Quartz 4

Obsidian Guide

6 min read

Obsidian & Markdown Cheatsheet for Beginners

🗂️ Obsidian Basics

  • What is Obsidian?
    A free, cross-platform note-taking app (Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android) that stores notes as plain text Markdown files in a local vault .

  • Key perk: Your notes belong to you — no cloud lock-in.

  • Core Concepts

    • Vault: Your note library (folder on your device).
    • Wikilinks: Link notes with double-brackets ([[Note Name]]) to build a “second brain.”
    • Graph View: Visualize connections between notes.
    • MOCs (Maps of Content): Hub pages organizing related notes. (Optional. These are the “topics” notes I create that exist primarily to link to other notes.)

  • Getting Started

    1. Use Daily Notes for quick logging and journaling.
    2. Start with core features — avoid plugins initially until you have the basics.

  • Pro Tips

    • Organize with tags (#topic), folders, and by linking MOCs to new notes you create… or however makes sense to you! Obsidian is very free-form and allows for many ways to organize things. Mixing and matching, though, will make your notes less useful. Pick something and stick with it.
    • Press Ctrl/Cmd+O (mnemonic: open) to search notes instantly.

✍️ Markdown Essentials

Text Formatting

  • Bold: **text** → text
  • Italic: *text* → text
  • Strikethrough: ~~text~~ → text 【10】

You may also highlight text and use ctrl+b (bold) and ctrl+i (italic) to format text. It will automatically insert the formatting characters above for you based on your selection. (Strikethrough can also be bound to a key if you want but isn’t by default.)

You could underline text by surrounding it with <u></u>, but it’s generally a bad idea since an underline is understood to be a link.

Structure

  • Headings:

    # H1 (rarely used)
## H2 (main sections)
### H3 (subsections)
#### H4 (subsections)
##### H5 (subsections)
###### H6 (subsections)

    Headings are super-important because they gives structure to your notes. Not all notes need them, but you should try to use them for longer notes.

  • Lists:

    • Unordered: - Item or * Item
    • Ordered: 1. Item (numbers auto-correct)

  • Links & Images:

    • Link: [Google](https://google.com)
    • Wikilink (link to other notes in your vault): [[Note Name]]
      • If the note name exists, you’ll get an autocomplete list allowing you to select it.
      • If the note name is new, clicking the link will create a new note with that name and open it for you.
      • See the advanced section for more
    • Image: ![Alt text](image.jpg)
      • The easiest way to add an image is to either copy/paste it or drag-and-drop it into a note. Once you do that, the image will be copied to your attachments directory (defined in Obsidian settings). You can then reuse it in other notes using the method above by referencing its file name.

Advanced

  • Wikilinks:

    • Use # inside your brackets to link to a heading. This works bare (e.g., [[#cool-heading-in-this-note|Cool heading in this note]]) to link to a heading in the current note or at the end of a note name (e.g., [[My Other Note#cool-heading|Cool heading]]) to link to a heading in a different note.
    • Use ^ to link to a block. You can use this to link to arbitrary sections in your document, even if they don’t have a heading. This will create a small numeric tag after the section being linked to, which is used by Obsidian to identify it later. The above rules for heading linking about using it bare (e.g., [[^ea48ed]]) or on the end of a note name (e.g., [[^ea48ed]]) work the same way with block linking.
      • Note that you will not need to know the block’s identifier. When you type the ^ character inside the double brackets, you’ll get a pop-up menu showing the blocks so you can choose the one to link to.

  • Transclusion:

    • Transclusion works just like wikilinking except you add an exclamation point in front of the first bracket (e.g., ![[My Note]]). Instead of linking to the note, this will insert the contents of the note at the position. This will be kept up-to-date when the original note changes.
    • The same tricks for linking headings and blocks also work for inclusion.

  • Code:

    • Inline: `code` → code
    • Block:
    ```python
print("Hello")
```

    Even if you never need to type code, these can be useful to render text in a monospaced font. I use it to render commands I would type as a quick visual indicator that this is something to be typed. You could use a code block without a language indicator (which is always optional) to render ASCII art or anything else that only works if the characters are evenly spaced.

  • Blockquotes:
    > Quote text →

    Quote text

  • Horizontal Rule: --- (3+ hyphens) ↓

💡 Obsidian + Markdown Combo

  • Use [[ ]] for internal links (creates notes automatically when clicking the link if you enter something that isn’t an existing note).
  • Embed notes: ![[Note Name]] to show content inline.
  • Type # to auto-suggest tags for organization. (Optional. Use if it works for your organization scheme. I tend to not use them often, but do what works for you.)
  • Press Ctrl/Cmd+P for command palette (quick actions).

Remember: Start simple! Focus on writing and linking — plugins can wait.

💾 Committing Changes

Changes are committed to the repository using the Git community plugin for Obsidian.

In the bottom right corner, you can see the number of files changed since your last commit. (Not 100% sure this works correctly.) If you hover over it, you will get a tooltip showing your last commit and number of commits since the last push. (Since you will primarily be running a commit-and-sync, the number of commits since push will typically be zero.)

Once you have completed some work or made any setting changes, press Ctrl+s to start a commit. This will bring up a small text box at the top for you to type your commit subject. The subject should be 50 characters or less. Use present-tense verbs for consistency and to make your messages shorter (e.g., Add new book note instead of Added new book note). After you type your subject and press Enter, your commit will be saved and synced.

If you are doing multiple unrelated note-taking sessions, you should try to commit between the task switch. These atomic commits make the Git history more useful by ensuring each git commit represents only a single activity.

Be sure to do a commit before you close the app after working or making setting changes. If you forget, it’s fine to re-launch and do the commit, but you don’t want to leave new changes without committing them since it will result in them not being synced anywhere else.

📝 Related Notes

Graph View

Backlinks