I am a consummate note taker. For me, my blogs, are themselves giant notebooks. When I take notes I’ve used tools like EverNote and more recently, Obsidian. Obsidian is a light-weight note taking application that can interweave your notes together, creating relationships between notes.

It all starts with the vault. A vault is a central directory for a collection of notes. For me, I use vaults based on a central idea or concept. For example, I have a vault for a Cyber Security course I’m taking. If I were to collect notes on philosophy, I’d start a new vault. In my view, each vault should be separate as the notes and interweaving will become complex if using too many topics.

My first hurdle was the black emptiness of Obsidian. I start the application and I have this empty screen. It looks like a text pad for a git readme and honestly that’s pretty close to what it actually is. Everything is a .md file, like a git readme. It also uses similar git like markup syntax.

Basic Usage

I like to separate notes into containers. I create folders and within each folder other folders and then the notes go into appropriate housings. For example Vault: Google Certificate Course has folders like “Foundation” which have sub folders: week 1, week 2 and so on. Within each week folder are the actual notes.

Creating folders is as simple as clicking an icon. The same for notes. Notes can be dragged into folders easily. No save action is ever required as every action is always saved.

Interlinking Notes

After taking several courses in my Google certification, my interconnected notes view looks like a star chart:

Each dot is a note. The lines connecting dots together are links between notes. Consider the interconnected notes below for Security Poster and CIA Triad Framework.

These visuals show that these different notes are linked together in some way.

Linking Notes

You link notes in a very easy and quick way. If you have a word or phrase you want to generate a new note, you highlight it and then double click [ on the keyboard. This will place the word or phrase inside of [[ ]] and that is a link.

Initially it is a dead link and will appear on the visualization as a link, without a note. For example, if I’m writing about OSINT and I highlight the word Hunchly, knowing I want to make a note about that tool in the future, then I double tap [[ a new link is created. But the note on Hunchly isn’t created.

To create the note you’re linking to, simple move off the link (click to another line) and then the link is a hyperlink. Click it and it will create a new note with that name (i.e. Hunchly). A link between these notes is auto-created.

Plugins

If you’re comfortable with 3rd party plugins, there’s options for those as well. Often with Cybersecurity, this type of usage would be minimized. But if you’re willing to try community created plugins out, there’s quite a few. I just wouldn’t recommend it from a security point of view.

Templates

Obsidian can also create templated notes. An example of this is WebBreacher’s Obsidian Templates for OSINT:

https://github.com/WebBreacher/obsidian-osint-templates/tree/main

Summary

While Obsidian is very minimalist and does a job for note taking I’m not sure how I feel about it. People rave about the interlinking of notes, and yes that is unique, but is it valuable? I’ve heard people claim they found relationships between their notes they didn’t know existed. This is very suspicious to me as the note relationships are not determined by your content, but your conscious decision to link one note to another. Much like choosing to hyperlink a web page to another web page, it can hardly become a shock to you later on to say, “oh my these are connected!” After considerable content is input into a vault, the interrelationships are so vast that it’s useless to visualize – like looking at a star chart!

Obsidian is one of the better note taking apps on my Manjaro Linux laptop. On my OSX laptop, however, I think I prefer EverNote. EverNote gets a bad rap and I’m not sure why. It’s much more intuitive, less reliant on community plugins (which I think are security risks), and has more options (like setting schedules, task lists and more.)

Currently I’m using both EverNote and Obsidian. Perhaps in time one will win out in my usage.