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Turning Obsidian into My Perfect Writing App

   October 24, 2022
   by [16]Mike Schmitz

   NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is right around the corner,
   and if you’re looking for a great tool to help you hit your writing
   goals, there are lots of great options available.

   In this article, I want to make the case for using [17]Obsidian by
   showing you how to turn it into a powerful writing environment using a
   few essential plugins.

But Isn’t Obsidian a Notes App?

   That’s what I thought when I first started using it a couple of years
   ago. I was hoping it would help me make connections between my notes
   and help inspire some new ideas. But over time, I fell in love with it
   as a writing tool. In fact, every article I’ve written in the last 2
   years has been written in Obsidian.

   What makes Obsidian great as a writing tool is how much you can
   customize it using third-party plugins. The number of plugins continues
   to grow (676 as of this writing), and with Obsidian recently launching
   version 1.0, the app shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.

My Journey Away from Ulysses

   Let me get this out right now: Ulysses is an incredible writing app.

   It’s just not for me for a couple of specific reasons.

   First, publishing to the web isn’t quite as easy as it should be with
   Ulysses. It does give you the ability to publish straight to WordPress,
   and you can even update blog posts from Ulysses now — if you can get it
   to connect to your custom WordPress blog.

   When this broke for me, I started digging in to how to fix it and
   quickly came across weird plugins and settings for modifying XMLRPC.
   And unfortunately, I could never get it functioning again. I fully
   understand it’s something on my domains, but the “simple instructions”
   didn’t work for me, and even as a web developer I didn’t feel
   comfortable digging too far into this.

   Which meant I was stuck copying and pasting into WordPress.

   And because Ulysses doesn’t use standard Markdown, that meant I had to
   “export” my text first. This works, but adds a few extra clicks (or
   taps in iOS) in order to get my text out of my writing app. Combine
   that with the fact that Ulysses has some weird Markdown formatting that
   never quite clicked for me in the first place, and I was left looking
   for a straight Markdown-based text editor.

   Obsidian fits that description perfectly. It’s simple, uses plain text
   files, provides inline formatting, and supports standard Markdown. It’s
   everything I’ve ever wanted in a plain text editor.

   But there are a few additional settings and plugins you can use to make
   it even better as a writing app.

Obsidian Settings

   First, let’s look at some of the settings.

   To access these settings, click the gear icon in the lower-left corner
   and then select Editor from the Settings sidebar.

   The defaults are actually pretty good, but here’s the key settings you
   want if you’re going to use Obsidian for writing:
     * Make sure that Auto pair Markdown syntax is toggled ON. This
       creates both symbols and places the cursor in the middle, making it
       easier to create italicized or emphasized text.
     * Make sure Smart indent lists is toggled ON. This makes it easier to
       create bulleted and numbered lists quickly, automatically adding
       the next bullet when you hit the Return key.
     * Make sure that Fold heading and Fold indent are toggled ON. This
       creates carats for Markdown headers as well as indented text,
       adding some cool outliner-inspired features that make it easy to
       fold up text in large files and focus on the text you want.

   There are a bunch of other settings you can customize, but many of them
   are simply personal preference. These are the important ones.

   Once you have your settings, it’s time to move on to the plugins.

Obsidian Core Plugin Settings

   There are two types of plugins in Obsidian: Core plugins that ship with
   the app, and Community plugins that you can install to extend the
   functionality of Obsidian. We’re going to look at the Core plugins
   first.

   Here are my recommendations for modifying the Core plugins:
     * Make sure that Backlinks and Outgoing Links are both toggled ON.
       These are sections available in the right sidebar that show all of
       the notes that link to the active note and all of the notes linked
       to from the active note respectively. (If you’re new to the concept
       of connected notes, check out [18]this article on using the local
       graph.)
     * Make sure that Outline is toggled ON. This adds a tab in the right
       sidebar that creates a table of contents for your note based on the
       Markdown headers. This is helpful when you need to jump to a
       specific section of a longer text as you can do so simply by
       clicking on the appropriate header title.
     * Turn the Word Count setting OFF. Word counts are important, but
       there’s a Community plugin that does this much better than the
       built-in word count tool here.

   Again, there are a bunch of options here that are personal preference,
   but these are the important ones. Once you have these Core plugins set,
   it’s time to really make Obsidian dance by adding some Community
   plugins.

Obsidian Community Plugins for an Upgraded Writing Experience

   You can access the Community plugins public directory by going to
   Settings → Community plugins → Browse once you’ve toggled off Safe
   Mode. From there, you can find plugins for just about anything, from
   [19]embedding tasks from Todoist to [20]creating timeblocked daily
   plans to [21]creating kanban boards — all based on your locally-stored
   plain text files using standard Markdown.

   All of the plugin links I share below are Obsidian links
   (obsidian://link-adress) that will open straight to the plug-in page if
   you have Obsidian installed and running on your device.

   Note that many of the plugins I will share here are 1:1 replacements
   for standard features in Ulysses, so if you don’t mind non-standard
   Markdown formatting and don’t run into the publishing issues that I
   did, maybe try that instead. But if you’re all in with Obsidian, here
   are the plugins I use to make Obsidian my perfect writing app.

Better Word Count

   The first plugin is called [22]Better Word Count. This replaces the
   built-in word count core plugin, and it functions largely the same with
   one key addition: when you highlight text, it shows the
   words/characters of the highlighted text instead of the whole document.

   It’s not as good as the writing stats in Ulysses, but it’s good enough
   for me.

cMenu

   If you’re uncomfortable relying on your memory for Markdown formatting,
   [23]cMenu is a third-party plugin that gives you a minimal text editor
   modal that allows you to do things like bold, italicize, strikethrough,
   underline, and toggle blockquotes.

   If you don’t like the default options, you can customize what shows up
   in the modal by adding any of the Commands in your Obsidian library.

Reading Time

   Another handy Ulysses feature is being able to see how long it will
   take to read the text in the selected file. But you can add this
   feature to the status bar using the [24]Reading Time plugin.

   This one is pretty straightforward — just install it and turn it on and
   you’ll see the reading time at the bottom of your Obsidian window. You
   can customize your reading speed in the settings for the plugin.

Footnote Shortcut

   If you use footnotes a lot, they can be a bit of a pain to create with
   standard Markdown. It’s a lot easier with the [25]Obsidian Footnotes
   plugin.^[26]1

   Once installed, you can find it in the Command Palette and with the
   hotkey: Footnote Shortcut: Insert and Navigate Footnote. You can
   customize the hotkey by going to Settings → Hotkey and searching for
   Footnote, which will then insert the appropriate Markdown and navigate
   to the bottom of the note where you can insert the text for your
   footnote.

Focus Mode

   The Obsidian interface can be a little distracting when you’re trying
   to focus on your words. Fortunately, the [27]Focus Mode plugin allows
   you to remove all the distractions and focus on what you’re writing.

   Once the plugin is installed and active, just click the Toggle Focus
   Mode button to hide the sidebars and status bar, and you can
   shift-click the button to hide everything but the active writing pane.

Typewriter Scroll

   [28]This plugin keeps the currently selected line in the middle of the
   screen as you type. As you type, the focus moves from the current
   section to the next section by moving the rest of the page in the
   background, much like an old-fashioned typewriter.

   There’s even a Zen Mode option that grays out the background text to
   help you focus on the line that you are currently writing.

Novel Word Count

   If you are aiming to write a book (fiction or non-fiction), you
   probably have a total word count in mind. [29]Novel Word Count shows
   you the number of words that a document or folder contains in the
   sidebar so you can keep track of your long-form writing progress.

   You can also use pages, characters, date created, and date updated (as
   well as a few different combinations) that can be configured in the
   plugin settings once you turn it on.

Conclusion

   Obsidian is much more than just a notes app, and might be the perfect
   writing tool for you if you want to:
    1. Store your plain text files locally
    2. Use something that supports standard Markdown
    3. Gives you the flexibility to craft your writing environment

   Obsidian may not be for everyone, but since it’s completely free to
   start, there’s no reason not to give it a spin.
     __________________________________________________________________

    1. Since it’s an Obsidian Command, you could also add this as a button
       to the cMenu plugin mentioned above. [30]↩

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