Program/Application Discussion

Obsidian

I thought that I'd take a moment to write about my experience with Obsidian.

First, what is Obsidian? It's simple text editor, but on steroids! It uses simple Markdown formatting, which makes it really handy to write in. Need to italicize something, just surround it by single asterisks. Bold, double them. Bold and italicize? Triple them! IT supports more advanced formatting output as well, like tables, bullets, and you use hyperlinks too.

You can keep all your notes in separate documents, and all organized in a Treeview. You can also interlink the documents, creating a personal Wiki. You can include entire PDFs, and make a database, including images and all that extra stuff. But probably one of the best features is the PDF export function. You can customize the look of an exported PDF by using CSS coding, just like you would for webpages using HTML. And the CSS applies to ALL the files within your Vault. You can have multiple vaults too.

I don't use the majority of the functions that Obsidian supports. There's so much that it can do, and it's extendable with plug-ins! It also supports spellcheck, which is necessary for anybody who writes anything. But just the fact that I'm only scratching the surface of everything that Obsidian can do, allows me to grow with the software. Best of all, it works on all platforms, including Linux. It's totally free, although you can donate to the developers and get built in synchronization support. But you don't have to go that route, if you're poor like I am, you can always use something like Folder Sync, which is a free app that you can run on demand on your phone.

There's probably a ton more that could be written about Obsidian, but I simply don't know about all of it! Needless to say, it's one of my favorite applications for both my desktop and my mobile. Oh, one more thing-- it auto saves, like after every keystroke, so you never have to worry about lost input. There's just a ton of awesomeness to this App.