Obsidian

Webpage: Obsidian.md

Glossary

Vault: Term used by Obsidian for a collection of notes. - This is equivalent to a Boost Note “Space”.

Obsidian Vault

An Obsidian vault is the term used by Obsidian for a collection of notes.

An Obsidian vault contains markdown files and attachments like images.

Unlike Boost Note, markdown notes are named according to the title of the note rather than a generated ID (like a UUID).

Each Obsidian vault has a directory named .obsidian containing metadata about the vault.

Dot Obsidian Directory

This section will describe the .obsidian directory inside each vault.

Workspace File

Within the .obsidian directory will be a file called workspace containing information about the notes in the vault. It stores this information as JSON.

Features

Obsidian Schema Links

These should not be used to link between notes. Obsidian will not recognize these links when generating the link graph (as of Obsidian 0.13.23).

The context menu of each note (accessed by right-clicking a note in the sidebar) includes an option to “Copy Obsidian URL”.

Interestingly, this is a less-abusive way of doing links between notes than the way Boost Note and Joplin do it. However, it may require some additional configuration, ie. you may need to register the Obisdian application with your Operating System to handle the obsidian:// URI schema.

These links take the form obsidian://open?vault=VAULT_NAME&file=RELATIVE_NOTE_PATH_WITHOUT_EXTENSION.

In the above:

VAULT_NAME and RELATIVE_NOTE_PATH_WITHOUT_EXTENSION are both URI-escaped
RELATIVE_NOTE_PATH_WITHOUT_EXTENSION may be nested within sub-directories
VAULT_NAME is a little awkward because: - It is based on the parent directory of your notes rather than any other metadata. - You could have two *vault*s on the same computer with the same parent directory name. This forces Obsidian to arbitrarily choose one of the vaults.

Links Between Notes

Internal links use the [[NOTE_NAME]] syntax, which is custom to Obsidian.

Renaming Notes

Obsidian will automatically update all backlinks with the [[NOTE_NAME]] syntax if you rename a note.

Image Attachments

Image attachments are dumped into the same directory as the notes in Obsidian. They are not treated specially.

However, Obsidian uses a special link syntax for images that does not work in all other editors. If you drag-and-drop an image into Obsidian, it will represent the image with double-square-bracket-notation: ![[image-path.png]].