obsidian

Obsidian is a free note-taking app with markdown formatting and a unique internal linking feature that allows you to visualise the interrelation of your notes.

While studying for one of the courses in took in the third year of my degree, I was suddenly struck with the realisation that I’d covered the material previously. I looked around for the little notebook I knew to contain pages of useful, relevant notes, before realising that I had left it on my bookshelf… Five thousand kilometers across the Atlantic ocean…

This was the first time I truly appreciated the importance of digitised notes. Historically I have not been a fan of taking notes on a computer, mostly due to the inefficiency of writing equations with anything other than a pen and paper. When I came across Obsidian, however, I was immediately drawn in by their signature graph view. Writing in markdown was new to me, but I quickly grew into the workflow and rapidly expanded my collection of notes into the network shown above. Obsidian don’t pay me, and I’m not much of a reviewer, so I won’t go into too much detail on the functionality, but I can wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who has stressed about the longevity of their notes and knowledge.