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How to Use Obsidian for Note-Taking

Plain Markdown files on your own disk, linked together — set up a vault and the one habit that makes it work.

beginner10 min read
creative-toolsobsidiannote-takingmarkdownbeginners
You have notes in three apps, two of which you no longer pay for, and a fourth pile in a notes app whose export button produces something unusable. That is the problem Obsidian is shaped around. It edits plain Markdown files sitting in an ordinary folder on your own disk, so the notes remain readable in any text editor decades from now — and it treats links between notes as a first-class feature rather than a formatting flourish. Those two facts explain almost every design decision in the app.
iWhat you need
A Mac, Windows PC, Linux machine, iPhone, or Android phone, and about 30 minutes. Download it from obsidian.md. Personal use is free and requires no account or sign-up. Sync and Publish are optional paid add-ons — roughly $4 and $8 per month on annual billing at the time of writing, so check the pricing page for current rates.
A vault is just a folder. Obsidian asks you to pick one on first launch, then treats every .md file inside it as a note and every subfolder as structure. There is no import step and no proprietary container — you can open that folder in Finder or Explorer right now and see your notes as files.
Where you put that folder is the one decision with lasting consequences, because it determines how syncing works later.

Picking a location

  1. 1Somewhere plain, like ~/Documents/Notes — the simplest choice if you only ever use one machine.
  2. 2Inside iCloud Drive or Dropbox — free cross-device sync, at the cost of occasional conflicted-copy files when two devices write the same note.
  3. 3Inside a Git repository — full version history and a real diff of every change, if you already know Git. Add a .gitignore for the .obsidian/workspace.json file, which changes constantly and creates noise.
  4. 4Do not nest one vault inside another. Obsidian indexes the whole folder tree, and nested vaults produce duplicate notes and confusing search results.
  5. 5Name the folder something you would still understand in five years. It is going to outlive this app.
!One vault is almost always enough
Splitting work and personal into two vaults means links can never cross between them, which is exactly the value you came for. Use folders or tags to separate contexts, and keep one vault unless you have a hard confidentiality reason not to.
Obsidian's editor renders Markdown live, so you type the syntax and see the formatting appear in place. You need about eight pieces of it, and the rest can wait until you hit a reason to look it up.
markdown
# Heading one
## Heading two

Normal text, with **bold** and *italic* and `inline code`.

- A bullet
- Another bullet
  - Indent with Tab to nest

1. A numbered item

- [ ] An unchecked task
- [x] A finished task

> A blockquote, for someone else's words.

[[Another note]]  <- an internal link
[External link](https://example.com)

---

Everything you need for your first week of notes

Type [[ and Obsidian opens an autocomplete of every note in the vault. Pick one and you have a link. Here is the part that changes how you write: if you type the name of a note that does not exist yet, Obsidian creates the link anyway. The link shows in a dimmer colour, and clicking it creates the note on the spot with that title.
That single behaviour is the habit worth building. While writing about a topic, link forward to the ideas you have not written up yet — [[Spaced repetition]], [[Why my deploy script is slow]] — and your vault accumulates a to-do list of thinking rather than a graveyard of finished documents. Weeks later you follow one of those dim links and write the note, and it arrives already connected to the context that prompted it.
✓Alias and heading links
Use [[Note name|what you want to call it here]] to link with different display text, and [[Note name#Heading]] to point at a specific section. Both keep working when you rename the target, because Obsidian rewrites links on rename.
Click the Backlinks tab in the right sidebar. It has two collapsible sections. Linked mentions lists every note that contains a link to the note you are reading. Unlinked mentions lists notes that mention this note's title as plain text without linking it — a running suggestion list of connections you could make with one click.
Backlinks are why linking beats filing. A note about one concept slowly gathers every context in which that concept mattered to you, bottom-up, with no index to maintain. If the pane is missing, open the command palette and run Backlinks: Show backlinks.
You have three organising tools and it is easy to over-invest in the wrong one. Folders are exclusive: a note lives in exactly one. Tags, written #like-this anywhere in a note, are non-exclusive labels, and the Tags pane lists all of them. Links are specific connections between two particular notes.
The honest recommendation: few folders, some tags, many links. Two or three folders — something like Notes, Daily, Attachments — is enough for years. Deep folder hierarchies force you to decide where a note "belongs" before you know what it is about, and that decision is the point at which most people stop capturing.
The graph view draws your notes as dots and your links as lines, and it is the screenshot that sells the app. It is genuinely useful in two narrow cases: spotting orphan notes with no connections, and using the local graph of one note to see its immediate neighbourhood. Beyond that, a hairball of 800 dots tells you nothing actionable. It is more fun than it is useful — enjoy it, do not organise around it.
The hardest part of any note system is the moment of capture, so lower that cost to nearly zero. Turn on the Daily notes core plugin and you get one dated note per day with a single click or command. Everything unsorted goes there. You do not decide where it belongs, you do not name it — you just write, with the date as your filing system, and link out to real notes when something deserves one.

Core plugins to enable in Settings, then stop

  1. 1Daily notes — the dated capture page described above.
  2. 2Backlinks and Outgoing links — the two panes that make linking visible.
  3. 3Quick switcher — press Cmd+O or Ctrl+O to jump to any note by typing part of its name.
  4. 4Command palette — Cmd+P or Ctrl+P for every command in the app by name.
  5. 5Templates — insert a saved skeleton into a note. Pair it with Daily notes for a consistent daily page.
  6. 6Outline — a heading list for long notes.
  7. 7Tags view — a list of every tag in the vault, for when you want to browse by label.
!Plugin sprawl is the standard Obsidian failure
The community plugin ecosystem is enormous and mostly maintained by volunteers. Two worth considering early are Calendar, for navigating daily notes, and Dataview, if you later want queries over your notes. Beyond that, add one plugin at a time, in response to a problem you have actually had — every extra plugin is more startup time, another thing that can break on an app update, and third-party code with access to your files.
One idea per note, and a title that states the idea rather than naming the topic. "Spaced repetition beats rereading because retrieval is the practice" is a better title than "Studying". It reads as a sentence when linked mid-paragraph, it forces you to know what you think, and it makes the note reusable — one clear claim slots into a dozen future arguments, where a 2,000-word dump titled "Notes on learning" slots into none.
This idea comes from the Zettelkasten method, the paper-slip system the sociologist Niklas Luhmann used to accumulate around 90,000 index cards over his career. The mechanics have not changed much in the move to software: small notes, in your own words, densely linked. See the Zettelkasten entry on Wikipedia for the original method.

The three keystrokes that replace clicking

  1. 1Cmd+O or Ctrl+O — quick switcher. Type a few letters of a note title and hit Enter. This becomes your main navigation.
  2. 2Cmd+Shift+F or Ctrl+Shift+F — search across the whole vault, with operators such as tag:#project, path:Daily, and file:2026.
  3. 3Cmd+P or Ctrl+P — command palette. Every command in the app, including ones with no menu item.
There is no free option without a tradeoff. Pick based on how much conflict-resolution you are willing to do yourself.

Three real options

  1. 1Obsidian Sync — the paid first-party service, end-to-end encrypted, with version history and mobile support. It handles conflicts properly and it is the option that just works.
  2. 2iCloud Drive or Dropbox — free, and fine for one person on two devices. Risk: if two devices edit the same note while one is offline, you get a conflicted copy file and have to merge by hand. Close the app before switching machines.
  3. 3Git — a real commit history and the best conflict tooling in existence, but you must commit and pull deliberately, and it is awkward on mobile. Good if you already live in Git.

Symptom, cause, fix

  1. 1A link is dim and clicking it makes a new note. That is correct behaviour — the target does not exist yet. If you meant to link an existing note, check the spelling against the quick switcher.
  2. 2Duplicate notes with names ending in a device name or the word conflicted. Two devices wrote the same file through iCloud or Dropbox. Merge them by hand, delete the copy, and close the app before you switch machines.
  3. 3Renaming a note broke links elsewhere. Rename from inside Obsidian, not in Finder or Explorer. Obsidian rewrites every link when it does the rename; your file manager does not.
  4. 4The app is slow to start. Too many community plugins. Disable them all in Settings, confirm startup is fast, then re-enable one at a time.
  5. 5Images do not show. The file is outside the vault, so the relative path cannot resolve. Set an attachment folder in Settings and drag images into the note so Obsidian copies them in.
  6. 6Your vault has 400 notes and none of them connect. You have been filing, not linking. Spend twenty minutes in Unlinked mentions on your ten busiest notes and convert the obvious ones.
The tool is the easy half. What decides whether any of this pays off is the method — capture rules, review habits, and doing something with the notes — which is what How to Build a Second Brain covers. How to Use Notion is the database-and-views alternative, and comparing the two makes each one's tradeoff obvious. How to Use Spaced Repetition Apps handles the things you need in your head rather than on disk. The Learning Mastery roadmap puts capture, retrieval, and practice in one sequence.