Obsidian

On my quest to identify standard tools to unreservedly recommend, I was looking for a note-taking app and had a few requirements:

• Local-first
• Consistent UX across platforms (Mac, Linux, Android)
• Markdown
• Flat-file storage

A few nice to haves:

• A high-quality UX, comparable to Gnome Circle apps like Apostrophe
• A mature project
• A small team focused on creating a great product
• No up-front fees

This brought me to Obsidian, which checks all the boxes. Excellent work! Thank you!

I liked Apostrophe, but it was Gnome-only. I liked Iotas, but its storage model didn’t play well with Syncthing. There are a ton of Markdown note-taking apps, but most seem like hobby projects and lack UX polish.

Vaults

I configured a couple vaults:

1. private notes in ~/Documents, sync’d via Syncthing
2. public notes in the Hugo content directory of my Github Pages repo, sync’d manually via Git

I visually differentiated them by setting a custom color for the title bar. For example:

body {
    --titlebar-background: lightcoral;
    --titlebar-background-focused: lightcoral;
}

Git

Obsidian maintains vault configuration in a .obsidian directory. I wanted to track most of this, but not the files that are session- or plugin-specific, so I added them to my .gitignore:

content/.obsidian/workspace.json
content/.obsidian/plugins

Templates

Since each public post needs a title and creation date, I created a template for that:

1. Created an _obsidian-templates directory alongside the .obsidian directory under content
2. Added the directory to Hugo’s ignored file list
3. Created a new.md template:

    ---
    title: "{{title}}"
    date: {{date}}T{{time}}:00-05:00
    tags: []
    categories: []
    ---
   

Now I can inject this into new posts by pressing ctrl-p, selecting “Templates: insert template” and selecting new.

Hugo

I use Hugo to manage my Pages. Hugo defines a content directory for Markdown files. Fortunately, Hugo ignores dotfiles by default, so I only needed to explicitly ignore the template directory:

ignoreFiles = ['/_obsidian-templates/']