How does Obsidian help you?

For me, I work in 3D and programming, so I collect a lot of heavily graphic material when I’m training and learning. Obsidian embeds images and media (especially animated gifs) really well. If I embed gifs in Notion or Trello, my computer fan goes wild. But in Obsidian, I have one of my documents with over 30 gifs, and my fan does not react. Locally-stored inline-gifs was the reason I originally moved to Obsidian.

Many other note-taking apps can’t even display gifs. (Some can, of course.)

I also heavily use the Random Notes and Smart Random Notes plugins to shuffle through random notes. It’s very easy for me to lose material into the long-forgotten mist. But if I shuffle my notes randomly, it resurfaces things, often in very serendipitous ways. (It might be my favourite part honestly.)

The local file-system structure means I can edit or change things by scripting Python. It’s so easy to access my media, if I need to make big changes, or replace media. It’s also easy to integrate with other tools, since you can easily append to the .md files. I track versions in .git and backup in multiple ways.

I don’t keep a fancy structure. I try to limit my use of folders and tags. Once I reach a level of complexity, I lose my mental model of the notes. So I keep it simple and light.

If you think very visually, and like that static structure of a mindmap, did you ever investigate the Juggl plugin? (I have not!)

(I also still use Scrivener daily for articles and journalling, because I prefer the fixed structure of the binder, and the ability to view multiple notes via Scrivenings view. As well as the ability to format with things like tab stops.)

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