Use Obsidian (BEST Markdown editor) for note taking and tech docs!

In this video, I'll show you my favorite markdown tool Obsidian (a free second brain and knowledge base program). I show you how I write my technical documentation, and my home lab notes. And hopefully inspire you, how to use Markdown as a language to write great README files and cheat-sheets. #Obsidian #Markdown #Documentation

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction
00:54 - Advertisement-*
01:29 - What is Markdown?
04:11 - How to use Obsidian
07:22 - Keep notes in Markdown
10:05 - Organize your notes in Obsidian
12:21 - Some additional tips
13:41 - Write tech docs in Markdown
16:13 - More features in Obsidian

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All links with "*" are affiliate links.

[Eragon-goww]

You can past images from your Clipboard directly in your markdown document in obsidian. It will past the image in the folder and make a link to it. I use it a lot for screenshots

[johngleeson]

Obsidian isn't open source, though you say it is in your intro. Maybe I'm wrong!

[arieheinrich]

The biggest benefit of Markdown is that is a text/character-based language, which means placing the file in a GIT repository means you enjoy all the benefits of DIFF changes and Pull Request branch policies. There are multiple programs that convert Markdown to any other formats, which means you can store the text in a repo and in you pipelines just convert it to whatever format you need, thus maintaining version compatibility between the code and the documentation.

[christianlempa]

Though Obsidian is free, it's actually not an open-source application (sorry for the confusion and mistake in the video!)

EDIT: I've cut out the misleading parts

[FromSergio]

Glad to see this as obsidian is the focus of my channel, after 2 years of using it, it still amazes me! Keep up the good work, you've helped me a lot in my self-hosting journey :)

[jrrtolkin]

I have seen some videos about Obsidian but never understood how useful it is.
Now after watching your video I am eager to start using it, its wonderful.
Thank you so much!!!
I think that Obsidian team should recommend your video as the best Obsidian video ever.

[evanjohnson]

That network topology diagram at 13:47 is great, did you make it manually or did you use a tool?

[steveteare]

This is excellent! Not referring to Obsidian, but to your presentation of it - especially in this particular context. Great work.

[raylabpro]

@christianlempa could you tell, which software did you use to draw network topology in your docs -> network -> Network Topology :) and today i started moving from Joplin to Obsidian after your video about plugins, thanks for that :)

[maruda]

I'm using Typora for my documentations, notes etc. in Markdown and it's for me it's the best md editor atm, but it's much simpler than obsidian, doesn't have this kind of vault functionality etc. Sadly, since the version 1.0 it's not free. One thing I really like in Typora are CSS stylesheets, so when exporting a PDF or printing out a document, I can style it using CSS, so the documents fit in the general design and colours of the company.
I'm going to give Obsidian a chance and test it for my documentations as the vault and ordering single notes inside the vault seems to be pretty handy. Maybe I'll switch from Typora, although I already paid for it.

[HprMg]

I would recommend using Syncthing (FOSS) in order to sync between devices. I have Obsidian on my smartphone and two laptops and it works great!

[Johndoe-]

Obsidian has been the best this I have ever come across and has come so far from where it was. Personal notes, knowledge base, D&D campaigns, work notes, and so much more. It replaced MS one-note and Joplin and Cherry tree. Good to see others are loving it. Also learned a few things here I did not know. Consider me subscribed

[OhertRasmus]

I've been using VSCode for a while now, but never knew you could live view md files.
Thanks!

[madeyeQ]

I've only used VS code for my markdown notetaking, but I'll definitely be checking out Obsidian.
I also looked at Joplin, but the fact that it doesn't store plain markdown files makes me hesitate to use it. The big strength of markdown is that it's simple text files I can edit with anything.

[xbmcme]

The main reason I've stayed away from MD is dealing with tables. They are a huge hassle to use and you can't do something like resize columns easily. I hope there's a plugin that can give me a table like Atlassians Confluence.

[slingshot]

I'm that dinosaur that physically takes down notes with a pen and a notepad. 😂

[kongoulan]

Ctrl + O = quick open => start typing the file name and it will smart find it

[theblowupdollsmusic]

Awesome video. That ASCII network diagram is next level!

[tiggerpie]

Thanks for your amazing video. What I didn't quite get is how frequently you upload your stuff to or download it from github. In the video sequence (from 9:14 onward), it looked like you were typing in changes in the desktop-app. But whenever somebody (as you're sharing your github address, everybody could do that at any given time) makes a change you'll overwrite it with your upload. What am I missing?

So what's your workflow to make sure not to overwrite any changes?

I'm sure I'd get confused if I sometimes work with my github repo and then again on my desktop version of Obsidian.

[ncoles]

Excellent video, Christian!!
Many thanks for making it!