Thoughts on Switching to Obsidian

Developers often times take notes in various places and in the past I’ve used Google Docs, Apple Notes, and also Github’s Gists.

All have their strengths and weaknesses but all of them didn’t exactly fit to what I needed and searching for that all-in-one application that can do it all was a tough search.

After trying all of those options and being unhappy with each of them in the end I decided to keep a folder of organized markdown files. Organizing them by topic, and saving and tracking changes the old fashioned way with git and Github.

While listening to the Ruby For All podcast I heard the mention of yet another note-taking application called Obsidian and the fact that it was a markdown editor had me intrigued.

I won’t go into the features of Obsidian because there are a lot to go through and I encourage you to download it and see if it can be a replacement of what you’re currently using. It features 100’s of different themes and just as many plugins so that you can customize it to your liking. I’ll go over how I use it and a little bit of how it can be customized so that it can turn into a powerhouse tool that can help with your own workflow.

Whatever it may be.

How I Use Obsidian

Today’s daily note is the feature that I mainly use in the app and although it is a basic feature that can be created in other note taking apps. The power of this feature comes from being able to link these “sections” of notes to a main topic that can be created as a table of contents for a subject or topic.

Let’s say for instance I’m fixing an issue within a Rails application and I’m reading documentation on Active Storage. Before Obsidian, I would takes notes within the Apple Notes app under a folder. Some notes are a single sentence and others are a few pages filled with things I want to remember and reference back on. Organizing these notes were a pain and most of the time I never got around to cleaning them up.

I’d forget about the notes that I took and when the same problem arose again in another application I ended up going back in circles re-reading the documentation to have to learn again.

Creating links to sections of notes within the application and creating a page as a table of contents to these notes has been a easy and seamless way to organize notes without having to manually copy-pasta to new pages.

CSS Snippets

You can’t customize the look an feel of Apples Notes application and you can only do so much with Google Docs. The second closest thing to customizing an app or pages for your notes is Notion but it too fell short as it didn’t organize well IMO.

However, Obsidian gives you the freedom to customize certain (not all) aspects of the application itself so that you can enhance or modify the look & feel with it’s CSS Snippets.

You can read more about how to start with CSS Snippets here.

The snippets folder is located in the vault folder that you created when first installing Obisidan under the hidden directory /.obsidian.

Another thing to note is that you will have to toggle on the custom snippets that you create in the ‘Settings’ panel under the ‘Appearance’ Tab.

Obsidian incorporates a ‘hot reloading’ feature for CSS Snippets, ensuring that any modifications made in the CSS are instantly reflected upon saving the snippet.

The CSS in the snippets file can be modified within the body selector and Obsidian uses a vast amount of CSS Variables to set its properties. The list of CSS Variables can be found in their documentation site and customization can be made all the way from typography down to the window settings in the Obsidian application.

While the CSS Variables that you can modify give you a good amount of properties to customize your Obsidian application. I’m looking for a fully customizable look and I want the feel of it to resemble my neovim editor.

Luckily for us, we can fully customize the entire Obsidian application following the guide in the documentation and using CSS!

Obisidian Themes

Custom themes built by designers are available throughout Github and Obsidian under ‘Appearance -> Settings’ and you’ll see some common themes such as Dracula, Tokyo Night and Catpuccin.

Currently I’m using the Tokyo Night theme and loving the color scheme, it’s also my theme for neovim so the familiarity is nice. After installing the theme, I’ll use the CSS snippets to customize certain things such as heading size, margins and padding to my liking.

Creating my own theme may take some time but Obsidian also has a guide for fully custom themes where you’ll have more control over modifying the entire application.

In Conclusion

Obsidian is a nice tool that has solved most of my needs for a note taking application that I have always wanted but didn’t want to build myself.

In the future, I may switch over to things to neovim and tmux but organizing the notes in away that I can see and find them easily is a tougher task could be solved by people much smarter than me 😀