My Obsidian Setup
I’ve been using Obsidian seriously for a couple of years for work and personal notes. I’ve noticed it’s often promoted differently than how I actually use it, so maybe my perspective will be useful.
For me, Obsidian is a powerful local-file markdown editor, and that’s how I use it. It lets me edit formatted markdown directly and it also supports inline LaTeX. Being able to edit formatted text and still save plain files is already very valuable to me. Instead of one big connected knowledge base, I create small, project-specific wikis that I can version with Git and share separately.
For personal notes from papers or experiments, I keep a single folder - quick, messy, and unpolished. Not linked at all. Linking notes makes sense when building a well-defined knowledge bases for teams and I sometimes do it, but for everyday note-taking, the hype is overrated.
When I work with knowledge bases or follow a well-defined research process, I often open the vault in a code editor and transform the notes using custom scripts and workflows.
I use the core features that make moving between notes fast: the command palette, global search, switcher, and page preview. I turn off the Graph view and any plugins focused on linking notes.
I prefer Obsidian to stick to plain markdown and avoid adding non-standard file types. Some recent core plugins introduce new formats. I am relatively ok with them as they seem fairly minimal and easy to parse. The new Bases are quite handy for team knowledge bases and structured work but I don’t use them in my personal vault.
Canvas is the only exception. It allows me to jot notes very quickly and arrange them into clusters visually. It feels natural to me, likely because I am used to sketching in graphic editors. I set the zoom threshold for hiding card content to the absolute maximum and have my canvas pinned as the first tab. I haven’t had any performance issues.
My philosophy is to keep custom plugins to a minimum. I only add plugins that provide basic features or clearly improve my workflow. I don’t want to depend on plugins that might break or be abandoned, or deal with conflicts between plugins.
Below are the only plugins I use.
Latex Suite: A must-have if you need to write math. It simply works - it makes typing math in Obsidian really fast. It is very modular, and has great default settings... If you take notes on research papers, you already use the plugin.
Vimrc Support: For folks who use Vim mode, this plugin loads a file of Vim commands from custom path. This is very useful for making various settings (most notably keymaps) persist. I only use this plugin to navigate using the lines as I see them in the editor instead of how they are stored in the file. Here is the config file:
.obsidian.vimrc
nmap j gj nmap k gk
Search In Canvas: I noticed I sometimes need to search within the canvas. This plugin adds a little search input to the canvas. So I can hit CMD + f to search within current canvas and CMD + shift + f to search whole vault.
Toggle Readable line length: Allows setting a keyboard shortcut to toggle between full-width text editor and a readable width. I use the default setting CMD+Shift+E. This comes handy eg. when working with large tables inside the markdown. I would appreciate if Obsidian remembered the files in which I use the full-width setting for me though.
I am sometimes tempted to seek plugins for better table management in markdown, but to keep things simple, I stick with the default editor. Some of my markdown tables have grown very large, with many columns and multiline cells. If the team figured out how to make working with single-file tables inside Obsidian simpler, I would probably tolerate another custom filetype. I think the original markdown table syntax is very unfortunate. If they added Markdoc style tables as a core plugin, I'd use it.
Obsidian is a powerful local markdown editor. It’s worth remembering that the files are plain and accessible to other tools.