/obsidian-setup

The best resource you will ever find for getting started with Obsidian, probably

Thor's Obsidian Vault

This vault aims to be two things:

  • the best possible resource you will find anywhere on using and setting up Obsidian (parts 1 and 2)
  • an evolving document of my personal experiments with plugins and workflows (parts 2 and 3)

The Getting Started configuration guide gives instructions for:

  • getting started with Obsidian, some guidance on setting up a vault, and highlights couple useful settings
  • getting going with a couple different workflows
  • an opinionated take on about 100 plugins and how to use them for your workflows

The post is aimed at a wide audience; if you use Obsidian or would like to, this post aims help you make the most of it.

In particular, I discuss how to use Obsidian for:

  • journaling
  • note taking
  • project and task management
  • self-organization
  • general writing
  • meme foldering

To get started, clone this repository as a starter template repository for your own uses. The repo contains an .obsidian and .obsidian.vimrc configuration with the settings and plugins I use, and the Getting Started with Obsidian post.

If you'd prefer to follow along by manually setting up your vault, I recommend copying the raw markdown of the post into a note in your vault in Reading View.

An aside on the security of installing plugins

Plugins are great, and I will recommend many of them. They're also a security risk. I weakly claim that none of the community plugins I install or recommend are out to pwn your system, but I could be wrong. To my knowledge, the Obsidian developers do audit community plugins for security concerns, but they could miss something. Consider being cautious of newer plugins with fewer installs.

Changelog

Roughly bi-annual updates to this vault since end of 2022.

  • 2024-08-09 - added a short section with a few recommended hotkeys
  • 2023-12-22 - tweet got some attention so did one more light editing pass, cleaned preamble.sty. Worked through part 3. Synced keybinds with my main vault. Added the meme-folder workflow.
  • 2023-12-21 - rewrote a good portion of parts 1 and 2, made workflow descriptions clearer, update vimrc
  • 2023-05-31 - how was I this bad at writing...added a few plugins, gcal, hotkey helper, latex preamble
  • 2022-11-17 - first draft finished

Todo:

  • meme folder-db aside out of part 3 into own section in part 2
  • investigate text-generator and other possible AI workflows, haven't found much use for these yet
    • quickadd added an option for AI workflows also
  • I haven't looked at the most popular plugins in awhile
  • I natter a lot about not using/liking dynamic or web-api based content, I could add an aside about that in part one

eventually get around to giving these plugins another shot:

  • projects
  • dataview
  • linter
  • leader hotkeys
  • Math booster?