I’ve been using Obsidian for ~6 months now, and I’m really pleased with its flexibility and functionality. But I’m curious: what do other users do with Obsidian? And what plugins or other resources do they find useful?
For example, I use Obsidian to write blog posts, so I use a plugin called ‘Better Word Count’ to track how many words I’ve written, and Wordy (a thesaurus plugin) to find synonyms and antonyms.
What are your favorite plugins or other tools (especially if you have an unusual use case)?
Among other things, I write books in Obsidian. I use the Longform and Pandoc plugins to make this easier.
I only just discovered obsidian a week or so ago but I already love using it and think it will be a big help for me. I’ve played around with a few vaults that have different plugins depending on what I need. The only community plugin I have tried so far is dataview.
Right now I have an empty vaults thats a playground for trying to make my own plugins, one for creative writing, one thats basically for planning and self-help stuff, and a couple related to hobbies. Even though I just found obsidian, most of them have a lot of pages already since I imported from the app I was using before that I wanted to move this stuff off of.
The graph is my favourite feature but I also really like the canvas feature. I have one thats a family tree of some characters I made with each of their pages connected together. I made a little map of my room with everything in it on another to help me sort through stuff.
I use it as a personal knowledge management tool for research. There is a great connector plugin to import literature metadata and annotations from Zotero. This I use as a basis for a knowledge network that is structured along abstraction levels (basis – summaries and concepts – outlines – writing notes etc.). This has streamlined my research process immensely, because I can trace everything directly back to the source without having to actually reread everything.
I think one of the best things is that Obsidian allows you to ‘link to the future’ by creating dead links. While writing notes or reading papers, I create links to concepts, people of interest, terminology etc. that might not be of interest immediately. If I want to explore these topics at some later point in time, I have already set up relevant links. This happens so often that it is now an integral part of my daily workflow.
It takes the place of 5 other apps. The less I have installed, the better, AFAIC.
Right now I’m in the process of clawing my way out of the Apple ecosystem that I got entrenched in a decade or so ago. Apple Notes has been just a basic “scratch” pad for me, but also a way to save medical history for ease of access since my medical history is very complex.
Switching to Obsidian recently has really got me thinking about what I can do with it. At first I thought it was overkill, but it’s the best Notes replacement I’ve found so far that doesn’t require a sub or something like that. Yes, Obsidian Sync exists, but they openly support other ways of syncing, and I appreciate that.
So for now it’s just a simple “scratch” pad, but plugins are making it into so much more and who knows what use cases I’ll have for it in the future.