Nifty note-taking with Obsidian

Nate Drake walks you through adopting the almighty Markdown-based note-taking app Obsidian to see whether it lives up to its legend.

- Nate Drake

Obsidian’s website describes the app as “a second brain for you, forever”. In plain English, that means a tool that can help you take and organise a colossal number of notes in a simple way, from basic study notes to a full-blown wiki.

The program makes use of the Markdown markup language to format text, making it easy to import and export files. This simplifies tasks such as using links to jump between notes and organising large amounts of information.

Obsidian is not FOSS but the free tier fully supports Linux, doesn’t require registration and has some very powerful features. The program itself was developed by Shida Li and Erica Xu, who were unhappy with the existing note-taking software on offer.

There’s also a thriving Obsidian community (https:// obsidian.md/community) and a host of devs creating plugins to improve its rather minimalist interface.

Pick your package

Obsidian is extremely Linux-friendly, being available via Snap, Flatpak and an AppImage. Head over to https://obsidian.md/download to get started.

Ubuntu users will find it easiest just to click Linux (Snap) to download the file. Open the terminal and use cd to navigate to your Downloads folder. You can then use snap on the relevant file to install it – for example: $ snap install –dangerous –classic obsidian_1.0.3_ amd64.snap

Note that because this is a third-party Snap file, you must use the –dangerous flag. You also need to enter your admin password. Once installed, Obsidian appears in Applications.