I Tried Obsidian Note Taking for a Week... (MD App Review, Guide, Tips, Features, and Setup)

Obsidian’s biggest payoff after a week isn’t just prettier notes—it’s faster retrieval and easier idea-building through linking, templates, and a highly customizable workspace. The experimenter came in frustrated with note systems that were hard to navigate (physical paper) or that stored ideas in isolation (Google Docs). Obsidian’s combination of wiki-style links, an accessible search bar, and flexible pane layouts reduced the friction of finding old thoughts and made it practical to expand them instead of rewriting the same ideas repeatedly.

A major early hook was visual and ergonomic: themes with a “vaporwave/outrun” aesthetic made long sessions feel less like drudgery, while hotkeys and pane switching (including keyboard-driven navigation) cut down on constant mouse/keyboard switching. Linking notes “within notes” also stood out as a navigation upgrade over opening documents one-by-one. Even before the vault was fully organized, the workflow encouraged building connections immediately—creating a hub note for an English class project, then breaking brainstorming into separate notes that could be traversed without losing context.

The week’s organizing challenge quickly became the real story: importing a wide mix of materials (anime reviews, book summaries, essays) created a messy starting graph, forcing decisions about structure. The experimenter paused to consider whether to separate references from ideas or to group work by ongoing projects. To move from chaos to a system, they adopted an existing vault template from the Obsidian forums—specifically the IMF model—crediting Nick Milo for popularizing the concept.

IMF organizes notes using three layers: an Index (I) as the main hub, MOCs (Maps of Content) as second-level “maps” that group concepts, and Fluid Frameworks to organize notes and concepts inside each MOC. After importing the IMF template, they personalized it and started using it for both academic writing and technical learning. For example, while studying Nand to Tetris, they created structured notes for logic gates—capturing status and connections, purpose, and then code and truth tables. Because there were 16 gates to build, they created a note template and bound it to a hotkey so new gate notes could be generated quickly.

Beyond note-taking, the system became a study tool. While finishing How to Take Smart Notes, they practiced what they learned by adding wiki links and building a “Note Taking” and “Note Systems” section inside a knowledge-management MOC. They used previews and wiki links to navigate, then continued refining the vault by deleting irrelevant categories and grouping orphan notes.

By the end of the week, the vault layout was still basic but functional: a graph view for aesthetics, search and starred notes on the left, and multiple panes in preview mode depending on the writing task. The experimenter kept most IMF categories and added a “concepts MOC,” using templates to create connections, tags, and references. Their conclusion is that Obsidian’s core strengths are accessibility, customizability, and durability—notes live as Markdown files on the computer, making migration and backups straightforward. The main tradeoff is a learning curve around Obsidian’s conventions, but the payoff is a system designed for creative organization and ongoing idea connectivity.