Using Obsidian for Personal Knowledge Management
Whilst Obsidian has many fine qualities, I’ve decided it’s not the right tool for me. I’m sticking to Quarto for notes that I want to be public (like this one), and Apple Notes for personal notes.
Over the years I’ve tried many different note taking systems. I’ve read a lot of the relevant books, such as How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens and The PARA Method by Tiago Forte. I’ve found one system that works very well for productivity related notes, for me at least. But I’ve never settled on a good method for storing information, or for research. So I’ve decided to try Obsidian.
One of the great things about Obsidian is that it works with Markdown files. That’s the same format as I use to create this website (using the wonderful Quarto technical publishing system). So I can use Obsidian to create pages for my websites. In fact I’m writing this page in Obsidian. It’s much nicer than using VS Code.
I’m going to keep a note here of how I set up Obsidian as I’m sure I’ll have to do it again in the future. And it might be useful to somebody somewhere.
How I set up Obsidian
- On my local machine (no sync because I discovered it can seriously mess with iCloud).
- Change from Dark to Light mode. Setup ≫ Appearance ≫ Base color scheme
- Change the theme to Minimal Setup ≫ Appearance ≫ Themes
- Install the Minimal plugin Setup ≫ Community plugins
- Create a template folder. Setup ≫ Templates ≫ Template folder location
- Install the qmd as md plugin, so I can use Quarto Markdown files in Obsidian. Setup ≫ Community plugins
- Turn off wikilinks as they don’t work with Quarto. Setup ≫ Files & links ≫ Use Wikilinks