Obsidian is a note-taking app that stores everything in plain text documents on your computer, but that's just the beginning. It has extremely fast search and keyboard shortcuts, and you can link to any of your notes from any other note. Of course, not everyone has access to it, but if you do, it will change the way you think about writing and note-taking.
But plugins are where the real madness begins. There are over 1,600 plugins, all crafted by other users, that you can browse and install in the settings. I can't tell you which are the best plugins, it depends a lot on your requirements for your application. But I can tell you that with these add-ons, you can turn Obsidian into the tool you want. Here are the plugins that I think new users should check out first, if only to get an idea of what the plugin does.
I've attached links to the Github pages for all these plugins, mainly for reference. Installing add-ons from within Obsidian is much simpler than installing them manually: just go to Settings > Community Add-ons > Browse and find the add-on there.
Manage anything with Kanban
We've discussed many times the Kanban approach, which consists of a series of columns into which cards can be dragged. There are a number of specialized apps that do this, the most famous of which is Trello, but there's a catch: you have to remember to open them. This is why I love the Obsidian Kanban plugin. With it, I can create boards in Obsidian. Each board is just a text document containing multiple lists, which means they don't take up much space, and you can even edit them directly as text documents if needed.
This is a very useful tool that can exist alongside other notes. I use it to organize my entire writing process, from brainstorming to writing to editing to invoicing. I highly recommend it.
Use this toolbar to ignore markers
Obsidian is built around Markdown, a simple way to format text files. I personally really like this approach: it makes it faster to add simple formatting to a document. It's not for everyone, though, and that's where the editing toolbar comes in. This simple extension adds a formatting toolbar to the top of every text window with commonly used formatting options. Everything is still formatted using Markdown, but you can apply formatting with the click of a mouse button if you like. For some, this is simply a way to complete the task of formatting before learning to use Markdown; for others, it can be a complete replacement for learning Markdown. There are no wrong answers here.
Copy notes to other applications and complete formatting
Speaking of formatting: Sometimes, you'll want to copy text from Obsidian and paste it into another app. If the relevant application does not support Markdown, you will be in trouble. This is why I use Copy as HTML: with this plugin you can keep all formatting when copying and pasting. If you prefer, you can trigger it from the Command Palette or add custom keyboard shortcuts. I've used it to copy and paste text into Google Docs, Microsoft Word and even Lifehacker CMS and it works perfectly every time.
Quickly crawl the content of any website
Scraping and tagging articles from the web is an essential part of many research workflows. To do this, I used the Extract URL extension. Similar to the browser's reader mode, the tool can crawl articles at any URL you provide, and only articles. My favorite way to use it is with the Import from Clipboard command, which you can find in the Commands palette or assign a keyboard shortcut. Just copy a URL, run the command, and the entire article in the URL will be copied to the current note. If you want, you can use it to make your own "read later" service.
Review your journal every day
We’ve already talked about how great it is to use Obsidian as a journaling application. Log review makes this process even better. With it, you can set up your sidebar to display entries for any time period you like. I personally like to look at logs from one, two, three, four, and five years ago, but as I get more years of logs, I inevitably make adjustments to this. I really like looking at what my past self was thinking - it's taught me a lot about the way I grew and didn't grow. This plugin makes it all possible.
