#obsidian tutorials

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Obsidian Tutorial - Making & Using Templates

God I love templates. Consistent layouts of notes AND less typing? I’m a simple man with simple pleasures. There are a lot of things you can do with templates, and with certain plugins they can get quite complicated, but the basics are pretty straightforward.

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Head to the settings menu and find core plugins. Toggle on the Templates plugin.

[ID - a screenshot of the Obsidian settings menu, in the Core Plugins section. The ‘templates’ plugin is highlighted and toggled on.]

Under the core plugins section in the settings menu, head to ‘Templates’ to set up a few basics

The most important one is your template folder location - this is the place you’ll save all your templates. I have one in my Meta folder just called ‘Templates’ - I recommend making a similar, clearly named folder so it’s easy to find

The date and time format options are slightly more complicated additions: there are certain formats you can use in basic templates to automatically fill in date and time, and this is where you set how you want that format to look. Don’t worry about it too much - you’re safe to leave it as the default if you want.

[ID - a screenshot of the Template plugin settings in Obsidian. At the top, the template folder location is filled out as ‘00 Meta/Templates’.]

Once you have your folder location set up, you can start making templates!

A simple example might be a character profile: create a new note, and lay out the text the way you’d like it to look, but without any specific details in.

Make sure the note is in your template folder

You can now use that note as a template! You can insert it into a new note either by using the command palette and the ‘insert template’ command, or you can assign a hotkey (I use Ctrl+T) and use that

Congratulations, you have now saved yourself approximately a million years of repetitive typing, and the stress of remembering how you want to lay out character profiles, journals, blog posts, and any number of other things

Bonus - free templates!

I have a handful of templates I’ve made, and you can grab them for free here:

character profile

country

fictional organisation

fic

scene yaml

RPG NPC template (requires dataview & metadata menu plugins for full automation, but you can delete those parts and use it manually as well)

RPG location template

Monthly planner (requires dataview)

Note: some of these make use of the ITS infobox custom CSS - i wrote a rough guide to installing it here

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Obsidian Tutorial - Tags Basics

Did you know that Obsidian has tags? You do now! Here’s the basics of how to use them.

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You can use tags in two places: in the body of your note, and in the properties.

You write them in the editor #likethis

You can add them in the properties sidebar by clicking add property, and then selecting the ‘tags’ property. Type your tag, then hit enter, and you’ll end up with something similar to this:

[ID - A screenshot of the Obsidian file properties sidebar, showing three properties. The tags property is marked out, showing that two tags have been added: tag1 and tag2]

You can also add them into the frontmatter inside the note. In that case, they should look like this, as a list:

[ID - A screenshot of some YAML frontmatter in Obsidian, with three properties. The tags property is marked out, showing that two tags have been added as a list: tag 1 and tag2]

Some key points:

You can’t have spaces between the words, so if you want spaces, you’ll need to use underscores, hyphens, or some other way of separating the words.

You can use alphabetical letters, numbers, underscores, hyphens, and forward slashes in your tags - however, they can’t only be numbers, you need to have at least one non-numerical character.

You can nest tags with slashes, e.g. #character and #character/main which is useful for organising things.

Tags are case insensitive, so #tag and #TAG are identical.

You can search for tags! (see this post for search basics).

That’s the basics of using tags. There are loads of ways you can decide to utilise them in your notes, so if you have an interesting setup, please share!

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Obsidian Tutorial - Linking Headings

So, one neat thing you can do in Obsidian is link the headings inside a post, the same way you can link notes to each other. These links will jump you right to the specific place in the note you want to be - very handy for navigation. Here’s how to do it.

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The basic premise is the same as linking notes: type two square brackets, then start typing the name of the note you want.

Once the note appears in the dropdown, type ‘#’ - this will change the dropdown to show the headings in the note. It should look like this:

[ID - a screenshot of the heading-link drop-down in Obsidian. The various headings are listed, with their heading type (H1, H2, H5) listed to the right.]

Click or use the arrow keys to select the heading you want, then hit enter

You’ve now got a linked heading! (and don’t worry, if you change the name of the note, the link will update)

You can also do this if you want to link headings inside a single note. All you do there is type two square brackets, then immediately type a ‘#’. This will bring up a dropdown of all the headings in that note for you to link to.

[ID - a screenshot of the heading link dropdown in Obsidian using just the # option in a single note. Only one heading is shown.]

I find linking headings handy if I’ve got a big note with lots of sections, and I want to jump to one place, and also for making quick internal navigations on said big notes.

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Obsidian Tutorial - Adding a Custom Font

One of the simplest ways to customise Obsidian is to change the default font. Here’s how to do that!

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Open the settings menu, and head to appearance.

There, under the Font section, you have a few options. We’ll be looking at the first three.

There are three types of font you can change in Obsidian: the interface font, the text font, and the monospace font.

As you can see in the screenshot, these fonts apply to different aspects of Obsidian. The interface font applies to all of Obsidian; this will be the one you see in settings menus, tab titles, etc. The text font applies to editing and reading views; so, what you’ll be typing and reading your notes in. The monospace font applies to things like frontmatter and code blocks.

[ID - a screenshot of the Obsidian settings menu, with the Appearance options open. The section for Font options is highlighted.]

To change a font, click on the manage button to the right of the font you want to change.

This will bring up a menu where you can search for a font you have installed, and add it to Obsidian.

You’ll have access to all the fonts installed on your computer - if you want to install a new, specific font, this wikihow article has a step-by-step breakdown on how to do that.

[ID - A screenshot of the Obsidian modal menu for changing the interface font. The font name entry box has been activated, showing a drop-down menu of font options.]

Once you’ve added the font you want, click Save to apply it to Obsidian. It should apply it right away, but if it doesn’t, try reloading the program.

You can repeat this process for each of the three font options.

You can add multiple fonts if you like, and then change their order in the list to switch between them - whichever font is at the top of the list will be applied, so long as it’s available on your system.

My font of choice is iA Writer Quattro, which you can grab from here if you like how it looks.

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Obsidian Quick Tip - Embedding Videos

Did you know you can embed a video into your notes the same way you can an image? Just type ![[name of your video.mp4]] for a video you have saved in your vault.

(You can also drag and drop a video into a note, and it will embed it, the same as with an image).

You can embed youtube videos too! Type a link like this:


and it’ll embed it in your note.

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Obsidian Quick Tip - Pinning Sidebar Notes

So you know you can drag notes into your sidebar? Did you know you can pin them there, same as pinning a regular note tab?

Just right-click on the note in the side-bar, or use the command palette and select the ‘pin’ option, and you’re done!

[ID - a screenshot of notes in the Obsidian sidebar. The context menu for one has the ‘Pin’ option highlighted. The two that aren’t selected have a pin icon next to the note icon.]

I like this personally because it saves me from losing notes I want to keep in my sidebar when I open a new note with one of them selected. ‘just don’t do that, space’ well look i can’t fix my own issues, so I just mitigate them. By pinning them.

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Obsidian Tutorial - How To Use Bookmarks

Bookmarks are an incredibly useful feature - here’s the basics.

Bookmarks in Obsidian function like bookmarks anywhere else - they let you mark a file to quickly access it later. They’re a core plugin, and are enabled by default (but if they’re off, or you want to switch them off, you can find the toggle in the settings menu).

You can bookmark any of the following:

Files

Folders

Graphs

Searches

Headings

Blocks

They live in the ‘bookmarks’ tab which should be in one of your sidebars - you can use the command palette and the ‘show bookmarks’ command to bring them up if they aren’t.

Unlike folders and files in Obsidian, which are only ordered alphabetically, you can order bookmarks however you like by clicking and dragging them. You can also have bookmark groups - essentially a bookmark folder - which can be collapsed. This makes organising them a lot easier.

(ft my D&D Vault because it’s the one I use the most bookmarks in)

To open one, you just click it.

How to create a bookmark

I’m going to put these under a read-more, because it got quite long, but the tl;dr is you’re going to either right-click on something, or use the command palette to bookmark most things.

For Files you can use the command palette, right-click on the file and select ‘bookmark’, or use the ‘bookmark active tab’ option in the bookmarks sidebar:

For Folders, right-click on the folder in the explorer sidebar and select ‘bookmark’:

For Graphs, right-click the tab with the graph view and select Bookmark:

For Searches, select the three dots icon next to the number of search results under the search box and select ‘bookmark’. You can also use the command palette, and select the ‘bookmark current search’ option.

For Headings, and Blocks, use the command palette, and select the option you want.

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Obsidian Tutorial - Using Aliases

Aliases are alternate names you can use for notes when linking them. They’re useful when you want to reference a note by a different name than the one you titled it. Here’s how to set them up!

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Aliases are applied using note properties, which you can access either through the properties sidebar, or by adding them to the top of your note in the YAML as a list:

[ID - a screenshot of the top of an Obsidian note titled ‘Obsidian Tutorial - Using Aliases’, which shows the YAML properties. The property ‘alias’ has been added, with one item in the list reading ‘a note alias’]

The property you want to use is called ‘alias’

Anything you put in the alias field can then be used as an alternate name for that note

For a simple example: if you had a character called Lord Jimmy Extremely Long-Name the Seventh, but you wanted to link to his note using just his first name, you could give him the alias of ‘Jimmy’.

Then, when you create a link to his note you can type ‘Jimmy’ and it will create link with that title. (The little arrow to the right of the name tells you it’s an alias)

[ID - a screen shot of a link being typed into Obsidian, using an alias]

A linked note that uses an alias will look like this: [[Lord Jimmy Extremely Long-Name the Seventh|Jimmy]]

That’s about it! I find aliases really useful for things like character names, where I want their note to have a full name, but when I’m linking to them, often only want to use a part of that name (or a nickname).

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