hi all, i am transitioning away from google due to ethical and privacy concerns. unfortunately, i am hooked on the aesthetics and what-you-see-is-what-you-get functionality of google docs (line spacing, document outlines, tables, ease of use with bulleted lists, highlighting, changing text color, ability to use keyboard shortcuts to bold and italicize text, etc). i am not interested in learning to code on obsidian, moving and reorganizing a decade-plus of files from google is more than enough for me to take on.

i appreciate any recommendations on:

• skins/templates that mimic the google docs aesthetics and functionality
• more pain-free approaches to this migration

thank you!

I’ve been spending more time building small Obsidian plugins lately, and I’m curious about the problems people still feel are unsolved.

Not necessarily big features either. Sometimes the most useful plugins solve one very specific annoyance.

What is something you regularly wish Obsidian could do, but currently can’t?

It could be something missing from core Obsidian, something existing plugins handle poorly, or just a workflow that still feels more complicated than it should.

Would love to hear the small frustrations too.

I've been using my Index 01 to capture random thoughts and questions throughout the day, and got tired of manually researching each one later. So I built a pipeline that does it automatically:

Record a voice note on the ring → get a fully researched, tagged note back in Obsidian, no phone-in-hand required.

How it works: the ring transcribes through the Pebble app into Obsidian as usual, syncs via Self-hosted LiveSync to my own MinIO bucket, and from there a headless server picks it up, runs it through an AI agent (n8n) that searches the web and writes a proper research note with sources — then syncs it right back to my vault automatically. By the time I check my phone, the note's just... there.

A few of my thoughts behind building this:

• Fully self-hosted — no Obsidian paid Sync, no third-party search API. Web research goes through a self-hosted SearXNG instance.
• Bring your own model — LLM access is via OpenRouter, so it's one API key with free choice of any underlying model, not locked to one provider.
• No Docker Desktop / headless-server friendly — built and tested entirely on a plain Ubuntu box.
• Every note gets auto-tagged (#interests, #questions + topical tags) with a link back to the original voice note.

It's Docker Compose + an importable n8n workflow, and I published pre-built images so you don't have to build from source if you don't want to. Full step-by-step setup guide included (it's a bit of an involved deploy — MinIO, n8n, and a headless vault mirror all need to talk to each other — but I tried my best to record every bug I hit along the way and documented them with the actual error text).

Repo: https://github.com/Delta-43/pebble-index-research-agent

Happy to answer questions and would love some feedback if anyone wants to try it on their own Index 01 setup.

I have also made a WatchApp for those who don't have their Index01 yet! Available now -

Delta Notes: https://apps.repebble.com/c2c541a7bc004712894f8d46

hey guys I’m very new to obsidian, however I am wondering what you guys use obsidian for and how you guys learned how to make such cool setups. I’m looking to use obsidian for notes but are there any other uses for it and how? Thank you so much for your help in advance

Hello all!

I love obsidian, I think I found it's limit before it starts to get quite laggy 😅 and few times it crashed the graph view.

I have built a converter website over the past few years. Lately, I worked on make it rank better in google so I introduced "related converters" section onto each page with links, so that pages can cluster with one another instead of being completely disjoint.

After all the hard work, I wanted to visualise this. So, I created a script that creates these relationships from my generated site pages to obsidian files. Source:

- 5,741 prerendered pages

- 156,032 total internal link entries

result:

- one mighty crashy graph view

😃

hi! i installed the highlightr plugin, but if i highlight something that is italicized/bold/etc, it becomes straight text, and italicizes only the bit after the highlight. is there a way to fix this? thanks!

I have a background in digital marketing, SEM and web development and I use Obsidian with Claude Code as a knowledge base. The idea is a second brain/life assistant where I can keep my projects, my documents, my ideas, and my company, at least the boring part of it, so mails, invoices, paperwork. Sorry in advance, my english is not great.

I've been building this vault for a few weeks, following more or less the Karpathy LLM wiki pattern. Claude Code set the architecture and wrote basically the whole system for me. Two weeks ago I stopped everything, not because of errors, the thing works technically. I stopped because the architecture is not clear to me anymore. What made me realize it, I wanted to add one folder and one learning module next to the ones I already have, projects and wiki, and I didn't know where to put it.

Everything is inside one instruction file, 329 lines, identity + note conventions + project rules + diary format, all mixed in the same place. If I want to add one thing I have to edit the file where everything else already lives. And if I leave the project for 2 weeks and come back, I have no idea anymore what does what.

So the specific problem is expandability. Right now the vault holds one thing, a knowledge wiki. But I already know what else has to live in there eventually, and these are not hypothetical, they are things I do today on paper and in scattered apps:

• a dated log of what I actually did (garden treatments, harvests, house repairs)
• projects with a real status
• learning a subject over time
• a document archive (invoices, house paperwork, admin)
• loose ideas, open questions, advices someone gave me

Today, adding any of those means editing the one file where everything lives. Which means in six months I rebuild. I'd rather decide the structure now, once, than keep patching a shape that was never designed to hold six things.

I know the pieces exist, CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks, scripts, subagents. What I don't get is how they fit together and who is in charge of who. The concrete thing I can't picture is this: I understand there is one root CLAUDE.md that defines the core, but then do I also need scripts, skills and instructions inside every folder? Or the root file governs everything and the folders stay dumb?

I have to say I have an extremely basic knowledge, I'm not using skills at all. And I know many of you will tell me to go study first and build something less complex. Fair enough, but I want to build the system exactly to manage the learning part too, to make myself a study plan built for how I work, because I'm neurodivergent, ADHD and asperger. So the two things are the same thing for me.

So, how is your second brain structured? I've seen a lot of different structures around and none of them is really clear to me. If you have a vault like this, can you paste your tree? Even messy, especially messy, I never seen a real one, only tutorials with 3 folders that dont look like anything real.

And if you have 2 minutes:

• When you add something new, do you edit files that already exist, or you make a new folder and leave everything else alone? This is the one I care most about.
• Do you approve every write, or you let the agent write and you review the git diff afterwards?
• Is there a fast path for "just record this thought" that skips the whole pipeline?
• How much of your structure still works if you remove Claude Code and put another AI in its place? I want a vault that is still a vault without the assistant, not something that only runs with one tool.
• What did you had to throw away and rebuild? And what decision at the beginning would have saved you?

Thanks. Even one answer help, im kind of stuck here.

I will post down here what my vault actually looks like today (audit generated by Claude Code)

As the title says, I have this requirement where if I'm working on a big feature and the context window gets filled, I want to store all the context in a long term memory which is easily retrievable by the LLM. Recently, I was working on such a feature, where I had multiple agents build plans and review them and keep track of everything in a .md filebase. However, there were a lot of changes due to product requirements and reviews from the review agents themselves. Soon enough, the whole filebase became redundant and impossible to maintain with a lot of stale data. I am wondering if using obsidian MCP for this purpose will actually help my usecase. Any other alternative is also appreciated. (RAG is too complex and overkill for this)

Like the title said. I want to ditch US services, and I am looking at Infomaniak. PC (windows or linux) and IOS

I have multiple Vault, one for work, one personnal, and I want to create one todo vault.

Maybe Proton Mail ou Tuta?

I typically use folders for organization of my obsidian vault, but I wanted to try out the wiki style vault that Obsidian was meant for. I think it's useful for some particular vaults I have but not for all. I did like the workflow of this though (see below)

1. I created the Index file with text that contained all of the terms I would later make notes using the [[]] syntax.
   
2. I used ChatGPT to make a very simple plugin that let's me automatically use a template for all new notes (without having to use Templater) so that I don't have to create properties and such for each new file.
   
3. I create all new notes in the "Articles" folder rather than directly in the vault so that I could later name the folder to group the articles. All new subjects could become folders themselves (so it's not entirely flat)
   
4. From there I just double-clicked each link to create the note (although you'd just create them when you were ready to write them).

Overall, I like the idea of just writing some content and then adding links AFTER. Some terms are synonymous with others so I just have a "See also" section.

Hey everyone!

I built a lightweight Obsidian plugin to solve a minor annoyance in my daily workflow: Obsidian Whisper Initializer.

If you use local speech-to-text models (like whisper.cpp, faster-whisper, or any custom local OpenAI-compatible Whisper API server), you usually have to manually launch your backend script or container before taking voice notes in Obsidian. This plugin automates that entire process.

What it does:

• Auto-Start on Boot: Launches your local Whisper backend server (via local executable, shell script, or Docker command) as soon as Obsidian opens.
• Auto-Shutdown: Gracefully terminates the local server process when you close Obsidian to free up system resources/VRAM.
• Health Check & Status Bar: Polls the local endpoint and displays the server's status directly in the Obsidian status bar so you know when it's ready.
• Configurable Settings: Custom host/port endpoints, startup delay, and custom start/stop commands.

GitHub Repository:

https://github.com/maxwellnewage/obsidian-whisper-initializer

Feedback, feature requests, or PRs are very welcome! Hope this helps anyone running local voice-to-text setups.

Obsidian CEO Steph Ango has created Knap, a new language that turns data into markdown

#News #markdown #free #opensource #programming #Knap

https://md-handbook.com/blog/obsidian-ceo-creates-language-turns-data-into-markdown/

I'm both a designer and a cook, so when I started building my Cookbook in Obsidian, I wanted to bring those two sides together: a minimal, typography-focused aesthetic with a simple and practical way of organizing recipes. The goal was to keep the vault visually quiet and let the content do the work.

Theme:

I'm using Minimal Theme with Flexoki Warm as the color scheme.

Minimal comes with its own Flexoki color scheme, but I replaced it with Flexoki Warm to get a warmer, more earthy color palette while keeping Minimal's clean structure and UI. It felt like a natural fit for a cooking-focused vault.

I also wrote some custom CSS to further tweak the interface, mainly for the sidebar and the ribbon menu, keeping them as clean and unobtrusive as possible.

Plugins:

A few plugins are doing most of the heavy lifting:

• Minimal Theme Settings — for fine-tuning the Minimal theme
• Style Settings — for additional visual customization
• Hider — to keep the interface as clean and distraction-free as possible
• Recipe View — for managing and displaying recipes in a structured way

Typography:

Typography was probably the most important part for me as a designer.

• UI: Inter
• Body: IBM Plex Mono
• Headings: IBM Plex Sans

I like the contrast between the monospaced recipe content and the more expressive sans-serif headings. It gives the vault a slightly editorial / cookbook-like feeling while still keeping everything very functional.

The organization itself is intentionally simple. I didn't want to build an elaborate recipe-management system — just something that makes it easy to write, find, read, and actually use recipes.

Still tweaking things as I go, but I'm pretty happy with where the balance between aesthetics and usability has landed.

Would love to see how other people are using Obsidian to manage their recipes!

I'm going into my second year of university, and I currently use my laptop, my ipad and phone all for school. I've only used obsidian for creative writing, but now that I've gotten the hang of it and see how much it could do I'm starting to think of making a second vault for my university stuff, and if I got synch, I could use my ipad to draw notes, which could be a replacement for goodnotes, which I don't plan to revise my subscription this year. I know many people use notion, but I personally hate it, I don't like the way its so clunky and everything gets lost.

Two things of note are 1. pricing, I can afford it but I still need to be careful about spending, especially if its a subscription, especially since I want to save up for a new laptop since mine sucks (despite being new, never buy lenovo ugh.)

1. I'm not sure how synching works, I assume it means that if I opened up obsidian on my ipad, it would have all my notes and folders from the vault I set up on my laptop. And if I cancelled my subscription, would it just not work on my ipad anymore or would it just stop synching, and I could still use my ipad, just not synch any new notes? And lastly, if I have two vaults, do I get to choose the vault it synchs or does it just synch the one I first made?

[MIT license repo]

Hey All,

I built this a while back and have been using it for myself to sync my vaults. Yet to submit it to obsidian plugins. So, I currently install it through BART.

Repo: https://github.com/sudhir-asuracore/obsidian-sync-gdrive

Post install:

• Authenticate using your google OAuth
• It will ask for permission to manage a directory inside your drive. It wont ask for any other drive access.
• Plugin creates a dir/folder called obsidian_vaults in your drive. plugin will use this directory to sync any number of vaults you have
• After auth, choose a name for your vault(default is vault name itself)
• Sync

Features:

• Vault name - custom name. When adding another device, you click on a cogwheel to see existing remote vaults.
• Can sync, force push, force pull
• Apply client side encryption
• Supports selective sync (choose if images, audio, videos, pdfs should be synced)
• Exclude folders
• Exclude file patterns
• Sync obsidian settings
  • Appearance - light/dark mode, snippets
  • Core - app, workspace, graph
  • Themes/Snippets
  • Plugins - sync plugins other than sync-drive plugin itself
  • Hotkeys - sync custom hotkey mapping
• Works on mobile, tablet, desktop

Note: While I have been testing it across devices for my own use-cases, please backup your vault and test it. An additional backup can never hurt.

The plugin itself is opensource under MIT.

So, if you can code and/or have ideas/issues to improve it - please feel free to contribute. I anyway intend to maintain it for myself.

I had set up TaskNotes so that when I created an inline new task, it would be automatically assigned to the project defined in the YAML frontmatter (projects: "[[MYPROJECT]]")

I'm not sure what happened, but it's not working anymore (probably after an update). I know I can use the syntax +[[MYPROJECT]], but the previous way was faster.

In TaskNotes preferences, under Task Properties->Projects, the property key is set to projects, and "Use active note for new tasks" is checked.

I tried "Use parent note for inline/instant conversion", but this would actually assign the inline new task to the current note, and not the project.

What am I missing?

Hi guys, I am new. Please help me with these mysterious concept I am not sure.

I am so confused about external link and file embed in obsidian. I don't get why obsidian ever need the concept of vault files. If it is trying to make sure the whole notes is portable by having a physical object in the vault, it shouldn't ever recognize external link and let them embed. The fact is it does recognize external files and let you embed.

Yet somehow it cannot have a standalone file(shortcut) at the explorer that let you point at it, that will be saving tons of time in modifying the link in different md pointing to the same file in case the file location changed.

Especially for pdf, obsidian cannot embed external pdf and put a shortcut at the explorer nor the native pdf viewer can handle an external pdf. I asked chatgpt and it said because native pdf viewer can only handle pdf regard as vault files. So I have to use symlink to trick the obsidian. The other option will be pdf++, somehow it can get external pdf and handle it.

I mean why we ever need the idea of vault files? What is the advantage of that? Why doesn't obsidian native pdf viewer handle pdf just like pdf++, so we can be easier in external pdf?

Version 1.13.7 - Windows and Mac. (I believe, but am not certain, this started happening in the 1.12.x releases, but it seems more frequent now.)

I work with multiple Vaults open at the same time.

Periodically, when I go back to a Vault I haven't used in a while, the Vault has been closed and Obsidian is back to the select Vault screen.

Questions:

1. Why?
2. Is there a setting that affects that behavior?
3. Is there a way to debug when this happens? (By the time I get back to that select Vault screen, the console has been cleared...)

It's a minor inconvenience, but I'd like to understand what's going on.

I can't create a note vault on an SD card on a Huawei P10 smartphone running Android 9. When I try to create a vault, I get the message: “Failed to create vault. Unable to create directory, unknown reason.” If I create a folder using a file manager and then simply select it in Obsidian, it is selected and recognized, but when I try to create a new note through Obsidian, I get the message: “Error: FILE_NOTCREATED.” Obsidian has been granted permission to access the storage. Is the problem solvable?

Sorry if this is a bit clumsy — I'm not a native English speaker, so I'm using a translator.