How I Use Obsidian
I've tried most of the note-taking apps. Notion, Evernote, Bear, Apple Notes, Roam, a stint with plain .txt files in a Dropbox folder. None of them stuck. The one that did was Obsidian, and the reason is boring: my notes are markdown files in a folder I control. Everything else follows from that.
I keep one vault. Work notes, personal notes, project ideas, debugging logs, book highlights, recipes, daily journal, Chinese vocabulary — it all goes in the same place. People sometimes ask why I don't separate work and personal. The answer is that I don't know, in advance, which category a thought belongs to. A debugging idea at midnight might become a blog post. A lesson from a book might land inside a work doc three months later. Separating them up front would break the links that make the vault valuable.
Two decisions shaped how the vault works. First, I categorize with wikilinks instead of tags — every link is a two-way connection, and over time backlinks build a map of relationships I never have to maintain. Second, I put structured data in frontmatter and query it with Obsidian Bases, which turns the vault into a set of linked databases while keeping everything as plain markdown underneath.
The Vault as an API
What I didn't expect is how much value would come from treating the vault as a programmable surface. Every file is plain text with predictable frontmatter. The Obsidian CLI talks to a running instance over IPC, so scripts can read notes, set properties, and create files — and have Obsidian's own parser write them, so the results are always valid.
That's how I sync work tickets into the vault automatically, and how a cron job generates this website from notes marked published: true. None of those scripts were hard to write. The data model is just markdown in a folder — no API to learn, no OAuth to configure. Notion has an API, but your content is trapped behind it. Obsidian's gimmick is that there's nothing to export. The folder on your disk is the thing.
Daily Notes
I start every day by opening the daily note. It's a scratchpad — tasks, meetings, passing thoughts. A thought that's worth keeping eventually gets moved into its own note. Most don't cross that membrane, and that's fine. The daily note also doubles as a log — I can open any day in the past year and see what I was stuck on, which has been useful for postmortems and performance reviews.
What I Don't Do
I used to spend time picking icons, colored tags, elaborate folder structures. Every time, it rotted the moment my needs changed. Now I have one folder called Notes/ where almost everything lives, and I let the structure emerge from wikilinks and Bases. Steph Ango's public vault was an early influence on this approach.
I don't use Obsidian Publish — I have my own static site generator. I don't install many plugins. The ones I keep make the text-file model more powerful: Templater, Linter, Front Matter Timestamps, QuickAdd, Excalidraw. Anything that hides the markdown, I skip. I do pay for Obsidian Sync to keep plugins and settings consistent across devices.
Why This Works
The short version is: pick a storage format you trust, categorize with links instead of tags, put structure in frontmatter, and treat the whole vault as something you can automate. The rest is just writing things down.
What I like about Obsidian isn't the app. It's that I can imagine using it for the next twenty years and not losing anything. If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, I'd still have a folder of markdown files. I'd write a new tool, or use someone else's, and nothing would change about the data. That's a rare property. It's the main reason the vault has kept growing.