17 Obsidian Features I’ve Invited Into My Autonomous, Plain Text World

You are only truly digitally free when your notes can stand alone, independent of any one app

The first skill a ninja warrior must learn is that of Tai Jitsu, or unarmed combat. The staff, throwing knives, and explosives will be pointless, without this ability plus the accompanying arts of stealth, disguise, and infiltration.

For me, ninja level in digital productivity and note making is using as few adjuncts to the plain text format as are needed to reach my goals. I’m happy to wield some sweet plugins, but I’m determined to stay capable of defending myself (and keeping my productivity system working) without them.

Tools I love to use, but could live without

Minimalist ideals aside, following are the seven basic layers that Obsidian adds to the plain text format that I’d hate to be without, in order of their importance to me. Markdown and wiki-style links go without saying.

1. Embedded files — a file showing up as regular text in another document → ninja infiltration, ha!
2. Page preview on hover — keeps my daily note minimal → stealth!
3. Folding sections — helps me focus on particular sections of my weekly note → disguise!
4. Periodic Notes — a big time saver for creating planner dates ahead of time
5. Calendar — for convenience in creating and accessing daily and weekly notes
6. Note Refactor — speeds up the creation of atomic notes from a larger text
7. Auto Note Mover — time saver, though Hazel can do this, too

Next is a list of 10 daily-use plugins I could do without more easily than the above, even though I don’t want to.

• Dataview
• Auto Backups (incremental backups of my iCloud vault to Dropbox)
• Auto Link Title
• Checklist (creates shopping lists from my recipe collection)
• Natural Language Dates
• Regex Find/Replace
• Tag Wrangler
• QuickShare (generates a link to share any Obsidian file)
• Show Current File Path
• Style Settings

I can rename tags, and perform vault-wide find and replace operations in Visual Studio Code, but it’s more convenient to do things like this inside Obsidian, via plugins.

You can see these plugins in action, in my free Obsidian planner demo vault.

You are free: why not stay that way?

When your notes are future-proof and portable, the digital playground is a safer, happier place. In fact, you own this playground.

Don’t be swayed by the other kids, the ones that moved their stuff into the privately owned equipment with the pirate ship and tube slides. (They sure do keep busy adding cool stuff and rearranging, don’t they!)

Fun as it seems, their space has a lock, and they don’t own the key. Good luck to them — let’s hope they don’t need it.

Just because your notes live in an app like Obsidian or Logseq, where data is locally stored (and therefore in your control), doesn’t mean you’re free of the proverbial walled garden.

Any time you make a unique feature of one of these apps a vital part of your workflow, you’re handing over a piece of your digital freedom.

Remember the parable of the washing machine.

By all means let a washing machine put hours back into your day, but make sure your most important wardrobe pieces aren’t those that can only be cleaned in that brand of machine.

Download my free Obsidian Planner demo vault here.