My Obsidian Setup

I use Obsidian on a daily basis for my office work and frequently for personal notes. Recently, my brother discovered Obsidian and we started talking about setup and usage. So here’s my Obsidian setup, for his reference and mine –

• My office Obsidian syncs with Google Drive. This is not actually for syncing but for backups. My personal Obsidian syncs with iCloud Drive, which makes it available on my phone as well as my laptop.
• I use a lot of folders and frequently need to move files into different folders. For this purpose, I’ve overridden the Cmd + M hotkey from minimizing Obsidian to “Move current file into another folder”. This pops up a nice folder selection interface.
• I also use File Properties a lot, primarily to track whether the file is “done” or not. So I use the Obsidian preferred Cmd + ; hotkey to add a property.
• I use Obsidian also for Task tracking, so I have my Tasks file pinned too. I’ll talk in a minute about how I use the tasks plugin.
• I have the AnuPpuccin theme installed and set to Dark mode. Most of the settings for this theme are set using the “Style Settings” Community plugin, which I’ll talk about in a bit.
• I have most of the Core Plugins turned on. The ones I use are –
  • The very first one is the Word Count Core Plugin. That’s a great feature for me, specially when I’m writing emails.
  • I also use the Daily Notes Core Plugin religiously. For every meeting, I hit the little Daily Note icon and then add the meeting name/details to the title of the file. This let’s me hit the Daily Note icon over and over and just keep my meeting notes organized and easier to find.
  • I also use the Templates Core Plugin religiously. I have a type of meeting for which I’ve made a template and simply use the Cmd + p hotkey to open the Command Palette and go to “Insert Template” and insert my one created template.
• I also use a LOT of community plugins. Here are the names along with specific settings and reasons for using these plugins –
  • The very first plugin I installed was Style Settings, in order to customize the AnuPpuccin theme. This is based on the recommendations on the theme GitHub page as well as someone’s blog post which I was following to setup Obsidian the first time. The main setting I turned on is under Workspace -> Rainbow Folders. I set the Rainbow style to “Simple”. The idea here is that the names of the folders change in a beautiful rainbow colors gradient. The more folders you have, the prettier it looks. If you set it to “Full”, the entire block of the folder changes color. That might be desirable to some. So test it out and let me know!
  • I also have plugins to “Send to Ghost” and “WordPress”, which let me publish to Ghost and to my WordPress blog. In fact, I’m writing this blog post in Obsidian and will be using the WordPress plugin to post to my blog.
  • I also use the Tasks Community Plugin which is a powerful tool. It took me a while to learn about it. You can use it to create tasks in every file you create and have them all collected in a single file. Basically, this plugin takes over the - [ ] markdown task pattern and lets you add due dates, priority, etc. You can also use the Command Palette and “Create or edit task” and it’ll pop up a very nice interface to deal with the creation process. Then, you can create a specific Tasks document as specified in the plugin docs to collect all of your tasks from across your vault and view them in one place. The best part is that each task is linked back to the file where it comes from.
  • I’ve also installed a plugin called “Various Compliments” which allows for a Fuzzy Search of text for autocompletion. You can choose to use only the current file or the entire vault, or even a custom dictionary as your source for autocompletion. This plugin is so useful that I don’t know how I was surviving before it! It does come in the way once in a while, since I’ve turned on autocompletion instead of only offering autocompletion options. But like with everything else in Obsidian, this is a choice and you can choose what to do here.
  • I also use a plugin called “Paste URL into selection”. By default, if you select some text and paste a URL on it, Obsidian just overwrites your text with the URL. This makes the UX closer to how we’ve come to expect web interfaces and markdown to be – it creates a link with the selected text as the anchor.
  • Lastly, I wanted to use a plugin called “Enhanced Copy” but it’s not released into the Obsidian plugins list. It’s only available through the GitHub repo. The plugin simply lets me control the behavior of how Obsidian copies out text from my notes. Usually, it only gives me 2 spaces for bullet point indentation. I prefer 4. This plugin let’s me make those changes.
  • In order to install the “Enhanced Copy” plugin from GitHub, I had to install a plugin called “BRAT”, which stands for “Beta-Reviewer’s Autoupdate Tool”. It lets you install beta plugins from GitHub repos. Though I wonder if people using it are reviewers at all. I’m not.
• Now, on to how I use Obsidian –
  • I make a new file for every meeting using the Daily Notes button. Then I rename the title to be “date – topic”.
  • I organize my notes at the end of the day or at the end of the week into topic-specific folders. I use properties as a means of reminding me of certain tasks I need to perform before considering a note as “Done”.
  • I use Tasks extensively, though I often move the dates around. The idea is that I should check into that file daily or multiple times a day to see what’s up next from my ToDo.
  • I also keep some running topics as Pinned because I need to work on them slowly.
  • Also, this post was written in Obsidian and published through the WordPress plugin. 🙂