Obsidian QOL Improvement
Okay, let’s talk about Obsidian, the note-taking sensation that has been sweeping the nation (for the last 5 years—I’m just late to the game).
While it seems like a lot of tech bloggers/vloggers use Obsidian just to make more content about Obsidian, it is a legitimately cool tool with a lot of nice features.
I’ve played with it enough now that I am pretty committed to using it for everyday documentation and organization. There is a lot to like about it:
Pros:
- Open Source
- Free
- Uses Markdown
- Lightweight (until you add a couple of hundred plugins)
- Massive community, which means loads of documentation
The only real con I have found is that if you want to sync it using their native service, you have to pay $4/month.
I don’t want to do that, so let’s figure out an alternative.
There are two main things I want:
- My markdown notes backed up in the cloud
- Syncing between my laptop (Linux) and my phone (iOS)
I could use iCloud, but it’s messy and kind of a pain in Linux with rsync automation in Cron. Instead, I am just going to host my files in a private GitHub repo. It’s almost all markdown text with a few images here and there, so storage shouldn’t be an issue.
I created a private repo and cloned it into my Obsidian folder. Once I pushed all my local files, I used the Git plugin to automatically push regularly. Pretty simple, but the phone is a bit trickier.
Did you know there is a Linux terminal app for iPhone? I didn’t, and it’s honestly great. iSH is free, and you can even SSH into it. 5 stars!
I mostly followed this guide here.
High-level steps are:
mkdirwith the same name as the Obsidian repo- Mount my local vault folder into this new directory
- Clone my repo into this folder
The Obsidian iOS app has all the same plugins, so once I configured the Git settings for my iPhone, I shouldn’t need to worry about it. I have been testing it a bit, and it works really well so far.
Going to start messing around with Templater for some climbing data tracking next.
