Obsidian is a

personal knowledge base A personal knowledge base (PKB) is an electronic tool used to express, capture, and later retrieve the personal knowledge of an individual. It differs from a traditional database in that it contains subjective material particular to the owner, th ...

and

note-taking Note-taking (sometimes written as notetaking or note taking) is the practice of recording information from different sources and platforms. By taking notes, the writer records the essence of the information, freeing their mind from having to rec ...

software application that operates on

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown i ...

files. It allows users to make

internal links An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a web page to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain. Hyperlinks are considered either "external" or "internal" depending on their target or destinatio ...

for notes and then to visualize the connections as a

graph Graph may refer to: Mathematics *Graph (discrete mathematics), a structure made of vertices and edges **Graph theory, the study of such graphs and their properties *Graph (topology), a topological space resembling a graph in the sense of discre ...

. It is designed to help users organize and structure their thoughts and knowledge in a flexible, non-linear way. The software is free for personal use, with commercial licenses available for pay.

History

Obsidian was founded by Shida Li and Erica Xu while quarantining during the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...

. Li and Xu, who had met while studying at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

, had already collaborated on several development projects. Obsidian was initially released on 30 March 2020. Version 1.0.0 was released in October 2022. Version 1.1, which adds the Canvas core plugin, was released in December 2022.

Features

Obsidian is built on

Electron The electron (, or in nuclear reactions) is a subatomic particle with a negative one elementary electric charge. Electrons belong to the first generation of the lepton particle family, and are generally thought to be elementary partic ...

. It is a cross-platform application that runs on

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

, and

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

, as well as mobile operating systems such as Android and

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also include ...

. There is no web-based version of the software. Obsidian can be customized by adding

plugins Plug-in, plug in or plugin may refer to: * Plug-in (computing) is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. ** Audio plug-in, adds audio signal processing features ** Photoshop plugin, a piece of software t ...

, which are also accessible from the mobile app, and which enable users to extend the software's functionality with additional features or integration with other tools. Obsidian differentiates between core plugins, which are released and maintained by the Obsidian team, and community plugins, which are contributed by users. Examples of community plugins include a

Kanban Kanban ( Japanese: カンバン and Chinese: 看板, meaning signboard or billboard) is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing (also called just-in-time manufacturing, abbreviated JIT). Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, deve ...

-style task board and a calendar widget. Obsidian operates on a folder of text documents; each new note in Obsidian generates a new text document, and all the documents can be searched from within the app. Obsidian allows for internal linking between notes, and creates an interactive graph which visualizes the relationships between notes. Text-formatting in Obsidian is achieved through Markdown, but Obsidian allows for the instantaneous previewing of formatted text. Obsidian's customer support is accessible only through email. The developers, however, have hosted an

Internet forum An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages. They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least tempora ...

and a

Discord Discord is a VoIP and instant messaging social platform. Users have the ability to communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called "servers".The developer documenta ...

channel where users can exchange solutions and ideas.

Obsidian Sync

Obsidian Sync is a solution to sync your notes between devices that is offered from the developers of the app. It includes end-to-end encryption, version history, and works on all devices.

References

{{reflist

External links

Obsidian plugins

Official Obsidian forum

Obsidian at SourceForge
Note-taking software Wiki software Android (operating system) software iOS software macOS software Windows software

History

Features

Obsidian Sync

See also

References

External links