New to Obsidian and have some questions

Help
1

I have been hearing about obsidian for years, tried using it and failed to understand the use-case but it seems like a powerfull thing I would like.

I understand it is a simple markdown text notes app which finds and shows links between documents, which somehow helps in organizing personal life, todo list, study notes, plans, etc.

Having problem w/ few things

  1. How do I open a .md file outside the vault ?

  2. Can/Should I open whole disk as vault ?

  3. What is a vault ? Can’t I just open .md file which links to other .md files in various places.

    1. I want to do so to have a hybrid approach, where files are organized in there folders in various places in hierarchy and still be able to use obsidian.

  4. What are the different use cases of Obsidian ?

What I’m trying to do

Things I have tried

2
  1. Any text-editor. Everything that can open a .txt can open a .md-file. Just navigate there in your normal file-explorer.
    1. In your Menu with the folders on the left you can rightclick (on linux and windows) and either use “open in default app” or “show in system explorer” to either open with a non-obsidian program or show the folder in the default explorer, where you can open it regularly.
  2. I guess you could. But you usually wouldn’t. You’ll have system files in your vault. In the best case, they are useless in the vault. In the worst case you brake something and fuck up your OS. What you could do is create a folder/vault somewhere on the drive and put all the files you are working on in it. Just be sure to separate OS-Files from personal files.
  3. A Vault is a folder in your normal explorer. It’s just, that obsidian only looks within this folder and only does stuff there. Because it just makes sense. If you for example create Videos, you would not want them to be in the same folder, mixed in with your computer-games.
    1. Can’t I just open .md file which links to other .md files in various places. I do not understand what you mean with this
      1. Why do you want that approach and to what extend? I personally have all personal data in my vault. So there is no need to think about files outside of it.
  4. Honestly, whatever you want. The obvious is note taking. I use it for project-management, tracking of habits and other stuff, for knowledge management, documentation for programming. You can use it for long-form writing (books and articles). When i use my pc now, i have the programms i need for other work (mailing program, firefox/chrome, inkscape, sublime) and obsidian. It basically is my interface to my computer. I barely use the normal file-explorer anymore, because everything just exists in obsidian and is organized there.