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Obsidian - Settings

Options

Obsidian has groups for these overall settings.

  • Editor – Default view, mode, display, and behaviors
  • Files & Links – Default folder for new notes & attachments, WikiLinks
  • Appearance – Theme, color, font, CSS snippets
  • Hotkeys – View & edit hotkey mappings
  • About – App updates, account

Core Plugins

These core plugins offer key features for making notes.

  • Workspaces – Save and load workspace layouts
  • Command Palette – Cmd+P with select a command
  • Quick Switcher – Cmd+O and jump to any file
  • Canvas – Arrange and connect notes on infinite canvas

Pane Views

I organize panes in the right sidebar into 2 vertical sections, each having several tabs.

Top

  • Properties view – Show metadata for your files
  • Tags view – List all tags with occurrences

Bottom

  • Outline view – Show table of contents for current note
  • Outgoing links – Show outgoing links and detect unlinked mentions of other notes
  • Backlinks – Show links from other files
  • Calendar - Show monthly calendar

Also, the left sidebar has these tabs.

  • Explorer - Shows hierarchical view of folders and files in your vault
  • Search – Search for keyword in all notes
  • Recent Files - Shows recent files for quick access
  • Bookmarks – Save shortcut links to files, searches, headings, and graphs

I prefer to have a local graph pane just to the left of the right sidebar to see a graph with connections to my current note. This complements the outline view that shows the structure of my active note, whereas this display how it's linked to other notes

  • Local graph view – Visualize relationships between notes

Community Plugins

Key Plugins

These are my most important Obsidian community plugins.

  • Homepage – Startup defaults
  • Periodic Notes – Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly
  • Templater – Note templates, folders, hotkeys, scripts
  • Dataview – Queries, code blocks
  • Note Refactor – Default location, refactored note template
  • Recent Files view

Extra Plugins

I find these additional plugins to be very helpful.

  • Actions URI – Services for Actions for Obsidian from Shortcuts
  • Calendar – Monthly calendar grid by week & day
  • Excalidraw – Rich sketching tool, edit & view drawings
  • Hotkeys for Templates