Obsidian 101 beginner tips – how to use obsidian

March 24, 2025

Intro

Obsidian, in my opinion, is the best way to quickly jot down and organize your thoughts, projects, and just about anything else you can put into text. Today I’m going to cover some useful tips and tricks.

Guide

Using the core plugins to empower your notes

Opening the settings menu (⌘+, on mac) you are greeted with this popup menu giving you options to configure various settings, what we are interested in is the Core plugins menu. (note: don’t install Community plugins or any external software unless you know what you are doing!) In this menu is a collection of powerful extensions made by the Obsidian team. Enable these plugins to your liking.

Some of my favorites include:

Templates to quickly make new entries (see command palette below)
Search
Word count
Workspaces to save and load sessions (ever had a moment where you don’t want to do something because it’ll overwrite your current setup? this fixes that)
Graph view a way to visualize your notes and their connections
Command palette for quick access to actions through ⌘+p or ctrl+p
Canvas: organize thoughts visually

Help resources

Obsidian has a steep learning curve, and the developers thought of that.

Using the afore mentioned command palette, you can open the “sandbox vault” to learn and practice. Be warned: anything you write here won’t be saved!

Here you can learn syntax, browse features, test ideas and more.

Important tip

don’t make a million vaults, instead hypercategorize, my current vault has a structure like:

Vault
  |
  |-Ideas
  |-Study
  |-Computers
         \
          | Programming
          | Obsidian notes
          | projects
# sorry to anyone who knows how to write maps like this

There are many other sub categories, but I feel like most readers won’t want to spend hours navigating my filesystem.

Powerful organization tip

using the “[[]]” syntax lets you link notes together, putting an “!” at the start lets you expand and show the file.
- better yet, putting a “#” inside lets you link to a file’s headings
- A “|” (pipe) lets you change the text displayed for the link
- A “^” (carrot) lets you link to blocks within the file
- see https://help.obsidian.md/link-notes
You can make links display with custom text using the “[display text](link)” syntax
three “-” make a divider

Yes, this does show up on the graph view!

Outro

Hopefully this guide has helped you with the basics of Obsidian. Perhaps you were reading this out of interest, if so, consider checking out another article:

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