**A local, folder-based Personal Knowledge Management application using durable data structures. This application here!**
Obsidian is a note taking & personal knowledge management ([[PKM]]) application that utilizes a folder-based, plaintext backend that lives on your computer. It uses [[Durable File Types]] and allows for no cloud-dependencies, and is therefore (theoretically) your “final destination” for PKM. There are other [[Obsidian Use Cases]], but you've not (yet) made those work.
It’s goal is to give you a **permanent, durable** home for your body of notes. It’s a competitor to [[Notion]] in some ways - but is better suited for notes than [[Obsidian for Projects]]. It utilizes [[Markdown]] and [[YAML]], and lets you embed local files into your notes. It’s got a robust plugin system and is incredibly highly configurable and modular. The aim is to keep it as lean as possible while giving you the tools to do anything. [[Obsidian Search]] is fast and has good power-user features.
It has built-in support for [[Mermaid JS]], [[Obsidian Canvas]]es are good, and a great [[Excalidraw]] plug-in.
It has over 1000 plug-ins, including the incredible [[Dataview Plug-in]] (which should become a standard part of Obsidian, really). Although I decided to [[Only Use Obsidian Plug-ins That Retain Portability]].
### Vaults are just Folders
Because Obsidian works on top of a regular folder on your computer, containing regular [[Plain Text Durability|plain text documents]], you can utilize *other* tools effectively to edit content that feels like it lives natively in Obsidian. These are things like:
- Using VS Code to find-and-replace text in **all** notes simultaneously
- Using [[DrawIO]] or [[Excalidraw]] to edit and save files that live in those folders
- Using [[NodeJS]] (or python or whatever) to iterate over your notes to operate on them in code
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### Source
- https://obsidian.md
### Related
- [[Slip-Box Method]]
- [[PKM]]
- [[Zettelkasten Components]]
- [[Obsidian to Notion]]
- [[Notion]]
- [[Obsidian vs Notion]]
- [[Plain Text Durability]]
- [[Logseq]]
- [[Obsidian Callouts]]
- [[Mermaid JS]]
- [[Excalidraw]]
- [[Obsidian Annoyances]]
- [[Obsidian Niceties]]
- [[Obsidian as a Semantic Wiki]]