OBSIDIAN Credit: https://obsidian.md
Nifty note-taking with Obsidian
Nate Drake walks you through adopting the almighty Markdown-based note-taking app Obsidian to see whether it lives up to its legend.
OUR EXPERT
Nate Drake is a tech journalist specialising in cybersecurity and retro tech. Using Obsidian to plan out his project for lighthouses has helped him discover that they’re actually very heavy.
QUICK TIP
If you haven’t used Markdown before, check out Matt Cone’s awesome guide at www. markdown guide.org. Both the Basic Syntax and Cheat Sheet pages have all the information you need to get started.
Obsidian’s website describes the app as “a second brain for you, forever”. In plain English, O that means a tool that can help you take and organise a colossal number of notes in a simple way, from basic study notes to a full-blown wiki.
The program makes use of the Markdown markup language to format text, making it easy to import and export files. This simplifies tasks such as using links to jump between notes and organising large amounts of information.
Obsidian is not FOSS but the free tier fully supports Linux, doesn’t require registration and has some very powerful features. The program itself was developed by Shida Li and Erica Xu, who were unhappy with the existing note-taking software on offer.
There’s also a thriving Obsidian community (https:// obsidian.md/community) and a host of devs creating plugins to improve its rather minimalist interface.