First, search the help docs and this forum. Maybe your question has been answered! The debugging steps can help, too. Still stuck? Delete this line and proceed.
What I’m trying to find the usefulness of Obsidian through reading specific examples of how they use it.
Below this line, describe what you’re trying to accomplish so the community can help you find the best solution. →
Things I have tried. I traced a link, a tag, a property.
I don’t feel the input effort is worth the benefits, but I’m sure I can get more out of it with more guidance.
I don’t know of a better software to input my stuff.
Many search plugins (a latest one here), including the core search, regex for range search, such as part1.*?part2 or even part1[\s\S]*?part2 (add / in core search to the beginning of the query for regex search), many AI plugins with semantic search capabilities. K-Plex is soon going to come out with a public-ready version, Excalidraw plugin from the same author for a visual PKM approach, etc.
They say Obsidian has a learning curve. I think it’s more about digging for potential gold to be unearthed. Many many ways to use the program, which can be upgraded with one’s own plugins. I have something like three score plugins and scripts to better make use of the experience.
Others will just make use of aliases and the QuickSwitcher. Yes, you need to put in the time for aliases and all other properties, or have AI assisted Templater scripts to write them in for you. The possibilities are endless.
Hi aswhite I’ve been meaning to respond to your novel writing post but found it hard to guess your notes. It sounded like you’re using Obsidian as a bookmark manager to collect external resources for novel research, but haven’t read them or wrote your ideas yet?
The reply above me is confusing; I don’t think you’re having a technical search issue and you don’t need plugins or AI. I wonder if your issue is a general confusion about what information you’ve collected, what it’s for, how to categorise it and use it. i.e. regardless of app, brain, or physical stack of paper notes.
It’s hard to guess what you’re working with. Can you summarise the sort of notes you have, and what you’re using it for? What categories, themes, or folders? Are your notes your ideas, links to websites, scene outlines, etc? Have you tried to do the same purposes in another app or on paper? What does it mean that you’ve “traced a link, a tag, a property” - examples? More info will help us help you.
Are you trying to plan, outline, and worldbuild for stories?
One pattern that paid off for me: save the note you write, not just the link. I clip a source, add source and status properties, then link it from the project note where I actually use it. Later, retrieval is just opening that project and following the links back. A search for unread items in the project folder becomes my weekly review list. For me the value came on the second read, not from tagging everything up front.
Thanks for responding. My question is more basic. I am trying to figure out how to use Obsidian while writing a novel in another program. I collect articles from the web, enter books I’ve read, add thoughts as they come to me, etc. How can Obsidian help me make sense of what I collected or suggest what I should be doing? I am looking for folks who can describe how they do it so I can see if what they do can help me. Does that make sense?
Obsidian mostly supports you by providing tools like headings, search, and links while you do that stuff yourself. “What you should be doing”, especially, is something it’s not likely to help you with. Do you have reasons for collecting websites, entering media, and writing your thoughts? If so, those reasons can guide you. If you don’t have reasons, it’s going to be hard to figure out what to do.
I understand it supports with tools. I am trying to find out how people use those tools to write novels, just like I would find out how people use tools to carve statues. I would like someone to show me how they do it. I am expecting someone to say something like: I read books or articles, and I enter them in this way… I have thoughts and enter them in that way… . etc. Then, I used Obsidian to recover or gather or collect useful info from my entries by doing… The effort paid off because…
Can someone share their experience with me? Thank you.
I can’t help but feel you’re reading way too deeply into what Obsidian is or “could be” and giving it a mystical shine as a result. At the end of the day, it’s a text editor specialized for markdown. You can think of Obsidian like Microsoft Word, but for .md files instead of .docx, or Notepad/Notepad++ on steroids.
If you’re struggling to figure out how to use it, try divorcing yourself from the idea of Obsidian and focus on the basic text aspect of it. How would you take notes in Notepad? How would you take notes in MS Word? Try doing that, and when you hit a point where you think “I wish the notes I just wrote could do x,” see if Obsidian or one of its plugins can do that.
Start with simple text notes and build up, or if you want to jump in more deeply, treat it like you would MS Word.
That’s the best experience I can offer: treat Obsidian like you would Microsoft Word, using Markdown files instead of .docx files, because that’s what it’s core functionality is. Anything else on top of that is the icing and sprinkles on a cake.
Thank you, Marionette, but I have to believe others have found more value in Obsidian than in Word for linking and finding relationships. Otherwise, it would be no more than a word searcher for retrieving data. Surely, it is more than that.
Yes, sorry, I sort of forgot that when writing my response. But also: have you searched the web or the forum at all for examples of what people use their notes for? And what motivated you to start taking notes in the first place? Did you read about benefits you might get? Did you have some goal(s) you wanted to achieve or problem(s) to solve?