Why You Should Use Obsidian As Your Diary App
It’s not hard to find an app dedicated to logging. In fact, it is much more difficult to choose one of the many options. To make matters worse, most of them lock their features behind a subscription service and store your notes themselves, making it difficult to switch apps in the future. But you can actually keep a journal for free and have full control over every word you write – with Obsidian .
How Obsidian Works
Obsidian is a minimal, fast, and free note-taking app trying to take its place in a world dominated by Notion, Evernote, and even Apple’s own Notes app.
Hook? You own the data. Instead of uploading your notes to a service that can change subscription plans at will (I’m looking at you, Evernote), you choose where to store all your notes in plain text files. They can be on your computer if that’s where you spend most of your time taking notes, or you can put them in cloud storage like iCloud Drive or OneDrive. What’s more, when you manage your storage yourself, all of Obsidian’s many features are free. If you want Obsidian’s own sync feature, it will cost you $8 per month.
Speaking of features, there are quite a few that stand out. Show stealer is how notes can be easily linked to each other, like hyperlinks to web pages. These notes can be stored in any folder, or linked using good old hypertext. Start linking notes religiously and the app will create a visual map of all your linked notes. There is also support for a wide range of additional features using community plugins.
How to set up Obsidian as a journaling app
Obsidian is a powerful, comprehensive knowledge base that you can spend on learning. However, you can leave all that aside and focus on what makes Obsidian such a great note-taking app: a writing environment.
If you’re just starting out with Obsidian it might seem overwhelming, but take your time to learn it. Once you’re in the zone, you’ll get a lot out of this seemingly eccentric note-taking app. After installing the app, create an Obsidian Vault in iCloud Drive or OneDrive. Then there are not many settings left. Create a folder structure in the sidebar and click the Daily Note button in the sidebar (it looks like a calendar icon). You can also start a daily note by searching in the command palette (shortcut Command/Control + P ).
Obsidian will instantly create a new note in the current directory with today’s data at the top. From there, you can write your journal entry. The application supports Markdown and you can use traditional keyboard shortcuts for formatting. Note can handle images, links, tables, and even checklists if you want to use Daily Note as a way to manage your day.
Once you get used to Obsidian, we recommend that you take a look at the community plugins. Find them in Settings > Community Plugins > Browse . Look here for plugins related to things like bullet logging and task management. Obsidian Memos is a great plugin if you like fast visual journaling.