Obsidian

Obsidian is a desktop and mobile application for note-taking built on plain Markdown files. It stores notes locally (no cloud, no account required) and visualizes the network of connections between them as a graph. It has become the dominant tool for personal knowledge bases and digital gardens.

What makes it different

Several design choices distinguish Obsidian from competitors like Notion or Roam:

• Local-first — your notes are .md files in a folder you control. No vendor lock-in. Works offline forever.
• Markdown native — no proprietary format. Files open in any text editor.
• Graph view — every link is tracked bidirectionally. The graph view shows the topology of your thinking.
• Plugins — community-built extensions for backlinks, Dataview queries, canvas, daily notes, slide decks, and hundreds of others.
• Cross-platform — Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android.

Core concepts

• Vault — a folder containing your notes. The unit of organization.
• Wikilinks — [[page-name]] syntax creates a link to another note without knowing its path. Clicking creates the note if it doesn’t exist.
• Backlinks — every page shows all pages that link to it, not just from it. This is the killer feature for a knowledge base.
• Tags — #tag-name inline or tags: [tag1, tag2] in frontmatter. Filterable, hierarchical.
• Graph view — force-directed visualization of all notes and links.
• Daily notes — auto-created journal entries for each day.
• Canvas — freeform spatial canvas for visual thinking.

Obsidian Publish

For users who want to make a vault public, Obsidian offers a paid service called Obsidian Publish. It renders a vault as a website with the same graph view, backlinks, and navigation as the desktop app.

This site is a replacement for Obsidian Publish for users who:

• Don’t want the subscription.
• Want full control over the design.
• Need better performance for large vaults.
• Want to publish via Cloudflare Pages or GitHub Pages.
• Need to integrate the KB with an AI agent workflow.

Obsidian + LLM workflows

The natural pairing of Obsidian + LLMs has produced several patterns:

• Copilot plugin — chat with an LLM about your vault directly in Obsidian.
• Smart Connections — semantic search over the vault using embeddings.
• Karpathy LLM Wiki pattern — Obsidian as the IDE, an LLM agent as the maintainer, markdown as the storage. See this site’s README for the full pattern.
• Custom scripts — many users run scripts (Python, Node) to extract and re-ingest sources into their vault.

Limitations

• Mobile is limited — the iOS and Android apps are less full-featured than desktop.
• No real-time collaboration — multi-user editing requires external tools.
• Plugins are sandboxed — limited compared to full IDEs like VS Code.
• Large vaults slow down — the graph view becomes unusable past ~10K notes.

See also

• Knowledge Base — what Obsidian is optimized for
• Digital Garden — Obsidian’s most common publishing target
• Astro — alternative for publishing a knowledge base as a website