Other Tools

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) Tools

Overview & Thoughts

Obsidian entered the market right when I was looking for a new digital note-taking tool. I had used OneNote for at least a decade before that, but the product had stagnated, and Microsoft was more interested in pushing everyone to their online version. Roam was the online note-taking darling at the time, but it was overpriced, and I really wasn’t all that interested in paying someone to store my notes. Obsidian offered local storage, Markdown support, and bi-directional linking, which was the killer feature I didn’t know I was missing.

Obsidian

• Main: https://obsidian.md/
  • Help forum: https://forum.obsidian.md/

Frequently used plugins:

• Templater
  • Documentation
  • Install Quick Capture as a template to quickly record thoughts, reminders, etc…without having to leave current page….great template to use
• Excalidraw
• Dataview
• Tasks - used to use todoist (even paid for it) but prefer the task plugin experience in Obsidian.
• Periodic Notes - for daily & weekly activities
• Kanban

Operating in a networked environment:

• Problem: Obsidian doesn’t like the primary vault to be stored on a network share, which is where I keep all my working files. This configuartion will cause the app to potentially take several minute to open.
  • Solution: Keep the vault on the local hard drive and use a syncing app, like Syncthing to sync files across devices & network.
    • Result: Startup dropped to under ~10 seconds.

How to link to other files:

• Network Share => [Pitch Deck](<file:///\\Ares-II\Content\Mark\Sync\Reading\Venture\Pitch Deck.pdf>)
  • Here, “Ares-II” is the server name (using SMB share between Windows & NAS)
  • Encapsulating the path between <> allows for spaces in the path without having to insert “%20” between blank spaces
  • A fall 2023 release stopped respecting the double “\\” in the network share example above.
    • Solution: replace “\\” with “%5c%5c”
• Locally => [Pitch Deck](<file:///D:/Storage/Reading/Venture/Pitch Deck.pdf>)
• Can also open folder locations in windows by this method => [Folder Name](<file:///%5C%5CAres-II\Folder Location>)