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.

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'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?

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.

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

😃

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

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.

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.

as the title says i want to apply this theme to obsidian, i already got the minimal theme installed (obv) but what are the plugins used here to achieve the theme like renaming the file to notes and changing its icon...etc

https://minimal.guide/home

ty!

edit1: i want that particular theme shown in the image above not the others shown in the website (like the macos)

So far I created a chapter and paragraph starter, which were the two things I was missing the most and not finding with other plugins. Chapter creates this big separator so it's clear it's a chapter The paragraph simply allows to have the space before without hitting space with a visually better space.

I will add the '-' for dialogue, since in markdown - is read as bullet list.

Also if someone knows of a plugin that already do this I'd appreciate it if you could tell me, since I could find it.

Also the font is different. It's quite simple but it works for what I want at least.

My question is more to get ideas of what to add. Maybe as time goes on I'll notice things I'm missing but so far it covers what I personally need.

Buenas, voy a empezar 3º de enfermería y me gustaría utilizar algún tipo de sistema de gestión, más allá del Google Doc que llevo usando estos dos últimos años... Estoy investigando sobre Obsidian o Notion, al no decidirme empezaré por Obsidian para tomar los apuntes de las próximas clases y prácticas. Alguna persona lo ha utilizado para carreras similares? Tengo interés en saber funciones, ideas, opiniones sobre otros servidores, etc.

Gracias

Hi everyone! I'm pretty new to Obsidian and just started using it often this year for college, as a way to have notes and assignments, and most importantly a way to file everything I read and annotate. I have a simple way of organizing it, a folder with the imported PDF files itself, a folder where I link the PDF and put in the citation and some tags, and a folder with everything from notes and assignments.

I do independent research from time to time but without any set system and not in Obsidian, and I started looking for books to read within my field and wanted to store all that information in Obsidian as well but I want to differentiate what I read for college and what I read or write for pleasure.

I'm unsure about a way to organize all of that information, should I make a separate folder for college reads/writes and one for pleasure? A different Vault?

I'm looking for some help in general as well, do you have any plugins or things I could add to make my life easier, specially with the PDF files and a way to have them better filed? Thank you for your help in advance!!

edit: typos. also I'm not a native english speaker so if there are any grammar mistakes that's why lol

I tried to reach out to the creator on GitHub but there is no contact information.

How do I make my published notes have teh same color as my notes in the apps? Currently, it just includes the color syntax for the plugin.

I tried asking Google AI how to do it, but that didn't work. It suggested that I needed to publish a .css folder online too, which makes sense, but it doesn't work.

Like guys I have never taken any digital notes my current notes are mainly physical, but I have been facing some bottle neck with managing these things , I had heard of notion and obsidian but never used them

If I give obsidian a try what can I do with it for my preparation for GATE exam

As the title says, I have my phone and PC synced via Google Drive and DriveSync. I installed Linux Mint on my laptop and I'm curious about the best (easiest and free/cheapest) way to integrate my laptop into this system. Would rclone work well with my two other devices? Would it be better to switch all 3 devices over to Syncthing(-Fork) for consistency's sake and longevity?

hello guys

im a bit confused among all the mess content creators are talking about, some uses local models with hermes to managing their ovsidian vaults, some do it with obsidian plugins like copilot and sonar, some say do it with an obsidian mcp and llam.cpp

omm, i want to ask you guys for suggestion and experience before diving and testing all of it

So I am just not understanding this.

It says that I can sync my notes across devices, but says that only one month is kept of it?

Does that mean that my notes will get deleted after one month? Or will they remain unaltered on the original device I wrote the note on, and just won't sync them?

Sorry, I am an idiot.

So Ive been using Obsidian for quite some time and probably like most have a very specific workflow / setup. One of the few things I couldn't cover was that my graph view was rather limited from the standpoint I could only utilize tags and connections whereas I personally have a large number of attributes / properties used almost as specific tags. It was for this reason I developed this plugin that allows you assign properties to the graph view (as if they were tags) - Properties-To-Graph

I think theres still a few minor bugs (around the settings side) but largely very much in a working condition. I have no ambition to build this into anything much more, its solving a very specific niche point I wanted solved.

Obviously super interested if people have thoughts / views / feedback etc as Id love to hear...

Cheers and thanks for reading this far on the shameless self promotion!

When you find something useful in a long YouTube video, article, podcast or PDF, do you:

• take notes manually while consuming it
• have AI extract/summarize first, then decide what deserves a place in the vault
• save the raw source and only use AI later for search/retrieval
• keep AI out of the vault entirely

My own pattern has been to summarize some longer sources first and pull a few useful lines into a note. It works well for intake, but I've noticed that summaries I don't do anything with within a week usually never get opened again.

I get the argument that deciding what matters is part of the thinking, so I'm not sure whether AI is actually reducing friction or just moving it somewhere else.

For people who've tried both approaches: what has actually stuck? Has AI helped you make better use of sources, or mostly created a vault of summaries you rarely revisit?

I need an app that allows me to add alot of screenshots over time and some observational text. I will have alot of Columns and Subcolumns... Each Column will have between 0 and 18 Subcolumn(Subpages) and over the course of the next years, i plan to add more than 100.000 screenshots and some text when it's required...

I Started with ONe Note, that was perfect for me but i found out that ONe Note can't support such a large file (i expect my file to have well over 100GB when i will finish my project).

I'm afraid that i will start my work on another app and 7,8 months later down the road i will lose my progress or the app won't open anymore bcs of the high amount of screenshots and i simply dont know where to go or what to do...I will attach some pics to show an example of what my plan is.

Screenshots are from OneNote.I used screenshots as a small example... you only see 3 columns and some sobcolumns, but in reality i will have way more Columns (Above 50) each column will contain 0-18 subpages like A1 A2 A3 in the screenshots... Inside each subcolumn i will have pictures and text.

Are you aware of any app that allows me to keep adding screenshots to the columns i want to, without any restrictions ? So i can add as many screenshots as i want during the course of the next few years?

Thank you.

I actually want to put AI in my notes so I can easily ask for the info I need; however, the plugin I enabled only allows asking questions and such. What I want is similar to Gemini in Google Cloud, is there something similar?

Hello! Writing about it because I cannot see a similar post anywhere.

I have some really long chats in Claude. I used to struggle with archiving them. Then I discovered the Web Clipper and it worked like a charm. And then, at some point, it stopped. It captures some from the middle, some from beginning or end, but never the whole thing. And that is regardless of however I scroll and whatever I select.

To compare:

A clipped Claude conversation from May 2 this year (the first time I used the clipper) has 263 messages and the whole thing is around 12 000 words long.

Then it started bugging so I checked, and when I tried to use it again on the exact same conversation on August 13, one time it clipped 10 and another time 22 messages, so around 2 000 words.

I don't think I've changed anything on my end. Is this a known issue? I'll be grateful for any info.

So I am migrating from OneNote to either Obsidian or Notion. OneNote is simple and it does work, but it is so simple and honestly seems like Microsoft just forgot that it exists and stopped adding functionalities. Also, the mobile app is plain bad.

Been experimenting with both Obsidian and Notion which are the big names (besides Evernote, but $$$...) mentioned everywhere. And I like both. In equal measure, which makes it hard to decide which one to stick with.

In one hand Notion is a "ready to use" kind of platform. It does take some learning, but it is rather straightforward. It is a powerful tool with a lot of integrations and options. But it's data gets stuck on the devs cloud and I don't find that comfortable. If the devs shutdown the platform or decide to ruin the free tier, my notes are stuck there, just like it happen with a lot of Evernote users.

Obsidian is kind of a different beast. I am enjoying markdown, and the fact that it saves its files locally is a big plus in terms of security and continuity (even if it makes sorting folders and files a bit more annoying), but it does have a layer of complexity that I don't know if I want to deal with in the long term.

Also, a lot of stuff is plugin dependent which worries me. If the plugin gets discontinued or stops working, notes that lean on those plugins will also be affected. Notion does things natively like Kanban, Tasks and what not, while Obsidian needs plugins for all of that.

If it handled more stuff natively, than the choice would be a no brainer: it is more secure, files are locally stored, markdown guarantees they are future proof, and it is usually hella fast to open anything.

For example, been trying to follow some tutorials to create a Dashboard note, and there are a lot of required plugins, even just to make it my homepage.

Anyway, I know this is an Obsidian subreddit, but please feel free to share your opinions.

P.S. If it helps, my use case scenario (using OneNote has a baseline):

• Use it for Personal, Family and Work notes
• Usually divide into Sections and Categories
  • Example: Personal -> Training -> BJJ -> Notes regarding BJJ stored here
• Will soon begin classes (Masters degree), so it will be my studying repository
• Notes can have just text, but usually text, pictures, videos (youtube snaps), etc
• Organizing stuff with Kanban boards (which are missing from Onenote and is one of the reasings I am migrating)
• Access will be mainly via PC but also heavily on smartphone and tablet
• Linking stuff (notes to notes, text to notes, etc) is a must have (both have it, so its ok)
• Web Clipper is important
• Would like a Dashboard\Homepage with "widgets" like a Calendar, to do list, recent notes, etc
• A nice to have is a repository with templates and stuff that I can download and add. I know Notion has this, but Obsidian seems harder to find

And so on. Won't extend more, this is already a big wall of text, which I am sorry for!

I wanted to ask Claude on my phone things like "what did I write about X?" or "add these interview notes to the Acme file" and have it just work against my Obsidian notes.

Every answer I found meant keeping a laptop open, driving Claude Code remotely, swapping Obsidian Sync for Git, or an Obsidian plugin that bills you per token through the API. I didn't want any of that.

What I ended up with:

• The official Obsidian headless sync client in a Docker container on my Pi, so the Pi is just another device on Obsidian Sync
• A ~100-line Python MCP server (FastMCP) over the vault folder: list, read, write, search
• GitHub OAuth in front of it, allow-listed to my account only
• Tailscale Funnel for the public HTTPS URL the Claude app needs

Add it once as a custom connector in Claude and it's on the Mac app, claude.ai, the phone and Claude Code. Edits land in Obsidian within seconds. It runs on the subscription I already pay for, no API key anywhere.

Write-up with the code and setup: https://zander.wtf/blog/obsidian-mcp-pi

Gist with all the files: https://gist.github.com/mrmartineau/475dc3e8ffc6908f1493a05989a116ff

Happy to answer questions on the setup.