in how I use them. Because that's what I really think is the best way to be using a tags versus hashtags versus actual links are tagged, so I call them. 9. Tagnotes: In this video, we're going to look at the difference between tags and links as far as I'm concerned in my database. Let's dive in. So I said before I have two basic types of files. I have two broad categories. I have notes. And this is for other people's thoughts. And Z i, seven time blocking strategies. Some note on an article by terror Wagner or something from strong towns, which is a book I read. So this was actually broke out from the book, strong towns. And I broke this out as its own note because I felt that really deserved its own note. All right, manager's job is to facilitate success. So if all of these things and I also have what I call ten minutes, they're going to tag. So this is what most people use things for. So I have one password as an app in here. I need to have a tagged as app, so that's the type of content it is to do as well, right? That's another app or the 1980 to Beirut massacre. This is an event and a tag node. So when I read more books, more content that relate to the 1980 to Beirut massacre, I will dive in here and I can continue to see how it compounds and builds. And the reason I really like to do that is when we get back to the graph view. You can see in my graph view, and it's actually already filtered to basic income. Let's take that out. And you can see my graph here. You can see that I've tagged notes are blue, so I can dive in and find a big tag note right here. What's this one? Community. So I kind of knew that's what this was going to be. If I go in here, you can see I've got a lot of resources for community, a lot of things that link to community. I'll talk about this operate here with aliases later. Have lots of resources that go into this note. And so what the tag note system allows me to do is as something it gets more lenses, there's a bigger and bigger in my graph because more things at linking to it, it lets me really dig in and say that this is something I should be looking at more. This is something I should dive in to. And that's really why I use links with the square brackets instead of tags with a hashtag. Tags with a hashtag or for status. So that's for a book to read, an article to summarize an event or a person, people I think I use so that I can designate certain types of content, certain statuses of content. But it's not actually for something like community or smoking or anything like that, those get their own link. Because then later on I can also just write red in them and build them out into a bigger piece of content. That's how I do. That's why I prefer what I call tag notes instead of tags. And the next video we're going to take a bit of a look at daily notes. 10. Daily Notes: In this video, we're going to look at how I use daily notes, some of that cool plug-ins that there are for daily notes that you may use just to give you an idea of what to do with your daily notes. So first off, you need to come in to your settings. We're actually gonna look at my alive database. You need to make sure that you have daily notes turned on in sorry, in the core plugins and you'd have daily notes turned on. And you can search it right here. Daily notes is turned on. And then you need to look at your daily note settings, make sure that you're pulling your template properly. So I have my own templates daily, which I've shown you in a previous video. And then you can choose to open daily neurons, startup or not. I've actually found this is not the best setting to turn on because you'll have issues with sync. So when I opened up my iPad, it will open the daily note automatically. It will run my template stuff. And then it will also sink any notes I had from my Mac, which means I'll have duplicate stuff. It'll, I'll have to clean it up. So I actually find it best not to turn this on. If you really want to open your daily note quick, there is something in the command palette open next daily note, open today's daily note. And I tied that to a keyboard command which I set a custom. The other thing we're going to look at, and we haven't talked really about plug-ins yet, his day planner. And I'll show you what it is here. And it can be a really good tool if you wanna do time blocking for your system, which I do, I used a planar fairly regularly. I also do like to do it in a notebook right beside me as well. There's another good way to do it, in which case you can see my settings here I turn. I want command mode on which is the default. And it completes past items for me, you can do a mermaid Gantt chart if you want. If you don't get that, if you don't want a Gantt chart is you don't want it. And then the status bar, these are basically default settings. I haven't really dug through all of these things because it just wasn't useful to me. So here's today's daily note. So what I use this for often would be something in the future. So I actually did have a note here and just talk to for my stand-up meeting for the employees that I manage at 0830, I actually had a note here which I erased. So you didn't see it. And it was called Employee 1 laptop. I also had a note here for a client one, stuff about a design that we're getting from them just so I can for my team about that. So you can see step ahead like Thursday or to have notes for Thursday for internal meeting. I have notes for next Monday when I talk to my boss at 11, and I've used the calendar to continue to show these in forward. Also use it during meetings to take notes on a meeting just in my daily notes so that I have them. Another thing you'll see here is a time log. I'm going to use this many days, but not all days in this case, I would do something like this morning I read read 700 provident, site duplication, something I had to do. It's kinda keep a track of what I've done in the day. That's one way you can approach your daily notes, which I use fairly regularly. The other thing I would sometimes do is day planner. So with that, I'd say day planner. And I want to link or at a day planner template for today to the current note. So now I have a day planner added to this note. And the way this would work is it will actually go, sorry, 600 breed. And I actually need to do a semicolon in their hand at 7070 rabbit site cation. And the next thing we can do is day planner showed the day planner timeline, which is our second option here. It says there's no planner data, but now it's populated, right? So now it's read. Not enter again. And I can say that. I know it. Sorry. 083009, under run. And then at lunch, Tom had a call and then at 30. So I'm just planning out my day. And you can see that down here where it actually plan out my day forming. And lets me see that. And let's me kind of schedule my day syllabi, have it ready for myself. And so I look down, I do this sometimes in a notebook as well. And I have that right beside me as well because it's what I did today. I didn't actually use day planner today. And then it also has some keywords. What do I do that? 1330. All right, and again, and then I kinda ended up at 15, 30. And so that is a keyword and so that I could actually ends the day planner. So it's not going to be trying to keep track of anything past that. So that's two good ways to use your daily notes. One is to keep a time log and then day planner as well can be a really good tool to plan your day so that you know what's happening. In our next video, we're going to look at sinking obsidian files and talk a little bit about which file providers are good and what I use now for my files thinking. 11. Syncing Your Files: In this video, we're gonna take a look at file sinking and what I think you should do. Now, ultimately, obsidian is just a folder of files. There's nothing else that just files on your computer so you can sync it with anything you want. You can use iCloud, which I've used and it worked quite well. You can use Dropbox, you can use Box.com, any service basically that syncs your files back and forth. All you have to do is point obsidian at that folder, you have a sink system. Now, there are some issues and some of them, some of them are not fully end-to-end encrypted. Some of them are end-to-end encrypted when it transfers along, but when it's on their servers, it's not really encrypted. Icloud is like that. It is encrypted as it transfers, but even on your computer, it's not encrypted over there. It's questionable if it's encrypted or if they can give the keys out, you can definitely with iOS backups, have your data taken that way in your data is actually on your iPhone. So that's another thing to think about when you sync your devices. But what I think really is the best option is obsidian sync. So when we look at Obsidian sink and let's actually look at my vault so I can show you all the settings here. When you look at Obsidian sink and we can go into settings down at the bottom. I can choose which vault I want to pick with, so I can have multiple remote vaults. I can choose the status of my sake. I can pause it if I really want. I can choose what I wanted to do with deleted files that keeps a file history as well. It'll show me the sink activity if it wants. And then here's where I think a lot of the real power comes from is that you can sync images if you want. You can sync audio, you can sync videos sink PDFs. So I'll basically all the file types just like some of the other ones, but you can be selective about it with obsidian. And then you can decide what you want to sync for settings so I can sink my main settings. Actually turn this off earlier in the course. So a bunch of other things haven't been sinking sink my appearance, sink themes and snippets. I want that sink my hotkey. So I wanted to hotkeys thanked think, sink my active and core plugin list yet. So I can sink my plugin settings back and forth between everything. And that's where I think a lot of the power comes from in the obsidian sink. It means that you don't have to worry about it anymore. You can simply use the app in your settings are going to sink back and forth. It works really well, with the exception that I talked about in the daily notes video where sometimes it's not fast enough, you open up your daily note in your other device and it hasn't sync those across yet. And this happens with iCloud as well with any sync service I've tried. And then your template fills itself out and you have a conflict because it fills itself out and you have extra data in there as well. That's the only thing I found. Every sync service doesn't do. The other nice thing about obsidian is that it's fully untethered, encrypted, you provide the key. So I have talked to developers about this and they said they don't have an audit on it. But they said they use AES-256 encrypted encryption, which is good encryption. And ultimately you have to trust someone at some point. So I trust the obsidian developers and I use obsidian sink. I pay the $5 a month to use it because it is just an excellent option. Especially because it thinks all of your settings, which a lot of people don't know. So my recommendation is just to pay for obsidian sink. If that feels like a little bit too much for you, then by all means use iCloud, use whatever File Sync Service you use. And all you have to do is point your obsidian volts at different devices to the folder that you're sinking. That's it. It will work. In our next video, we're going to look a little bit at the obsidian keyboard commands, how you set them and just what you can set them up to be. 12. Keyboard Commands: In this video, we're going to look at some of the key keyboard commands. I think you should know that I use all the time that are just excellent to help you really navigate obsidian. Now to start, one of the best keyboard commands is actually Command or Control P. This opens the command palette. This will give you any access to any plug-in, anything that is set up in the system to have a command. So you saw in earlier videos where I showed you day planner and I showed you how I access that. Also use it regularly to split vertically or to split horizontally. So I can set up what I want. And these again work on Mac and on Windows Control P, and then work on your iPad or iOS device as well to use Command or Control P. Next up is commando, opens files, so that way you can search any file you want and it will open it for you. They're good keyboard command to know Command 0 or Control 0. Next up, new note, command, that new note. Note, now have a new note and I can add content to it. And now I'm ready just with command N to have my new note. Now when you really want to dig fine-grained into database, a good keyword command is Command Shift F. Control Shift F, depending on what system you're on. And that's going to allow you to open the search pane or really easily to search anything so I can search content. We can also add the explain search term match. All of text is new content. All right, If I do like that, It's exact match new content only. So if I didn't have new content, if I had new content, it shouldn't match anymore. So I went away. If I did this, it's looking for anytime I use the word new or anytime I use the word content. Next up command option and either the left or right arrows or Control Alt and either the left or right arrows that makes you navigate back. So I can navigate back to different pains that I was actually active in right now is a good one that I use regularly. If I go into my Kanban board and then I want to go back into it. I can hit Command Option and the left arrow, it will take me back. Next up, how to follow a link. So if I go to my untitled note, and then if I create a link, that new note, I'll have a link here that I could follow. Clicking on it doesn't do anything and this is where you hold Command or Control, and it will open up your new link. There's also works on your iPad as well. And then what I really like is move files, file, you tie that on my own to control command M right here. If I go to move file, I actually have to go move file to another folder. So what I really want to do is come into my keyboard commands, hotkeys to go to move. And this is where I can set it. I click on the little asterix here and I get depressed. So Control Command M. And now I have that tied to move file. And now I can move it to anything I want. Let's move this to call it a note for now. And I've dealt with that file out of my inbox and it's now off to where it should be filed. That's really get there a lot more keyboard commands. When you saw the command palette, there's lots more you can do with your keyboard commands, but I think those are the big ones that you're really going to need to know, specifically Command P to access the command palette and search for other commands. I use that daily. I use that all the time because I can't remember every keyboard command. All right, if I created a 100 keyboard commands, I won't remember them all. So the goal is remember the few that you really need regularly. And then remember that you have command P to access the command palette and access everything else. In our next video, we're gonna take a look at the graph view just to have an idea of how I use it. So you can see my graph and just get an idea of how you could use it too. 13. Graph View: In this video, we're going to take a look at the graph view and what you can do with it, what I use it for probably a big focus and how I find it beneficial because I think it is easy to look at the graph view and think it looks really cool and then not really use it for anything of value. So this is my graph view and one of my favorite things to do is to have color-coding. So you can see you have color-coding for writing idea with red. And I can actually hover over 1. How do we give parents and kids freedom so that whenever they look at how we have said that kids can't do anything, be anything on their own. And that also means that parents, unless they can afford to pay for some sort of childcare all the time. They don't have any freedom either. And so we have reduced parental freedom and reduce the child freedom. Alright, and we can see what that links out to it links up to this main node over here, the depth of expertise. And a linked out to a few other things, right? Linked out to selfish reason to have more kids both books. So that is one of the things I'll use it for and I'll look for a red note that is continuing to grow in size. And that's something that actually happens as you link to things more you can say about these big green ones here are tagged note, right? Book. These are tags. And they link out and they grow as you get more links to them. So in my tags or links my tag don't video. I talked about how exactly I use tag note and you say I have them in here as well, marked in blue. And so I would look for a tag note again here that is big and this is why I often come to you because it's one of the biggest it's community. Another one I could look at would be right here, the rehearsal loop, right? We have a couple of links to that as a tag note. And my goal here is to really dig in and find out which ones are getting bigger and then which ones I should investigate more because I'm making more connections and that's why I do the links. Now there's a few other things in here you can do. I can actually hide tags. If I want to do now, I don't see them. I still do see my tag notes and blue, right? And ableism is one tag note. Again, community, you'll be down here on its own. It's not that big tag note I have COVID-19 is one that I have as well. Acceptance. So I can create new groups by new group. And I can do anything I want in here. I could even say community and give it a color. Let's give it purple. All right, I'll start to see some that have the word community in them, they organized mind has that or a normal people weekend go existing files only. So this will exclude any file that you have linked to. So if you use the double square brackets, it doesn't actually create the file. It doesn't create the file until you click on it or create it manually. And in this case, we can now see that there's a bunch of art created. So they don't actually exist. They are just files that are out there that'll be like also show orphans the files that have no links. And that's actually useful to see. Occasionally I've actually seen, I used to see this more. You can find out, Here's one right here. Down here is one. So we have kind of an orphan out here. This is a good use for it. When I look around and I see that this doesn't really sit anywhere in, it's an orphan. So this is all books on race. So I am white guy and this is books on First Nations, African-American, any minority group. So books on race. And I can see that that is out on its own, right? There's another thing I can see here. We're using Empower daughters sits kinda out on its own at this point. And this helps me identify those things. Are the things you can do here is from and display arrows. So you can show the zoom in a bit for that. I'm going over here. You can see the direction of connection, right? You see there's an arrow into this. The arrows off. So to help you see if it's something that's connecting in or out of something. And you can change your line thickness. If we want thicker lines, you can change the node size overall. So this grows every note a little bit. And then your bigger nodes will just be bigger as well. Then we can also change the forces with which they repel. So we want Center force, right? Repel forests, link forest distance. So I don't really play with a link forces. Although I think I'm going to like slightly bigger nodes maybe. And I'm just scrolling back and forth with the click wheel on my mouse and it kind of scrolls in to where you are clicking. So one thing I don't love right now as I look at this today, they're not sure that my blue color right here is actually different enough from everything else. So maybe at Green will do better. Just looking to see something visually striking that I can really see what like I want to be able to identify tag notes, maybe green is a better one. There. Writing ideas and red are good. And that's a really your graph view. So up here in your search, you can also, and I've shown this another one. If I wanted to search basic income, I've now filtered down, this will actually use any of the search parameters that are allowed in the search box on your site or on your in the file pair file menu. So up here where we went in here and hit search, click any of the parameters in there and turn them into a search of your graph view. I think that's where it's useful for your graph view. I don't think that your graph, you, is that useful if you're only just looking at it? It's pretty and it can be neat to show off, I guess, but I don't think it's that useful to you ultimately, unless you're actually using your filters, using your searching and really digging into what's in there. And then knowing what's in here. 14. Getting Obsidian Help: In this video, we're going to look at some of the ways that you can get help from Obsidian, from that community, from discord and from the forum. Now one of the first places you can go to get help is to go in and click your vault. And then you can open up the Help fault. So this is a demo and help fault. We can open that up. And now we have a bunch of information about obsidian, how to use it, and just different things we can do it right? Advanced topics. What different file formats I can take third party plugins, how to use the URI schemes. That's one really, really good spot for you to look. If you're looking for obsidian help. Next, if you go to the obsidian site, you'll go to the community navigation item. And there's two options here. You can join the Discord server, which is excellent, or you can visit the forum. And the forum, you can ask questions, right? There's announcements, there's bug reports. If you have an issue, requests for features, you can show off the different work you're doing under the share and showcase different plug-in ideas that come up. I'm knowledge management and methodologies for how to develop an obsidian database, some developer stuff, mobile stuff, metastatic. So just about how we operate the forum FAQ and then a bunch of archive things. It's another really good spot. Or we can hop into discord. So I already have discord up. Or I've joined this server already. Discord is really good if you have a question instantly and if you really want to dig in and you need some help and you can be their real time. I actually find it a bit hard to follow as a feed because it is just so busy. Because obsidian is so popular now. And I actually find that it is less useful to me on the desktop, partially because it takes so long to start up. And to get into different groups. I find it much more useful on my iPad. So in the obsidian discord, there's just less people asking for help or offering help. Lots of good links will come up. Good place to look as even the star board, see what people have started. So this will be different posts people have used made about obsidian. This will be just announcements, plug-in update, CSS theme updates, or I'll even put my videos in here so they get started and then they often get captured in other places. And there's lots of different channels in here if using CSS or using the publish mobile, there's insider builds. If you're an insider or VIP builds if you're part of that. And those are all just really good spots. If you need help with obsidian, if you have questions, by all means hop in there. I don't know if you noticed. I actually have a discord channel as well that's linked in all of my YouTube videos. So if you want to go in there and ask some questions, feel free to join me. 15. Community Resources: In this video, we're gonna take a look at a few of the other wider community resources that are available to you. If you want to learn more about obsidian. One of my favorite resources is the obsidian roundup newsletter is run by Eleanor chronic. And it's just excellent. I pay for it. I get featured in it sometimes as well. And she just doesn't excellent job of rounding up everything that's happening in obsidian. I regularly actually block out time in my week to make sure I can sit down and go through the resources that she finds because they're excellent resources, right? Excellent updates on everything that's happening in obsidian. Next up is the sweet setup disclaimer. Actually write for this site sometimes that helped build it. So they have been doing an excellent series lately, an obsidian introduction to the callback URLs. They have actually released a course which is right here to Obsidian and beyond, which I think is funny based on Toy Story. Well, I don't actually know if that's what they did. And have a great set of obsidian, obsidian resources for you to look at. Done by Mike who was an excellent screencasts. Next up, Brian checks. He has done a lot of really good short videos on how to use obsidian, right? He has one here on Kindle notes, which I have on my list to watch. And he has this really long four-hour one or he really dives in and shows you every aspect of his obsidian setup. I haven't had a chance to go through that whole video yet. But it is a good video. I I would assume it's a good video because of all the other stuff I've seen. One of the ones that I really love though is his tags versus links and obsidian, because it really helped me formulate my idea for tag notes. Without that, I maybe would have come to tag notes eventually, but he certainly helped me get there faster. Next sounds a younger, he is a great developer, was what he does a lot of the time. But really, he does some great videos on just productivity in general, right? So we have some here and obsidian flashcard apps for learning task management. How to take notes efficiently from YouTube. That was a good video. I enjoyed that one. Productive mindsets. I've enjoyed how we really works with obsidian and logs act together. I've enjoyed his thinking on that. Mixed up, linking your thinking by Nick, Milo has been just really a good resource for quite awhile. He does a lot of good things in here. This is one reading well, and I'm city and that's something that I really want to dig into, especially with the long form plugin, which haven't had a chance to dig into yet for writing long-form content because Scribner just isn't cutting it anymore. So he did a lot of good videos just around interviews with team or with people in a community, interviews with people like showing off their databases, It's good job. He also did a course linking your thinking, building your custom PKR system now where he actually works with you and then gets you to show off his shoe, off your database to him. And some of his videos are actually that actually really like his theme cyber Tron that I use. I uses the myths of really, really good thing. And they're good course here is from key productive, I actually believe. Who did that. So Brian Jenkins just into rows did that. So it's a good course. I actually have I purchased this myself. Yeah, I adjusted just into roasted this the obsidian expert. I'm just talking about Justin's channel on just a second and it has been really good. I've gone through a good chunk of the course. I've gone through everything yet, but I think it's a great course on just how to get through obsidian, how to do things well on that. And just into roses channel is also really good, effective remote work. So we've got a good read wise comes to obsidian video. He looked at craft a couple months ago, sitting as a predictor for productive tool. Productivity tool has also been a really good one. Plaintext con bond with obsidian data view That was good All the Light think that the kanban plug-in in obsidian is far better. Ultimately, there's lots of really good community. There's R says that I can say like my channel, think my channels that could community resource as well. 16. Mobile Devices: Now at 1, I actually left obsidian for Kraft specifically because Kraft had a really good mobile support. Now the time obsidian had nothing, it said that was going to be a good viewer for your files, but it wasn't ever going to be a full editor. And the truth is that even most of my reading, most of my research with my iPad in hand, I do most of my notes on my iPad. Actually, we're sitting at my desk and my main computer and my iPad is on a visa arm right beside me with the keyboard. And I actually do a lot of my reading, my research over there because it's just the device I prefer to work on. This video, we're gonna take a quick look at what you can't do. I'm actually probably not going to show the iPad as much because the phone is where you have the biggest difference, especially if you have a keyboard with your iPad, then it works just like the desktop. And then the phone showing you the phone will give you most of the same at views that you see in the iPad. Just have more screen real estate there. So this is the iPhone version. You can see it's open to my daily note. Now because I use sync with obsidian, it actually sinks my settings over as well. One thing I do notice regular that with the sink is slower. So when I open the app, will open up the daily note and then it will run all your template or changes on it, which is how I get this top bits up here. That's how I get this top bit. And then it'll sink and I'll have duplicates. So that is one thing I actually recommend you don't set it to open up your daily note all the time. Now, basically to use it, it has a lot of the same things we have on the one sidebar on the left, we have all the same icons that we can have on our desktop version, right? We can open a different vault if we want. And we come over to the side, we can do anything you want, right? I can do my random note as well. If I wanted smart random note, there's no search results available. I will show you that in a future video how I use smart random notes to make obsidian work for me and helped me make connections. Really, we have pretty much everything we want in here. We can have some specific mobile settings in here. This edit, what we have in our keyboard at the bottom, when we're editing a note. When we're in a note, we can open the command palette by pulling down, so I can now save my current file. I could even go to open, open settings, opened my weekly note. Anything that we have in our command palette, which we hit Command P, which I do on the iPad with Command P, usually because they often have a keyboard where I'm working with it. Although again, swipe down, we'll still do that. On the other side we have. And the same thing to do, right? I can have my backlinks on the side. I can have my calendar view if I like that as well. On the iPad, you can even hit this pin up here to pin your sidebar. Although looking at my iPhone, as you can see from the view, it just not really worthwhile and my iPhone to do because my phone isn't narrow and most of them are. And we could look at our graph view as well. Right? And you can see, I can hide all of these so that I can just really actually dig into my graph if I wanted. Again, I find this mostly useful on the iPad if I'm going to be doing it at all. What did you find this most useful for is adding new things to my inbox. That is mostly where you use it or referring to a note that I have in my iOS vault, if I make a new connection, I'm reading and I really want to dive in, and which case I would be looking at say footprints, which is a book I'm reading about the fossil trace fossils that our current society will leave behind. And they might be reading it while the kids are swimming lessons. And I would take a new note in here. Alright, we have our keyboard when you select something. And then we can actually customize this. This is our mobile setting where we can customize its checklists, indenter out, dent, undo, redo, hide the keyboard and came and go to settings here. And mobile, this is where we change all of those things. I've left them all the same. Mind would mostly use the double square bracket, bold headings, or we can choose our heading. Heading, heading. I don't want the QR code. That's mostly what I use. I don't use tags a lot. I don't upload images. I that's not really what I do. I use it for taking notes on the go adding to stuff as I'm reading. And I wanna using the iPad version, I generally have a keyboard plugged in. Now as far as most of what you will get to use with this, it's pretty much every plugin will work. There are a few that don't work, but pretty much every plugin and obsidian, it will work with the mobile devices without any issues. And that's really why I came back because I used the kanban board for my content calendars. And then digging in to my notes as I start writing, I kept generating more links and then I wanted all the links to my content, to the new stuff I was writing the new links, I generated the new ideas in one spot. And then obsidian just made more sense. So the mobile apps are excellent. They are far more than viewers. They do pretty much anything you want there, almost nothing that it will not do. And the only thing that really won't do is stuff in Community Plugins. There's one or two that don't work. And they're generally very minor features, all the major features that I've showed you as I've been going through my vault work just fine. 17. plugins: In this video, we're going to take a look at some of the plug-ins that I think are most useful in your obsidian database. So first off, let's look at Obsidian and I'm going to use Command comma, which is a standard keyboard key on Mac to look at our plug-ins, and specifically we're gonna look at Community Plugins. There are some core plugins that I think are good for you. Daily notes being one, right? Dealing notes I've already turned on is one of the good ones that I think that really everyone should be using in some form. I go back and forth between using it heavily and using it just a little bit. Or step is Community Plugins and turn off safe mode, turn off safe mode. And now we can see them really that warning just said, Hey, bad things can happen, It's not our fault. That's it. And honestly, a lot of the power is in obsidian is indicated you plugin, so I'm going to say it is excellent for you. Then we hit Browse, and now we have our options on the other side. And here's some the ones that I really like first up is calendar. Calendar do it adds a calendar. So if you looked at my default obsidian vault, Let's open up a new vault again. Here. Open the vault. And we're going to open up my iOS vault. Say I've calendar right over here. This is a big important thing. I use it all the time to navigate between different notes and to die and navigate to a different days. So that's one that I really like Calendar. So to install a plugin, all we do is click Install. Now, installing the plugin, installed successfully and then we enable it. And then he came back out here to calendar. We can show it right there. Now we can see a calendar. We could jump around between our daily notes. Now. Write new daily note, Create. So now it's created a new daily note for that day in my inbox, you can see it just created the head great, great plugin I use every day to make my obsidian experience better. Next up, templates. Templates is amazing. So what template or allows you to do is it allows you to fill in a whole bunch of parameters in your vaults and just create new notes. So if you look at my daily notes every day, that doesn't exist because then I can make sure nothing shows up. And he sought flash for a second and I populated these dates, links to the date showing you the modifications and everything. That is all because of templates. If I go into my templates folder, I have my daily note. If I look at it, you can see it's actually got these variables. This code in there, which was what template or uses to populate the variables later. Next up we should use day planner is another good one. I go off and on between using it. I've done a YouTube video on this as well. And it lets you use your daily note and basically time block your day. I'll go back and forth between that and then you can actually see on the cover of my notes a little bit. But you can actually say I go between that and doing a something like this actual notebook. Just depending on how many feeling lately that lately I'm actually feeling a notebook. But day planner views.py for quite a few months as well. Another good one is going to be outliner. So what does it want to let you do outliner? Let's, you can see in the GIF here, actually move a bulleted items up and down easily with some keyboard commands. My only drawback with outliner is that it is not compatible with iPad OS with your mobile devices. So that's a kind of a big drawback for it, but ultimately it's an excellent plug-in, so I still recommend it and I still use it when I have it available. Next up cycle through veins. It's really feel like it should be a default feature. So this allows you to switch between open different pains in your database. So it's control tab by default. So actually let's install it and I can show you exactly what it does. Cycle through pains and install and enable. Split. Horizontally. I can now do control or Control tab and you can see that my cursor is switching back and forth between them. So I have multiple panes. I can just switch back and forth between them. That is much nicer or makes it much easier to work with your paintings. Next, note, refactor. Refactor. This lets me take notes in my database and split them out. So if I had a long I'll show it here. It's been enabled cloud here. So if I have so now that I have this, I can use no refactor and I can say Refactor. And I'm going to extract the selection to a new note. My first line is a filename at that, and now I have a link to it and I could even change it title, right? Change my new title up there. And I have my note as a single atomic thought instead, which is excellent. And then I would actually move this to next next advanced tables. So this one is if you're dealing with a lot of HTML, sort of mark down tables, this helps you build out tables better because the markdown table is paying them up. Just as this will help you work with tables better if you're really using them lots. If you're not, then this is not one you need. And then finally, we'll look at hotkeys. Hotkeys plus, plus. This gives you a bunch of extra hockey abilities for obsidian that you can use a puts them on the control panel as well and the command palette. So you can just dive back and forth between them. You can set up better keyboard commands. There's a whole bunch of other things you can do with hotkeys plus plus. So once you're familiar with obsidian, diving into hotkeys, plus plus is an excellent option to really start super charging. How you use it. 18. Themes: In this video, we're going to take a look at installing themes for your obsidian application. To do that when we start by going to our settings. And then we're gonna go to Appearance. And we're going to look for themes. That's really it. So we have just the default theme to start, and then they can go to community themes. You can also build your own if you really want to. There are excellent community themes out there though. So my one that I love most is actually cybercrime. Right here. I love this the most. And I love it the most because what it does with it increases the font size a bit, which I like. It. I think it doesn't really good job on mobile as well. One of my favorite things really though, is what it does with bold, italics, stuff like this. Nick has done a really good job of quote, of color-coding things for you. So you can really see, right? And you see each heading color changes a bit. So heading. So you can really see visually what's happening in your document. I really like that. He also has a light theme in here. If you'd like cybercrime light for the dark, especially on my iPad, I find that the new with the newer iPad screen is so bright that light themes are just far too bright for me. My wife always limits how dark I keep my devices. But there's tons grew boxes. Another nice one right here. I also ease neon. It's pretty cool to Hades neon use. So it is neon is just loud and bold and I'll like that, like the glow to it doesn't do the bold metallics, but it has a better blockquote style. And so really, when you come into your appearance settings, you can also do some tweaking of the fonts. And you can change if you want a translucent window. I never liked that in a way anybody does. And then I can choose any theme I want here. Between them. We're going to browse and choosing. I came in, say dark themes only or light themes only what I, whatever I want. So I like a dark theme, so it's actually detected that and will only show me stuff that has a dark option. You can see there's lots of different options in here. Some of them are Christmas. I don't know why you'd want that, but pay you do you don't worry about anything else? Thank themes can offer you some extra customization just to help you see obsidian and away you want to see it. Specifically, like I said, cybercrime would think Milos theme I really like because of how it treats bold and italics. So that's what I would recommend as well as grew boxes really good. And the 80s neon theme, those are the ones that I've used. If you're going to go past the default theme. 19. Aliases: In this video, we're gonna take a look at aliases in obsidian and they're super, super powerful. So what does an alias start by showing you, Let's go to my smoking one. So an alias is this right here. So we need three dashes. Three dashes to end. This is YAML format two spaces. And so now my file is actually titled smoking, but it also will link to cigarettes, cigarettes, and tobacco. So if I was in a new note, let's split this and create a new note. Delete me. And I was going to link to something that I wanted to link to tobacco. It actually links and you can see here in the formatting links to the smoking file pipe. Tobacco pipe is this vertical character in the middle. And so if I ever went to preview, which actually don't use a ton, it actually will only show me tobacco, but it does link and it would show me in the backlinks pain for this one that you delete me smoking tobacco is a back a link to this as a one really good way to normalize language. That is something that I do regularly when I'm reading across multiple genres, you have to normalize the language that each author uses to a standard language because they're often talking about the same thing. Another really good one that I've used it for is manufactured doubt. Because manufactured doubt is actually the same thing as fake news. That's just what we call it now or misinformation or alternative facts. These are all the same things. So I have a description of what it actually is like when the smoking cigarette companies funded other studies to get people concerned about things that weren't smoking. And this came into a bunch of different ways. But when I normalized language actually went back through and looked up fake news, misinformation, alternative facts, and normalize it all into a single file as well. And that's really aliases. You can see here formatting wise, if it's a going to be a worth the space, you need to use quotes around it. Misinformation, single words. So I can do that with just a single word. Alternative facts. You can technically also do that all on one line with a comma separating, right? I could do big news. Other thing, but I actually like the dash format better for YAML because I just find it easier to read. So I would recommend you stick with that. 20. Search: Welcome. In this video we are going to look at search, how use it from the basics right up to advanced operators for searching just a line or searching just a block of code. The first thing you're going to want to do is to open up your settings for obsidian. You're going to want to make sure you have search turned on. And since we're here, let's just turn on starred. If you notice, I actually use the built-in search here. Should type that right to find the two things. And we'll come back and we'll learn about both of these in a minute, in the starred, in a minute. So the first thing you want to make sure you do is look at the search panel. You can access that generally in your left hand sidebar. It's often starts off with the files panel, but you can click over to search with the magnifying glass. Or first thing is whether we match case or not. So do we want to have an exact match for case? You can't override that in a search operator if you want, which we'll talk about later, explained search term. So I think this is important. I really think that's important. You want to explain the search term Han. If you want to collapse results, show more context. So it actually shows more of a preview of your notes. You can change the order and you can copy the search results. So let's start with a search and you can see here that we'll get to some of these later. But let's search for driving. So you can see here I have a bunch of results and they'll turn on explains search term. This is important, especially as you're learning a search matches texts deriving. And that's just a basic search for finding any note that has deriving in it, right? You can see one from a data note here. You can say automated vehicles. You can do just a bunch of different things in here as you can see with driving. So another thing we can do here is we can search for notes that have multiple different items. So we can use the search operator OR and make it say black to find out who's driving or black in it. If we want to search for a multi-word item, we can search for electric. And I'll look for stuff contains an exact fits this bill electric, right? Even have results. But the important part really here is the double-quotes. Once I have double quotes, it will look for exactly that. If I take out the quotes, it will look for electric driving matches all of these to all right, if I want to go or electric or driving. So now if I want to search driving, we can use our start search. If this is going to be a search I want all the time I can now go over to starred star and star current search. I have a star search for driving. While it wouldn't actually save the starred search of driving because it's so simplistic. It, this is very useful force complex searches that you build up and you use multiple times. And if you right-click, you can then remove it from start. And that was with the star plugin that you have to have turned on in settings. Now there's another thing you can do here with rejects and you use double quotes and now we are certain double slash and now you're getting into Regex. But the truth is, regex is a bit of a dark art. I'm a programmer and rejects is a bit of a dark art, so I am not even going to show you how to use it. Most people don't need it. There's lots of other search operators you can use in obsidian that will just help you get the searches you want without using regex. If you really say, Hey, rejects will solve this problem, you probably already know about it. And then you can just use projects in your search. All right, now let's start digging into our advanced operators. And you can actually find this as well by clicking on the information. And this will for me to choose which browser. And you can actually go through the obsidian help to find exactly what you're doing. And you can see even here I said it Kill Man o is normally how you search, but it's really control shift or Command Shift F actually opens the search panel. So a really good way to show this is if I open a new file and I say search test. And then if I can shrink by sidebars for you and split horizontally. So now we're going to use what's called the query block query. And now any search that I want will show up. So searches work inside query blocks, no problem. So the first thing we're going to talk about is path. So I search path and then I put it in the file paths, Let's say daily notes. You can see it has now any path that includes daily notes. So you can see here it says daily as the actual file title for a daily notes section of this course or anything in daily. So this can be pasted directly into our search if we wanted to find this just in our search path daily. Next up, let's look at file operates very similar. We use daily again, this is going to find any file with the title of daily, very similar to Command 0 in this except this is embeddable. And say I have daily notes. Can I pull do Kanban cards into my daily note? If I see you combine task for today. These are all just different notes that I have sitting around in my database. Next up, content. This is to search the content of a note. So for content we could search, Let's say deriving again, right? And we're seeing the content deriving. Some of these may seem like you wouldn't use them, but it's when you combine them into multiple, multifaceted searches that you really get into a lot of their power. Next is tagged with the tag we could use. Um, type tag, hit Colon, use our brackets and then I would search for our tag. So let's say note. I think they show me everything that says tagged note in it. And that line. This will allow us to search if there is something on the same line. So let's say for driving. So this is filtered my notes down to only places where black people are black driving is on the same line. And similarly we have block. And we'll do something similar. If I do black driving, we still have the same amount of results in a block and a line is that a block is. And a thing where this is a block that says black and arriving on it. It's now we have our next one. And I can keep going and keep going and keep going, and that's fine. So this could be like a multiple paragraph and have a block so I could keep typing. I could even go back to the beginning and tight right now that we're still rapping, even though we're wrapping text and this is on multiple lines, that's still fine. On that. Another one we could do is with section. So section, section. And so this case, we could say, I want to find things that say and even change this one to say no section. And this will find stuff that says black and driving in the same section. So that would be between headings. So if you're looking for something, say inside a heading and subheading, then this will show you between headings and you say I have more spaces, right? Black spaces or is in here, because black and deriving is in multiple different areas on, in my notes. Another thing you can do is actually deal with how you match case, match case, block driving. So I can change how I search operators work based on whether I turn match case on or whether I do, nor case, I can change that based on anything I want. And that means I can even override the default setting, which you find up here just by changing ignore case or match case. Finally, let's look at some tasks. So we have some task operators and we can go task on, and I can search anything. Driving task o is there a share? Task, hang Chair. Good. It's good to know that I didn't do this and I didn't actually manage my tasks inside obsidian. Those two operators task is anything you can see I have can't get hammock chair and Hank attack picture, right? One is done once and done. So if I was to say task to do, and that's only show me the ones who do have a new task done and will only show me the ones that need to be done still. Now let's look at combining these queries. No, resubmit my screen and preview it so you can see it. So now I am combining my queries. We're searching a path of notes or path tags or path books. So I'm searching on this side, you can see if it's in the path of books as this is books that I have read of looking at path notes or a path of tags. And this is tag notes for me. And then it's showing me my query with multiple different operators in it. So this is where I think you really get into the power. So I could search something by line, bisection, change case and really get into the power. And this is why I don't think most of you need rejects. This is also how I say using search in practice. So we'll talk about workspaces in another video. But if I go Load Workspace and search random note, there's actually loaded my random note plug-in and loaded, basically built, pre-built how I want things set up. So it actually has saved the search in it as well, save the ordering. But what I really want is the random note right there. So this is the smart random note and it's gonna open up a random note. So this is resentment to tag note. I don't have anything else to this, but I can look over here and start to say, what other things match in here. I do this, try to do this fairly regularly, right? Add-in, added income of women joining the workforce didn't increase prosperity. This from strong towns. A book that I read and I will use this fairly regularly just to help expand my notes so I can continue to see. I can can continue to find old notes and make more connections with I work. 21. Workspaces: In this video, we're going to take a look at Obsidian workspaces, what they are, what you can do with them, and just how awesome they are, because I think they are an excellent feature of obsidian. So workspace is what is it? This is actually a plug-in. It is a core plugin, so you have to turn it on and your core plugins, and then you have basically saved states. So something I showed in a previous video was if I open, I go workspace, Load Workspace. And I can choose my workspace. As you can see, you have four of them died. My writing workspace, that's literally just opens up into full screen. This is what it basically is a saved configuration. So saved file saves your search panel, saves everything. So it's opened up to my Kanban board and how I develop home my, my videos for my YouTube channel. And see here's my idea is you can see what I'm working on useful things and iPadOS 15 be recording that in a couple days. And it may be doing one on Devin thing to go. And then I have a lot of stuff because it's mildly disorganized right now which happens? Or you can go to Workspace load, I can say book review. So I want two panels opened and I would usually open the book review. So I would open something like footprints review. On this side, open up prints. This is a review I did a while ago. So I actually have my where I'd be writing. This was my notes on the book. And that's how I would get to a real easy or I could go to Workspace. Random know this is one I also use and actually a saved search and save my panel configuration for that. So how do we get a workspace that we want? Really all we do is set up whatever we want, whether it's our sidebars opened or closed. So let's say you want to open up desk, build something. I'm kinda plan with desk bell that I want to be, I'll open up that and I want to be able to open it up in split with split vertically with some other node martyrs. Sure why not monitors? So now they have this setup with the panels I want in theory or if I wanted, my sidebar is open and open them. I can go over here and say Manage workspaces. I can save this as a test workspace and save. Now we can get right back to it. So if I went wanted to do work load and I want to go to writing C, I'm not writing. And then I can go to Load Workspace and I could go through test, thinking it right back to where we set up. So I think workspaces are powerful for you. And I think that as you get to know obsidian and get to know the configurations you want, they can save a lot of time and just clicking around and setting up UI. They're really good. It's a default plugin. You should all be using it. 22. Making Obsidian Work For You: In this video, we're going to go over a few things about how I think obsidian can really work for you. How you can integrate it into your workflow so you get the maximum benefit out of it. And just a few of my workflow tips that I use to get the maximum benefit from obsidian. So one of the big things that I really like is the smart random notes plug-ins. I'm gonna go to Community Plugins and it is already turned on. I'm just showing you how to do it. Check for updates is go to browse and we'll go random notes, smart random node. And the reason I like this is because it works with my saved searches. And so it actually bases Smart random note feature off my Saved Searches if I'm not better than the random node feature, because the random node feature does not do that. So actually for this loaded into workspace and I showed it to you before. So I'll go to Load Workspace. I'm going to go to a random note and it's actually puts the search up here and even really need that. So I can hide that. I'm looking for over here as backlinks and stuff. And so I'd hit P random note. Now just look through what I have. So this is a writing idea. Well-meaning parents sit on kids smoothing all problems. So this is from we don't want an easy cruise through life. We don't want an easy cruise through life, but parents are going to sit on top of their kids all the time smoothing away any, the ability for anything to go wrong. For me, this is the idea that we really baby children all the way up to like even their late teens and we don't let them have any negative consequences to their decisions. I get negative anything in life we like, you know, they get about mercury and talking to the teacher, which is not productive in my opinion. And then, then they learned that some other authority, not them as supposed to solve all their problems. And then they turn like whatever 1920 they go off and they're like suddenly have to solve their own problems and this is a bad thing. So when I find that idea and I tried to do this, I tried to do this every week. I'm not as good at it as I hope. But then I would actually go through and start to look for other ideas. So I didn't read through some notes. I think about what I've been reading and I take some time with each one, at least a couple of minutes and just look. So here's another one. This is the data detective. So I would even think about this as a book I read about Tim Harford. I have reviewed it online and I would just think like, is there anything else that I talked about in this book and I'd scan through the note there, any other thing that needs to be broken out into a smaller piece, into anything else that can help me increase my Web of Knowledge. And I do that, you know, a couple of times. Spotlight. I don't need that one. That's fine. Construction. Right. What else? So a Pattern Language, this is for city construction. All right. I would just kinda look through what else is in here that I maybe need to link. That's one of the ways that I really find it, helps me link long-term. So jeopardy as in. So this is actually a Jeopardy game show. So now we don't have double matches, right? And this comes from a school value speed over depth. So even the SATs, the LSAT's as talks about but nothing Gladwell and one was podcasts. The value speed over depth. They don't want you to take your time and think and have a good, strong answer. They want you to be as fast as possible. And so it actually valued a lot of these tests actually value people that are fast as opposed to people at heart can really do the job well. Which is funny because as you go to like your LSAT and as you get to like the highest judge levels, you need to be like slow methodical, think clearly about very complex issues as opposed to just being really quick. So it's a one way I really do it to make this work. Another way is by tag notes. So I have two types of notes and then come back here. I have tagged notes, which is like this event tag note that Annotate to Beirut massacre. I would see what else links to it only one right now, acceptance. And these are all ideas that may or may not turn to something bigger later. They may be something, they may not be something. So even here I would look at it right now and live, I'll just link this social acceptance rejection. Just add another link there. As authors in here as well in my tag, but really at the tag notes that are important. So addiction would also have an addiction. Your brain has become hard, shake and addiction. Great. I'll make some more tags in here. And these are things if I look to my graph view, that may be a big later. So if I go to my filters or sorry my groups, you can see that I have tagged notes in green. And so as I am looking, I will actually look for what is big in green. So something has COVID-19, That's a big, bigger idea. Something that I have linked to from a few different sources, right? One of them is the David detective, which has a bunch of links out. And you see there's a bunch of little ones in here. Delusion of explanatory depth links out to a few other things. I'm also look for, just for any note that's getting big writes. This writing idea over here is getting bigger. The difference between education and indoctrination. So what does that difference? What's the difference between education and indoctrination? And we're educating my kids or I am an MI indoctrinating them. So right now I'll actually do this slide will split vertically. And I want to go to k explainers. And I'll put this as an idea in here between education and indoctrination because it's something that I want to chase down kind of longer-term later on. And so I will look for things in my graph view that are continuing to collect weight, right? So it's a big one. This would be community. I knew that because it's one that I see often in your notes because it is just a big topic that I kinda dig into. All right, and there's some writing ideas around this as well. And the good thing about the graph view is finding things that are just kinda off on their own. So books on race, I've read a few books on race, right? I said The Color of Law, and also I read. It's not highlighting this one over here. It says, I know we're talking to white people or race, right? And we're getting some in here that are being talked about. And I can see right here there's a book. And this book links off to some other ideas as well. Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria is a book, but it's being linked to from the author. It's being linked to from savvy ally. So that gives it more weight, right? If I have multiple books I've linked to it, then it gives it more weight that I probably should be reading. And it's also linked to from what? Books on transgender because that's also been referenced in that category as well. And those are two of the big ways that I think that obsidian can be made to work for you. Having a good practice of going through your notes randomly just to see what's highlighted and see what you've learned new so that you can make more connections. And then really leveraging the graph. You, I think a lot of people think it's really pretty, but they don't dig into how it can be used with doing some highlighting. And then the tag notes I find are just better. There are ideas that are gonna go bigger. They are my thoughts. They are ways of categorizing information. Whereas notes or like someone else's thoughts on a topic. And so they often will link to a main tag. Note that I may expand on later and they may dig into more, but they are not necessarily the main content of the notes that I want to be developing long-term for myself. They are other people's thoughts and the terminals are more my thoughts or my ideas that will be developed long-term later.