Obsidian

My thanks to Obsidian for sponsoring last week at DF. Obsidian is a remarkably flexible and powerful writing and note-taking app that is designed to adapt to the way you think. Obsidian helps you create connections and links between your notes so you can organize your thoughts. You can create links between everything — ideas, articles, lists, locations, books — anything you can put in a note, you can link to other notes. It’s like building your own personal wiki.

Obsidian’s guiding principles:

  • Free for personal use
  • Available on all operating systems (including Mac, iOS, and iPadOS)
  • Interoperable, local Markdown files
  • No tracking, no account required
  • Private, end-to-end encrypted
  • Easy to modify with API, plugins, and themes
  • 100% user-supported, no VC funding

Obsidian exemplifies the mindset of a proper power-user tool: it makes easy things easy, and hard things possible. Another way to think of Obsidian is like an IDE for your notes, thoughts, and ideas. Fresh out of the box it’s useful, powerful, and obvious how to get started. But Obsidian also has a rich ecosystem of plugins and a great community of users — you can customize it in incredible ways. It’s also the sort of Markdown-based tool that does things with Markdown that I never would have imagined when I created it.

They’re offering a special deal for DF readers: sign up for their optional add-on sync service, Obsidian Sync, by 1 January 2024 and you’ll get 5 times the storage space — 50 GB for the price of 10 GB. Get started simply by downloading Obsidian for free.

★ Sunday, 24 December 2023