It isn’t troublesome to seek out an app designed for journaling. Actually, it’s tougher to select one from the ocean of choices on the market. Worse but, most lock their options behind a subscription service, and retailer your notes themselves, making it onerous to change apps sooner or later. However you really can journal at no cost and keep full management over each phrase you write—with Obsidian.
How Obsidian works
Obsidian is a minimal, quick, free note-taking app attempting to carve a spot of its personal in a world dominated by Notion, Evernote, and even Apple’s personal Notes app.
The hook? You personal the info. As an alternative of importing your notes to a service that may change subscription plans at a whim (I’m you, Evernote), you select the place to retailer all of your notes in easy textual content information. They are often in your pc, if that’s the place you spend nearly all of your note-taking time, or you possibly can put them in a cloud-based storage answer like iCloud Drive or OneDrive. Higher but, if you handle your personal storage, all of Obsidian’s myriad of options are free. If you need Obsidian’s personal sync function, it’s going to value you $8 per 30 days.
Talking of options, there are fairly a couple of stand-outs. The show-stealer is how notes may be linked to one another effortlessly, like hyperlinks to net pages. These notes may be saved in any folder, however may be linked utilizing good previous hypertext. Begin linking notes religiously, and the app will create a visible map of all of your linked notes. There is additionally help for all kinds of additional options utilizing group plugins.
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How to set up Obsidian as a journaling app
Obsidian is a powerful, complex knowledge base that you can take your time exploring. However, you can leave all that aside and focus on what makes Obsidian such a great notes app: the writing environment.
If you’re only starting to use Obsidian, it might sound overwhelming, but take your time to explore. Once you get into the zone, you’ll get a lot out of this seemingly eccentric note-taking app. After installing the app, create your Obsidian Vault in iCloud Drive or OneDrive. Then, there’s not much setup left. Create a folder structure from the sidebar and click the Daily Note button from the sidebar panel (it looks like a Calendar icon). You can also start a daily note by searching in the Command Palette (Command/Control + P keyboard shortcut).
Obsidian will instantly create a new note in the current directory with today’s data at the top. From there, you’re free to write your journal entry. The app supports Markdown, and you can use the traditional keyboard shortcuts for formatting. The note can handle images, links, tables, and even checklists if you want to use the daily note as a way to manage your day.
Once you get used to Obsidian, we would suggest you take a look at community plugins. Find them in Settings > Community Plugins > Browse. Here, search for plugins related to things like bullet journaling and task management. Obsidian Memos is a good plugin when you’re a fan of fast, visible journaling.
