The video titled "My Complete Obsidian Masterclass (FULL GUIDE + SETUP," presented by Nick Milo from Linking Your Thinking, serves as an extensive tutorial for users of the Obsidian note-taking app. Aimed at beginners, the video consolidates previous content viewed nearly 4 million times into a single masterclass lasting 40 minutes. The tutorial covers the foundational aspects of Obsidian, including downloading the application, creating notes, utilizing Markdown, and employing various settings, hotkeys, and linking concepts.
The video is organized into several distinct parts, each focusing on different functionalities and features of Obsidian.
Downloading Obsidian
Creating Notes
Linking Notes
Utilizing Backlinks
Graph View
Value Over Time
Core Plugins Activation
File Management
Link Protection
Graph View and Themes
Essential Hotkeys
Building a Personal System
Linking Ideas
"The power of linking your thinking is because you can create these thoughts over time and they start to grow and build."
Markdown for Future-Proofing
Dynamic Note Value
Customization Options
The masterclass concludes with a strong call to action for viewers to create rather than simply consume information. Nick Milo emphasizes the importance of personal thought and creativity in using Obsidian.
"It's tempting to fill your library with other people's thoughts... but as your library fills with other people's words, it's your own thinking that gets lost."
This sentiment encapsulates the overarching message of the video: the goal of using Obsidian is to facilitate personal knowledge management and foster creative thinking.
Engagement with Additional Resources
Regular Updates
This masterclass acts as a comprehensive resource for anyone looking to master the basics of Obsidian and build a robust personal knowledge management system.
What if you could master the basics of the Obsidian note-taking app in one sitting? Hi, I'm Nick Milo and I've combined my entire Obsidian for beginners series into one uninterrupted master class. Like nearly 4 million people before you who have watched this, this video will help you master Obsidian from your very first note all the way to a powerful thinking system. Let's get started. Okay, let's start by downloading Obsidian. Go to Safari. Type in obsidian.md and just download the latest version. Allow that to download. Close this. Once it's done, open it up and simply drag it into applications. So, I've already done that and I've put it into my doc here. So, let's open it up first time. It should look like this for you. And it's saying open folder as vault. Create a new vault. What's a vault? A vault is simply a folder that Obsidian is looking at for its files. So, let's create a new vault. And let's just call it a folder. And browsing location, let's put that folder on the desktop. And let's create it. Here it is. So, what we see is it's just it's right here. That's all it is. A simple folder. Real quick, by the time you watch this, parts of Obsidian might have changed how they look or behave. And that's okay. Just scan the QR code on screen here, and I'll send you details on exactly what's changed in Obsidian since this course was published, the most important features, and the most important visual changes. I'll even send you a heads up on any major changes in the future. All right, let's keep going. Okay, so this is Obsidian. We're in. This is what it looks like. a little intimidating. I want you just to focus on this button, new note. That's the most important note right now. So, let's click on that. Going to blow it up a little bit. Right away, it allows us to change the title up here. Let's call this guy note star. Our very first note. I hit tab. Puts my cursor here. And I'm just going to say, "Hi, I'm a new note." That's all. Notice just saying I'm a new note. So what we want to see here is that if we go back to the desktop in this folder, this is notar. That's it. It's a MD file markdown which is the same as a plain text file that you can open up with text edit which is on any Mac in the world. It's plain text is a type of format that as long as there are computers, there will be computers that can read plain text. And that's what we mean by a different term future proofing that we'll get to later. Now going back to Obsidian, we've made a note, but what happens when we want to make a second note? Remember this new note. New note. Okay. And let's call this one. Never. No one likes me. They only like. This is the first magical moment in a software that can make links. I'm gonna hit bracket bracket which pulls up a list of all my notes and I'm going to select note. They only like notar. Now if I do a click on notar it takes me back to that original note. That is a huge huge game changer. I mean, I'm I'm getting goosebumps here because once we start linking our thinking, it opens up a whole new avenue of thinking. Honestly, it kind of reopens up the avenue of how our brains actually work. So, we're kind of getting closer to what feels natural. But let's let's use like a real situation on this. Imagine you have a favorite movie. We all have our favorite movies. For me, one of my favorite movies is The Matrix. It comes up all the time in conversations. I'm thinking about the red pill and the blue pill and choices. So, why not kind of externalize that in this piece of software? So, let's go back to new note. I'm just going to say the matrix. And I have pre-written one sentence. So, first off, what am I trying to do here? I'm not trying to make a a critique of the movie. I could. I absolutely could. But for my purposes, what I like are the ideas, the concepts that I that I glean from different sources, such as movies like The Matrix. And Morpheus presents Neo with this choice, the infamous red pill, blue pill. And so what I'm going to do is just highlight this. I'm actually just going to hit the bracket and then bracket button again. And so I've created a potential new note. Now, once I click on it, now it's a new note over here. Here it is, right? That's pretty cool. That's really powerful. That's awesome. Um, so what's so cool about Red Pill, Blue Pill? Well, it's really about choices and the willingness to to have one's beliefs challenged. And you know, the more I thought about this concept, I threw in a second sentence, which is perhaps it's so difficult to take the red pill because we lose that sense of control, right? And sense of control is definitely something that's integral to a lot of my thinking about when I, you know, feel in charge of what I'm trying to accomplish and other times when I feel like chaos is taking over. So, I know that's a note in the future that I'll want to create. But here's the thing. Right now, I can just add these brackets and it won't create the new note until I click on it. So, it's just kind of a placeholder. It's a reminder for myself. Here's the other thing, though. This reminds me of something. So I might type here related and let's call this adversity paradox. Cool. Now let's click on it to create the new note. Adversity paradox. And so the adversity paradox is this crazy idea that we're never really seeking out adversity in our lives, but when we find it, we tend to grow from it. So, it's the idea that we get stronger from the stressors in our lives. I mean, that's pretty fascinating to me. So, I'm thinking about this idea and it makes me think immediately to a book that I had to read in high school and I fell in love with actually. It was by Victor Frankl and it was Man's Search for Meaning. And he makes the argument he's a Holocaust survivor. He was. And he makes the argument that it's not sex that brings us meaning. Like Freud would say, it's not power that brings us meaning. Like Adler said, it's suffering that brings us meaning. Now like nowhere in the adversity paradox is the the concept of Victor Frankl, but because of how our brains work from our own personal experiences, in this case mine, I was able to make this connection. And to me, this is really powerful. And this is the power of linking your thinking is because you can create these thoughts over time and they start to grow and build which we'll get into more. So I'm just going to make the Victor Frankl note. I'm not going to touch it right now and I'm going to go back to the adversity paradox. Um what else? What else? What else? Hm. Maybe Never could learn a thing or two from this concept. All right. So, now we tied Evernote back into this. And this takes us to the next really cool aspect of linking your thinking, which is back links, also known as linked mentions. So, right now, check this out. We're in this note called adversity paradox, and it has a linked mention to red pill blue pill. Let's click back to that. Now, what does that mean on red pill blue pill? It links to the adversity paradox. So, going back to the adversity paradox, here's the linked mention, right? Now that we're at red pill, blue pill, we have that the matrix links to it, right? And we can even read in context that it says Morpheus presents Neo with a choice. So we can click on that and now we're back to the matrix note. So that's how these linked mentions work. And it's a great way as you look at one note to see all of the different connections that you've made, which takes us to the last point, the last part of this demo, which is the graph view. Now check this out. This is pretty cool. This is what we made in the program today. We started with Note. Basically, NeverNote didn't like Notar and was was jealous of Notar. And so, when we link the two, we formed a new relationship. And now these two notes are linked. And we can we can build context through that link. And then Nevernote. Well, we didn't go in this order, but now it's connected to the adversity paradox, which is connected to Victor Frankl. Adversity paradox is also connected to red pill blue pill which is connected to the matrix. So in this way we have created all sorts of contextual goodness. So let's take a step back. In a short amount of time we've made all sorts of new connections. We've externalize them in a program like Obsidian and we've started to grow them and cultivate them. And the magic is, let's go back in because let's say a year passes and I get back to this red pill, blue pill, and I'm thinking to myself, you know, this reminds me of something that just happened yesterday to me. And I and I write this in this reminds me of something that just happened, etc., etc. And uh so do we see what's happening here? This note doesn't lose its value over time. Its value actually grows in time. As I have more experiences and I externalize those experiences, the connections grow. Now, why is this important? First and foremost, when you link your thinking, you improve your ability to recall those memories, those those thoughts, those ideas. And that's the most important thing. We want to be able to have confidence that we can find what we're looking for when we want to find it. That is first and foremost. And when we link, we have a better chance of remembering. Secondly, it allows us to build things as we're seeing here. So, we might not start with the perfect uh Michelangelo sculpted out of of marble, but we can get there slowly over time, right? And that's just through our own experiences that we're adding value to our existing collection of thoughts. But practically, you might be thinking, why is this important? Well, it depends. I mean, if you're somebody who is a creator, this is the perfect way to create a new article or make a new speech because you've already done 80% of the work. Now, it's just crafting it and honing it for whatever particular medium that you hope to deploy it in. But I find that a lot of the value just comes from having conversations with other people and and having this in the back of my mind. I'm making all sorts of leaps of insights across genres and domains. And I it just makes every conversation that you enter that much more interesting and fun and engaging because now when you're listening, you're more actively engaged because you're trying to, you know, understand whatever that person is saying in in some other concepts that you've taken some time to really flesh out. And this is where newness and novelty comes from. Okay, so let's begin. First thing I'm going to do is hit that button, the new note button. And this creates a new note. We can title at the top. I'm going to paste in the six most important keys to typing in markdown. I'll paste it again in here. Now, I know what you're thinking. It's bold or itallic, right? Well, no. Maybe in traditional text editing in Word, we would think bold and we would think itallic. But in personal knowledge management, we need to think how to connect ideas. We need to think about how to link your thinking. With that in mind, we've already discovered the most important part of markdown, which is the link. And that's where we hit bracket bracket. And then all of a sudden, we have this list of our notes. You know, programs like Obsidian are really smart. So, if I type n O, these are the notes that remain. And if I hit S, there's an S and note star. Then I just have to hit enter. Boom. Now, we have that link. That's pretty wild, right? What's cool about this? If we go back to graph view, we now see the six most important keys to typing a markdown connected to note, right? That should look familiar by now. So, let's go back to this. That is the link. Super powerful. The thing about the link is it is a strong direct connection. But that's not the only type of relationship that we can build between ideas and not the only type that we want to make. The other one and number two when dealing with markdown is the tag. So, good example of this is I'm looking at my note library and I see a couple concepts in here. So, let's let's try using the tag uh let's use at hashtag concept. Okay. And I see the adversity paradox. And I'm just going to at the bottom just put in concept. And look, it already autocomp completed for me. And I also want to put in concept to red pill, blue pill. So at the bottom I'm just going to and hit C and enter. Now we have that. So how does this work? So if I commandclick on concept, we get to search. We'll cover this in detail in the next video, but you can see right away that those three notes give me the results because they have the tag concept in them. We can do all sorts of things with these results, but the most important thing to know right now is that's how tags work. Okay, now we've covered the link, we've covered tags, now let's get into how to make our text look a little bit prettier. And let's start with italics. So now we're getting into this aspect. And so what happens is italics typically you want to emphasize something. So, as you're typing and you want to emphasize something, you add asterisk and there you have it. So, we can see that we have italics in this section. How did that happen? Markdown reads these asterisks to single asterisk like that to give you um italics. Now let's take that to the next level. The number four most important key to working a markdown. You got it. It's bold. So how do we do this? So bold is typically like typically I will use this when I want to bring attention to big nouns. And what do we do to get bold in this case? Double asterisk on both sides. And that gives us big nouns. Excellent. Now, we're almost there. Now, we're going to get into the formatting and cover lists. So, we've been making a list. Now, what does that look like? If I hit dash hyphen and and space, then I've created a list. And what I'm going to do now is delete. So, then I can enter. And software like Obsidian is smart enough to know that a list has began. So now when I do this, I'm starting to make my list and it's naturally forming. So now we have formed a really cool list and and that's how it's done. And the sixth and final thing that we want to do to get a handle on markdown is to understand how to use headers. So let's go through the notes and explore this a little bit. It's actually hashtag, but then you hit a space bar. This gives us that title. And there are six levels of this. So, let's explore in some of these other notes. Um, adversity paradox. I usually like to have that here. So, I'm going to hit hashtag and then adversity paradox. Doesn't that look pretty nice already? And let's imagine um we wanted to hit related here and make this something new. So, we hit three hashtags. And look at that, it's smaller. It's header three. Header levels go from one all the way down to six. Let's see other examples as we're printing up our notes. This is the Nevernote. Um, kind of redundant, but we put it right there. Same thing with not star. See how quickly this can go after a while. I'm going to paste. What I'm doing is I hit the hashtag and boom, I'm pasting in the title related. Okay, see, remember how I did that previously? This time I want related to be the header three. So now we have something that looks pretty nice. And sure I could go header four. I could go five and six. And we see that they're kind of all the same size at that point. This is two. This takes us back to header one, which is the title. But I think three is kind of a nice subheader in this position. The matrix we didn't put in. So you can see how fast you can start to format your text. Now remember, you don't want to stay focused on this, but it doesn't hurt. Victor Frankle, you know, I might add what's a what's a perfect tag for a person? You know, it'd be the people tag. So I'm coming back through these notes. I'm trying to make them pretty. You know, here I might put in movie. I would um this I'm going to put in PKM. Do you need to put these tags? Not necessarily, but you see how easy it is as you're going in and out of your personal knowledge management library, you can simply add a couple things here and there and just incrementally improve your ideas. And the beauty that we'll touch on later is that when you get these touches, what you're really doing is you're getting reps, you're getting repetitions, and every rep that you get does something up here. It allows those neurons to connect a little bit easier, a little bit more efficiently. And that's what allows us to remember and recall even better. So yeah, we just go through and we kind of um improve the notes as we go. What's notar? For the sake of it, we'll just say that notar is under the people tag. And now that I have a few, I can click this one and see that we have never victor Frankl. So that's another way that we can kind of use those weak relationship builders tags to our benefit. Now this is one list and finally we're going to change these up which is a tiny bit of formatting but you can see that this is an autonumbering list as well. So this is another form of the same thing. And here we have it. The six most important keys to typing in markdown. The final note I want to make on this that's really important is there's no formatting bar at the top. Why is that? It's because for text that we create, the most important thing is the idea that we have that we want to get on page that we can externalize that we can articulate that we can put into a place that we can then return to and grow. So formatting is out of the way and we can focus on the most important value creating activity which is actually thinking writing out those ideas and expanding those thoughts. So picking up from where we left off uh let's make a new note and I'm going to paste in the next lesson. The eight most important settings in Obsidian. Obsidian is full of so many settings. So just choosing eight was kind of a difficult thing to do, but we're going to keep it simple and we're going to find out, hey, we don't have to touch those other settings and everything just works. So first, let's explore a little bit. We're going to go to this cog icon, which is the settings, and open up this popup window. Now, exit out of there by clicking away. Let's start with the editor first, and let's go to the first one. So here's the editor, and we're going to go down this list a little bit. First one, the the automatic settings that they have is what you'll need. Don't have to do anything, but if you'd like, hey, turn on spellch check. So, that's number one. Easy, right? Number two, we're going to look at the plug-in menu. Plugins menu. And there are three things that we will do. Okay, so plugin. I guess I had it spelled right. First one, remember how in the previous video we started to add tags? Well, now let's turn on the tag pane and it's going to show up right here. Okay, so we'll we'll return that shortly. Page preview. Very cool for a future video. We'll turn it on now. And starred notes so we don't forget those notes that we might want to keep handy. Let's exit out of here. So, what did we do? We we created this. We enabled the tag pane and that has created this. So now we can click on concept and we can see the times that concept comes up. We can click on people and see when people comes up and we can go back to the back links tab and back to the tags. So that's the tag and let's go back to folder page preview. We'll look at in the future starred notes. So now we have this starred note here and what we can do is let's say we want to star this note. We can go up to the more options part of this note which is sort of this sandwich these three circles and we can go down and star this note. Now when we have what do we have there eight notes it's not a big deal but when you have 800 notes or even just 80 notes you might want to star something. Then you can just go here really quickly. Let's imagine I was on note star and I wanted to get back to the topic for this conversation. Then I just click back to our note. Cool, right? I like to stay on file explorer on the side. And that's halfway through. So, let's go now to the next part of the settings. Just file and deleted files. So, it's important that we decide where we want to keep our files. Now, for me, I kind of like to keep it in the system trash. And what that means is it's your computer, your file systems trash. Let's explore that really fast. Let's say I create a new note and I title it nonsense. I don't want to keep it. So, I rightclick and I'll hit delete. And I'll confirm that it's deleted. So, where did it go? It actually just went to the max trash folder. And here it is. So, that's what I would prefer that you do. Then you always know where deleted notes go. And you want them to go somewhere you're familiar with. All right. Going on the next one. This is bolded because out of everything in the settings, I find this to be the most important one. Especially once you start linking and changing the names of the files that you link to, you want them to always update. Turn this on. So now that means, see this note, neverote, it's linked to note, right? So what if we change note to note 2. I click away. It gives me this up here. updated three links in one file. So now I'm going to go to Nevernote and check this out. Nevernote has updated Note 2. That means that when I commandclick on it, it takes me to notar. So that is so crucial. This is the most important setting in anything that you do with Obsidian. Turn it on. Now final two. Let's look at appearance. We have dark mode and we have light mode. Hopefully that didn't hurt your eyes too much. We're going to explore themes in a upcoming video and also we're going to explore custom themes. That will be pretty fun. Right now we won't touch them too much. And finally in an upcoming video we're going to look at hotkeys so we can do a preview like that with a touch of a button and really see what this format might look like when it's outside of the edit mode of markdown. Okay, let's pick up from where we left off. And if you remember, we had enabled custom CSS. And when we do that, we have these custom themes buttons. And we also really quickly explored base mode, changing it from dark to light. So now we're in light mode. Here's kind of what the app looks like. This might be familiar to what you're used to when you're working with most of the apps until recently around. They've always been in quote light mode. It was just the only mode we knew. Now there's dark mode. I tend to prefer it, too. I know it's trendy, but it is kind of nice, especially when you're looking at the screen for long hours. So, for now, we're in dark mode. And let's explore community themes. So, what you do is you find a theme. You're just scrolling. Oh, this one's new. Um, and we can click use. And so now we're in this custom theme which is really big. Let me I'll show you this hotkey later, but you can reduce the size on things and you can kind of see what this looks like. Um let's try a different one. Hopefully I Okay, so this is a really nice theme that's similar to the custom theme and it has a really cool map. Okay, so these maps aren't showing up too well. If you noticed on my other screen, I have this pretty advanced looking setup. So I don't mean to go too crazy with this, but let's use it for this purpose. So, this is part of what's called the light kit, which is the linking your thinking kit. And this is a starter kit. So, as you gain experience, you might think like, how do I connect everything? I use folders, do I use uh tags? What can I use links? You know, to connect these ideas over time. It's easy when we have 50 notes, but when we have 500 and we have 5,000, it's a different story. So, I created this kit to allow you to kind of figure out how that works. That'll be a different video and a whole different series. For now though, let's use it to explore themes. So, this is a custom theme. This is called Cybertron, which um I created and it's kind of like futuristic and stuff. You can see a little bit of the look. So, what's kind of neat here is remember bold in this theme, bold is its own color. And uh you know, if we wanted something to be italicized, that's its own color. You can see the color for links. If we want to click on direction, that takes us to this direction note. If we click on for virtues, that takes us to this note. A lot going on here. Let's not just stay on this theme, though. Let's go back to that really cool um kind of Obsidian alternative theme by one of the uh Obsidian mods on the Discord forum actually. So, this is pretty cool. It's clean. It really takes advantage of that purple color. Um, and if we look at the graph view here, it's a pretty cool looking thing. And we can click into any of these notes. Let's click into what are higher order notes. And here's the structure of a note. List. Now we're in edit view. And we can see this is a title, right? Just that single hash. We could add hashes and reduce the size, but that's a title. We'll keep it that way. Something else you might have noticed is uh this thing called the local graph. So, any note I click on, and this is really wild, but we can see a local graph version of it here. Uh I don't want to go into all those features, but we're just exploring the themes. Let's check out one more dark theme, and then we'll go into light mode, check out a few themes there, and just kind of show you what's possible. So, this theme um this is a pretty cool theme. What's neat is members of this community and you know, typically any community, they're creating themes that they enjoy. Uh and so here's another one by a member of the community. And you can see the different headers are different colors. So, that's an important thing if you know for this theme. It's an important thing. Let's see what other colors there are. So, okay. Pretty cool. Yeah, I can dig that. Um, let's stay in edit mode and let's go to appearance and we're going to switch it to light mode and let's check the community themes for light mode. So, we've we've dealt with a lot of color and this theme as it happens is clean theme. So, let's check out clean theme. see what this looks like. So, I mean, if you're just used to dark mode, it's like, wow, you know, the irises are blown out, but after you get used to it, well, maybe something could be done with the graph view, but after you get used to it, it is uh going back to this attention note, you can see here's bold, here's a tallet, and we can see the different headers, the links that we can go to different notes. So, this is a pretty minimal theme. The idea with a minimal theme is it's great because it's just you and the text. So, you can actually just work on your ideas and write. That's what we want to do. We want to have a little bit of fun. Yes. But then we want to get back to writing, thinking, and linking. So, let's check out uh maybe just one more. Scrolling through. Why not this one by another Obsidian mod. And this is the light mode version of it. So we see let's check out the different titles. Okay. All one color which is an off black. And then we get into our text. If there's a link, it's a lighter color. And let's jump back to this attention note. Here's bold. Here's itallic. So I think you get the idea. Like this can be fun. You can lose hours in this. You can design your own, but it shows you the versatility and the power that you can have um as the graphical interface in which you interact as you take your notes, as you make your notes. Um hopefully you got something out of this video. It's a little bit different than the other ones because I think those other ones are a little bit more practical. This one's kind of, you know, fun. You can mess around with it, spend almost too much time, but it does hearken to one of the really important reasons we do all this is that we want to have fun. We want the experience that we have as we manage our personal knowledge, we want it to be a joyous experience. And I have to say when I go back to my Cybertron theme, which we'll do now, this brings me more joy than it should. Let me update that. This, for whatever reason, brings me a lot more joy than it should. I enjoy working. I I I'm more creative in this mode. Uh but I know it's not for everyone. It's, you know, it's definitely an acquired taste. Okay, I'm excited to jump into the hotkeys. So, let's create a new note using a hotkey. I'll tell you that one later. And let's call this the eight most important hotkeys in Obsidian. I'm only showing you three now, but you will see the other ones. So, the first one is open link while you're in edit mode. You've seen me do this already, and it's a commandclick on the link. I think on a Windows it's control. I'm going to be speaking in terms of the Mac operating system. So, keep that in mind. So, let's find a note. And we're in edit mode, right? Because we can see this hash. Now, if we get out of edit mode, which we'll cover, then we don't see the hash anymore. We're back in edit mode. So, if I just click on this note, it's like I'm trying to edit it. But once I hit command and then I click, boom, opens the note. I use this all the time. Super super powerful. Once you start thinking in terms of these links, you need to be able to use this hotkey. So that's a command click. So where where's another one? Um adversity paradox command. Oh, press command and click. Boom. We're there. Okay, let's now I'm looking on the side and let's go to the next one. So number two, toggle preview. So this is edit mode. This is preview mode. How am I getting there? I'm hitting command E. What's really nice is this allows you to be a left-handed ninja. You just keep your left hand right on the keyboard, hold down command, and you can toggle back and forth. When you're in preview mode, as you might expect it, it looks nicer, but you can't edit. When you're in edit mode, you see the, you know, kind of the behind the scenes formatting of markdown. Um, and you can edit. So, that's number two. Number three, open the quick switcher. So once you do want to start typing, bring that right hand off of the mouse and hit command O and that opens up the quick switcher. Then you can start typing whatever word comes to mind. I'm thinking note star, but uh I can't remember. So I was like note and then n o s for whatever reason and then oo note star. I hit enter. Boom. We get taken to the note. So that is another extremely valuable hotkey. Let's throw in the next uh three. Boom. Number four, search. This is command shift F. See what happens here? It takes us to this new pane. We were at file explorer, but when I hit command shift F, I just can start typing. And in this case, I'm going to type in for never. And I can see the two notes populate immediately. Maybe I want to search for a hashtag. So then I go concept and I have these three concepts and I can see it was used twice in this um in this note. One here and one here. Very cool. Boom. That's repeat. Don't need that. And let's go back now. Next hotkey. Okay. So you start navigating around. And just like an internet browser, sometimes you want to navigate backwards. So, there's actually a hotkey for that. Obsidian is a pretty advanced app. So, instead of wasting real estate with big back and forward buttons, which will probably be some sort of plugin later if you really want, instead the way to do that is to use hotkey. And in this case, it's command option left arrow, left arrow, left arrow, left, left, left, left, left. And just takes me back, back, back, back, back. Same thing. Command option right takes me forward. And that's number six. Two more to go. Can you see how just a few hotkeys can really take your game to that next level? Final two. New note. Remember, we were just going to Newote. We started this video series on new note. Well, if you can imagine, it's commandn. That creates a new note. So, I just hit command N and I just start typing. And that's the title immediately. It can be whatever you'd like it to be. Then you hit the tab button and then you're you're typing in the title. So that's pretty nice. How am I going to get back to that old note? I hit back. Boom. I'm back. And last part, this kind of opens up a whole new window of functionality. So we're just hinting at it, is that we can open a note in a new window. So what does that look like? Not a brand new window, but a new pane. So we commandclick on a note. So remember when we were in edit mode, if we commandcooked on a link, it opened that note in this pane. But if we commandclick over here on a note, let's see what happens. Commandclick on this note, it opens a new pane. And these might be a little tight. So, in case you weren't aware, you can find the edges and drag these however you need to so you can see them. So, now we have two windows. And remember what I can do to see preview mode. I can toggle that with command E. Here is me toggling preview mode again. Now, let's say maybe I don't want to look at red pill, blue pill. So, what I'm going to do is quick switcher. What was that? Command O and I type adverse. Oh, there it is. And I hit enter and I'm at the adversity paradox. So hopefully you can see just how powerful this application is, especially once you know the markdown, especially when you know a few basic settings and especially especially when you have a few hotkeys at your disposal. If you've made it this far, thank you for your attention. I hope this master class has been valuable for you. Here's the most important thing I can leave you with. It's tempting to fill your library with other people's thoughts, clipping articles, saving quotes, but as your library fills with other people's words, it's your own thinking that gets lost. So, just start creating. You have enough tools now. Connect new ideas with your own thoughts. Don't just take notes, make them. That's linking your thinking. If you want to get a detailed breakdown on all the parts of Obsidian that have changed since this was recorded, you can go ahead and scan the QR code on screen and I'll send you details on the most important changes to Obsidian. And if you're ready to take your Obsidian skills to the next level, then this playlist will get you up to speed with Obsidian's advanced features now that you've mastered all the essentials. Check it out next. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing what you create.
Learn Obsidian, the notes app: from beginner to full workspace in 1 video. GET UPDATES - I'll send you every major visual + feature change (& future ones): https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/join/obsidian-updates?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=my_complete_obsidian_masterclass This is a compilation of my Obsidian for Beginners video series - viewed nearly 4 million times - in one video. Mastered everything here? Watch this playlist next to take things to the next level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqrzxfZD_hc&list=PL3NaIVgSlAVLSspDBo4czhFAisttDEOCi&index=1 ๐ GET MY PRO OBSIDIAN SETUP: https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/ideaverse-pro?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=my_complete_obsidian_masterclass ๐ฑ GET MY BEGINNER OBSIDIAN SETUP: https://start.linkingyourthinking.com/ideaverse-for-obsidian?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=my_complete_obsidian_masterclass ๐ LEARN OBSIDIAN BASICS: https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/obsidian-flight-school?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=my_complete_obsidian_masterclass ๐ GET MY BEST IDEAS WEEKLY: https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/newsletter/yt?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=my_complete_obsidian_masterclass ๐ DOWNLOAD OBSIDIAN: https://obsidian.md/ 00:00 Start the Obsidian Masterclass 00:25 PART 1: Download Obsidian and create your first vault (complete beginner) 01:50 Write your first Markdown note (future-proof your ideas) 03:00 Link your second note with double brackets [[ ]] 04:05 Capture ideas at speed of thought 06:05 Use placeholder links to spark new notes 07:00 Grow your ideas by connecting them 08:05 Unlock backlinks and linked mentions 09:00 Explore the graph view to see your knowledge web 10:35 Watch your notes gain value over time 12:15 PART 2: The 7 Most Important Markdown Essentials in Obsidian 13:35 Build relationships with links and tags 14:45 Highlight what matters with italics and bold 16:20 Organize thoughts with lists and headers (H1โH6) 18:30 Add tags like People, Movie, PKM to filter and connect 20:00 Simplify with numbered lists (formatting that stays minimal) 20:50 PART 3: The 8 Most Important Obsidian Settings 22:00 Activate core plugins (Tag Pane, Page Preview, Starred) 23:35 Manage files and send deleted notes to system trash 24:25 Protect your links with automatic updates (critical!) 26:30 Deep dive - graph view, community themes, styles 33:15 PART 4: The 8 Most Important Obsidian Hotkeys 34:30 Toggle preview and edit with Command E 35:45 Use Quick Switcher (Command O) and global search 36:30 Navigate back and forward with hotkeys 37:50 Create new notes faster (Command N and split panes) 39:00 How to build your own system 39:40 IMPORTANT: Get everyย major Obsidian update + visual change ๐ TAGS: #Obsidian #obsidianapp #Obsidiannotetakingapp #LinkingYourThinking