 So I have made a lot of videos over the course of the last three years about note taking software. Almost as many videos as I've made about file managers, but not quite. It seems to be that I'm quite obsessed with finding the best note taking application. And some of that, as I've explained before, is because my primary means of taking notes for the last 10, 15 years has been Google Keep, and I hate it with a fiery passion. All of my notes are there for a very long time. Now, like I said in previous videos, when I talk about notes, about half of those notes can go away. I don't need them. They're old grocery lists and nonsense like that that don't need to be transferred over. But some of the other ones I obviously want to keep, you know, their ideas for videos or their ideas for random things that I need to keep in my head or whatever. And I want to keep them. So I every time I try to find a new note taking solution, I have to think, is this thing good enough for me to stick with for me to commit to transferring all of that stuff from Google Keep to the new thing. And most of the time, in fact, every time so far, it has been a absolutely not I don't have that type of interest in that type of commitment with this particular application. And every time I make a video of a note taking application, someone in the comment sections, usually 10 people shout at me in capital letters, Matt, try obsidian, try obsidian. And I either come back with a, well, that's not open source, or I come back with, well, I tried it and I didn't care for it, which is true. I have tried obsidian in the past. I didn't care for it. But I'll be honest about it and say that I didn't give it a really good try because there were some things about it that just didn't really mesh with my workflow. And I just stopped using it and went back to Google Keep. So I have tried obsidian in the past, but people keep telling me Matt obsidian is fantastic. You have to you have to give it a good try. So I have for the last month, I have been using obsidian full time on both my PCs and on my iPhone. And I have some thoughts. So before we jump into anything, if you leave a thumbs up on this video, I'd really appreciate it really help the channel. But let me talk about what this video is not. This is not a full review of obsidian. It is also not a video where I'm going to go over any of the features. OK, if you want to know the features of obsidian, you're going to have to go search elsewhere. I could be here for days. Let's just get that out of the way. Obsidian has a ton of features. And if it doesn't have the feature by default, chances are there's a plugin that will add it. There are a ton of plugins. We'll talk about more. We'll talk about plugins here in a little bit. But obsidian is not lacking in features. Let's just put it that way. It has a ton, a ton of features, so much so that you're probably, if you're looking for just a simple note taking application, are going to be very overwhelmed. I know I was and I know I have been overwhelmed with a number of features in obsidian, so much so that a lot of times I spend more time tinkering with obsidian than I do actually, you know, taking notes. So that's one thing. Now, another thing that I need to talk about before we jump into the actual meat of the video is that a lot of the stuff that I'm going to be talking about in this video is negative. And I don't want that to come across as me saying that obsidian is bad. Obsidian is not bad. It's a fantastic piece of software. And if you have need of even a third of the capability of obsidian, you're probably a happy camper. I don't have that much need for a lot of the stuff that obsidian does. As you'll see as I go through this video and I talk about the things that I've been using it for, I'm a very simple guy when it comes to note taking. It's why Google keep has been okay for me because it's very, very astonishingly so simple. So let's go ahead and talk about obsidian. I'm going to go ahead and transfer over to my main desktop here and you guys can actually see obsidian. Now, this is not the vault that I've been using. So all of my notes, you guys aren't going to see those things. But and that's fine. But I just wanted to create a vault kind of show you around a little bit. And to talk about some of the things that I both like and dislike. So let's start off as positive as possible. So the UI of obsidian is fantastic. I really, really like it. You can do splits. If you want to use splits, you can have a side by side where you have an editing dock on or an editing bay on the one side and have a like a preview window on the other side. You can do that. You can have a knowledge graph if that's your sort of thing. You can have tabs obviously I have a whole bunch of tabs up here at the top, usually when I'm doing this. So it really does do a good job of UI. Also, if you go to the settings, the settings aren't horrible. Usually when an application is festooned with a whole bunch of settings and bells and whistles and all this stuff, the settings are a mess. And we know that just go look at the kd plasma settings, they're a mess, because there's a ton of settings and they're buried all over the place and you have to search for things obsidian hasn't been toppled over by the number of settings that it has. It does a very good job of delineating what each section is for. You can just go through these and just edit them all you want and it's very, very good. Okay, so I have good things to say about the UI. I've really, really enjoyed using it over the last month. It is a good UI. Another thing that I really like is the file tree along the side. So when you open a vault, you have all the files in that vault right there along the side and you can create nested files so you can be as organized as you want. It's really, really good. Another thing that I really like is that it allows you to navigate between these things in multiple ways. You can do it from here or you can do it from up here if you want. You can navigate it through it in a couple other ways as well. And it's just a very good way of navigating between notes. You can also link between notes. So if you want to do something like like Xemwiki is capable of or Notion even really kind of you can link between one note and the other that way if you wanted to go to that note you just click on it it would take you to that note. Now I do kind of wish that they would link back to each other but you know automatically but they don't but that's not that big of a deal. You can just create another note and you do that just by doing something like this and then you click that and then you close it or it closes automatically and then you can go back to it just like so. So I like all of that stuff. The linking it has fantastic by the way fantastic markdown capability. I bitch and moan and gnaw on my teeth every time I open up a note taking application and it has markdown support but it's not all the way there like like they have messed up the headings or they you know they don't include the ability to do actual external links. They don't allow you to do pictures or they don't let you do a horizontal line or a line break or any of that stuff. They go part of the way there and markdown support but they always half-ass it. Obsidian does not do that. It's full on full fledged markdown support. If you want an HTML block you want a code block you want links pictures whatever you want. All of it's here in traditional markdown fashion. It's fantastic so much so that I've been basically replacing Kate with this. I actually made my writing folder the one that I used to you know basically write just for pleasure a vault in Obsidian that I can just go to and do any of my fan fiction or original writing or whatever I want to do right. I can go there and I can do all of my writing there. Now I haven't done that for work yet because as I've explained before or explained in the past all of the stuff I have to do for work has to be eventually translated to Google Docs. And unfortunately getting it out of Obsidian into Google Docs is an extra process that I don't really care to do. Maybe I have to go into the file structure find the markdown file that it creates inside the vault and then transfer it over to Google Docs. It's not as easy as it is usually when I'm like in Vim where I can just I'm already in the folder. I don't have to do with any of the vault structure I can just copy it to the clipboard and transfer it to Google Docs that way. So it's not quite as easy or at least I haven't figured out a way to make it as easy. So I haven't done it for work yet but for my regular every day just my time my type of writing. I can do that in here and it's a fantastic markdown solution for all that stuff. So that stuff all very very good. And I foresee myself using it for a long time because a lot of the documents that I have both for work and just regular writing are very large documents and this has handled things like 200,000 word documents very very well. No stuttering like I get in Vim all the time. So it's a very very good markdown solution for writing and for note taking at least on the surface. So those are the positive things that I have to say about it. If it was just that I think it'd be fine but I have some bones to pick. Okay. Things that just don't really suit the way that I want to do things. And that's fine. Not everything has to be the way that I want it. I'm not that I'm a little narcissistic. I'm not that narcissistic. Okay. So everything doesn't have to be the way that Matt wants it in the world. That is just obviously that's never going to happen as sad as it is to say. So I have some some negative things to say about just the way that this does things. And the number one absolute top of the list is vaults. Now I know people swear by the vault system. So let's first before we jump into the negatives talk about what vaults are. Basically it's a directory. That's basically what it is. It creates a directory somewhere on your system or it opens up a directory as a vault and it just appears here in the side. So this particular vault is just called notes and it has all of these directories inside of that vault or inside of that directory. That's really all it is. My biggest issue. My biggest one is that you can't have multiple vaults open up in the same time in the same window. Now you can go down here to the open another vault. You can go here and you can open up another vault this way and then open that up in another window. OK. So be a window side by side. Not extra tabs. Not side by side or you know somewhere over here as a nested vault system or whatever. It has to be another window and that bugs the crap out of me. I don't want to do that. So I've had some people as I've tutored about this over on Master Done talk about how I could basically create one master vault and put all the other vaults that I have inside of that vault. That would allow me to have all of them open at one time. Basically just putting all the directories into one big master directory. I could do that. I don't really care to do that because I like to keep things separated. I want to keep my work stuff if I'm going to do my work stuff there. I want to keep my notes stuff in one place. I want to keep my writing stuff in one place. I don't want to have all in the same damn directory. It would drive me nuts. It would mess with my organized brain. Right. So that's a huge downside for me when it comes to obsidian. I don't care that much for the vault system. I just really don't. I think that I'd be okay with it if I could have multiple vaults open in the same window. I don't want to have multiple windows open that just drives me bonkers. Now I know some people are saying well Matt you can only use one at a time anyways. That's not true. But at least not true for me. I often have multiple things going on at once. I'm taking notes which would be in one vault. I'm doing some writing in another vault and I have to have them both open either on a separate workspace or side by side or whatever and that's not the way that I prefer to do things. I want them in tabs or in that sidebar over there along here along the side. That's the way that I prefer to do it but that's not the way that it works which is just highly disappointing because that's by far my biggest complaint. Another complaint that I have and this is not that big a deal for a lot of people. But if you don't have eight dollars a month you don't get sync. Now I don't think for the vast majority of the stuff that I would be doing outside of notes I'd care about. So I don't like I don't need my writing or my work stuff to synchronize. All that stuff is going to be on one PC anyways and I could easily very easily take those directories and sync them to another computer. So if I have all my writing on this PC and on my laptop I could set up sync things so that those things synchronize on their own and that'd be free. But for notes I want to be able to sync from my phone to obsidian on my PC. I don't want to pay eight dollars a month to do it. Eight dollars a month is pretty steep to be honest with you. That's the price of basic I mean it used to be the price of Netflix but it's not the price of Netflix anymore. But you understand the point right. It's very very very pricey if you want to enable synchronization right. So I don't think that I'd pay that for that. It's just not worth it for me for the amount of stuff that I'd even use it for. Now I do want my notes to synchronize and I think that I could rig up a solution where again I use sync thing or something similar to that where I synced it from my PC to my phone and then have the vault pointed at the same direction in obsidian and that'd be fine. But that steep price does give me some caution when I because I do think that it would be easier if I could just use the sync that's built into obsidian right if I wanted to do so. And because it's so pricey that I can't. So that's one that's another thing that I had to say about that's kind of negative. One of the things that I do enjoy we're going to go go ahead and kind of transition back into positive here for a second is that it does have full on them support. You can actually use your VRC in obsidian if you want to. And that doesn't require a plug in or anything. It works perfectly well. I love this bit here. So if you you can't even turn them support on without knowing how to close them. It's awesome. Now I didn't do it. And sadly I did not do enough testing to figure out all the responses that this would accept. I just a colon colon Q exclamation point. And that was you know that's the way that it took it. But I'm assuming it because there are 12 other ways of quitting them without writing you can probably use those things. But I'm not sure. I unfortunately didn't spend enough time there to figure that out. I'm disappointed that I didn't but I love this. I think that this is the most fantastic thing that I've ever seen in my life. The fact that you have to know how to quit them in order to actually even turn it on. Not only is it hilarious but it's brilliant. It's just fantastic. So you it does have full on them support another thing to transition back into negative for a second is that if you turn on them support in one vault it doesn't do it in every vault that you have. What even is that with why on earth is that even the setting like if I turn on them support I want them support everywhere. Every vault that I have if I'm going to have to be forced to have multiple vaults and I'm going to have to have multiple windows open. I want the same experience in every single fault when I change a setting. It does at least for them the them modes up it doesn't do that. So I have them support in my writing vault. I have them support in my notes fault but only because I enabled it in both places. And that's not that that's not the way that it should work. OK. That really bugs me and I hope that they can fix that. But maybe they have it that way for a reason and I just can't figure out why that is why that reason is but whatever. So yeah them support is fantastic. Now let's go ahead and transition into plugins while we're here. There are a ton of plugins but there are a couple problems that I have. So first let's talk about the positive plugins are plentiful. You can go to the browse plugins section here and it just shows you hundreds of plugins. Some of them are duplicates of each other. So they do things in a different way or whatever. But they do basically the same thing. You can basically if you need a particular feature that Obsidian doesn't already have you probably can find it inside of the plugin system including things like chat GPT and adding breadcrumbs and all sorts of stuff. You know from the inane things that don't make any sense whatsoever and aren't all that useful to very, very useful things. So if you're going to create a daily journal or whatever you can have a plugin that will actually create every day for you and follow a specific template if you want to. So that's really cool. So there are a ton of plugins. My biggest problem and this is the same thing with the Vim problem is that the plugins don't transfer between volts like what even is that that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. If I want if I like a plugin so much that I'm going to take the time to install it. It doesn't take very long but still I've made the effort to go in find the plug in and install it. Doesn't it stand a reason that I want that in every vault that I have or at least I mean maybe some maybe you know traditional Matt here. It's possible that after the video comes on I'll go back spelunking into the settings and find that there is a place here where I can sync plugins and sync settings between different vaults. That probably exists and I just didn't see it. There are a ton of settings so I won't even claim to have seen all the settings so it's possible that that exists. But by default the plugins don't synchronize between vaults. That's weird. The settings don't synchronize between vaults. That's just weird and it's not the way that it should work. It's not. I don't have to install every plugin that I enjoy on every vault that I have. I don't want to do that like that. That's just that creates extra work for me. And I don't want I don't want to manage stuff that much because that means that that means that I have to especially on plugins that I know that I want to have everywhere. I should at least have that option. Right. So I've just went through very briefly and searched for a way to synchronize plugins between vaults. I still don't see it. You think that'd be here on the comedian community plugins page if it exists or on the core plugins because there are some default plugins that are here. But as far as I can tell that setting doesn't exist which is weird and definitely not the way that it should work. Right. So yeah. I like that has plugins. I think that if I were to use Obsidian long enough and actually transition everything over and bite the bullet and either figure out a way to synchronize on my own or actually pony up the $8 a month either way. If I did all that stuff I think that the thing that would bother me the most was having to manage multiple vaults. It goes back to that initial negative point that I had multiple vaults just is not fantastic when they're not basically managed in the same place. For at least the way that I want this to work is for me just to be able to manage all the settings across everything not have to do with multiple windows not have to deal with knowing where the vaults are all the time having to open them up basically go you know press I'll go back here and show you so I have to do this and then I had to select the vault and then you know whatever I have to do all that every time that I want to open another vault I don't like that that's just creates an extra pain point for me and I don't want to I just want one place for all of my stuff now like I said I could if I wanted to take someone else's suggestion and just make a master vault right and put everything in there all the directories and separate them out just by directory inside of that directory kind of like nested directories I could do that and maybe I will maybe that's the solution because I do like obsidian quite a lot and despite all the negative things that I've said it does fantastic job with very large files so I could do my writing here which would kind of make a one stop shop for me it does a good job of note taking it has all it has full markdown support I can drag I can drag web snippets in I can drag HTML in pictures code blocks whatever I want all into a note in whatever format that I want it has multiple formats for notes so I can do like a Trello style board I can do a table of some kind kind of like notion I can link between all those things it's all fantastic it's a really really good note taking application but the pain points that it has negate all of that or at least the vast majority of it and that's just disappointing for me because I went into this with a negative attitude because I knew that the vault thing was going to bother me I knew it because it had bothered me before but I figured well you know maybe I just didn't give it enough of a chance maybe I didn't take enough time to immerse myself into the workflow to understand what all the it was about to manage multiple vaults together to organize things actually take a whole bunch of notes and have them all in one place and all this stuff maybe I didn't do that but now that I have now a month later I'm still of the opinion that vaults are not the way that I want to have it done or at least it's not managing the vaults the way that would work well with my workflow and because that's true and it kind of filters into every part of the experience obsidian is just not for me and again I can't stress this enough that's disappointing for me because I really do like it I think it's a fantastic note taking application I think it's fantastic Markdown editor it doesn't and I'm not even touching on the knowledge base and all that stuff that it can also do similar to the stuff that notion does like I haven't even gotten into any of that stuff really beyond just kind of briefly touching and I haven't even talked about it so you know it has all this extra features that I haven't gone to gone through it has all the good note taking application features that I'd want outside of synchronization out you know that's not eight dollars a month but that vault problem is just going to be the deal breaker for me so that's it for this video I know I've gone on for a very long time about an application that I'm not going to continue to use but I wanted to do this I think that's important because I think a lot of people are interested in obsidian a lot of people see people say like oh my goodness obsidian is a fantastic application and I wanted to put my thoughts out there so just remember what I said at the beginning obsidian is a fantastic application but now that we've gone through the video it's not for me so that's it for me on this one if you have thoughts on obsidian you leave those in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you you can follow me on master on odyssey those links up in the video description you can support me on patreon.patreon.com slash the linus 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