Form, Function, & Fun! - My Obsidian Vault Tour [2024] 

I second this

@@lilyofthe4lley Third

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@@nazihboudaakkar8117 fifth

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Thanks for the great theme!! Definitely my favorite minimal dark theme for Obsidian out there!

@@cyanvoxel My pleasure! ❤️ One of your subscribers brought me here after an email exchange. Will definitely bring more customization options soon(tm) ! ☺️

Hi @SakuraIsayeki I can't seem to find your theme in the plugin list. Was it removed from Obsidian?

@@JvP000 Hi! The theme is still alive and kicking. Just make sure you don’t tick « light themes only » when searching for Vanilla AMOLED :)

@@SakuraIsayeki Thanks for confirming. I must apologise, I was looking in the community plugins rather than Themes, that's why it wasn't showing initially

also after finishing the video i just wanted to say the scriptwriting + editing were top notch. keep up the great work brother.

Being able to customize the themes of notes like this while still keeping everything in simple markdown files is one reason why I love Obsidian so much - And CSS isn’t too bad to pick up, you can get a lot going with just the basics like changing colors and font styling and all that. I’d recommend checking out W3Schools’ CSS tutorials, they’ll get you on your feet in no time!

oh dude i feel you on like a cosmic level just downloaded obsidian and going crazy with it, this video is amazing dude i feel gallons of motivation rushing through my veins

@@ameyagupta7285 we’ll make it brother. Let’s achieve the coolest of graph views there ever was!

I didn’t even notice until you said so. DAMN IT. I came from the TagStudio video. I subbed and turned on the bell tho!! Pls more videos

@@snarf8115did the same thing. Downloaded Obsidian and everything based on his stuff. I want him to do a full hour long dive on his vault

Thanks so much!! PARA has definitely helped bring some structure to my vault and files in general, although my Archives are still typically a bit of a mess lol. Also great to see a fellow RuneScape fan!

Thank you so much!! I'm thinking about doing exactly that for my next Obsidian video, actually!

Legit moved to Obsidian and downloaded your templates, thanks. I cam back to this video so I can spell Zettelkasten properly :D

As a recent Neovim user myself, it's probably just a matter of time haha!

Thanks so much! And sorry, I've never gotten that error before... Maybe you need to make sure that the boxicons pack is downloaded in the settings? If it's already there, then I suppose try seeing if deleting and re-adding an icon rule will fix it.

Thanks so much for watching!! If I'm being honest, I didn't show off my Maps of Content too much because... it's largely empty at the moment, ha! Currently all I have in there is a couple large notes that contain the combined links for all my Field Notes books, but they're more of a proof of concept and fun thing to look through than anything practical. I *do* plan on them being a bigger part of my vault, though. I know I want to add a sort of "RU-vid Hub" where I have links to ongoing videos and projects, which would be much more useful than the current bookmark system inside of Obsidian IMO. I also want to have some MOCs for various game dev or programming projects that may have a bunch of resources I'm jumping between. So essentially I envision using it to keep track of larger multi-note projects, as well as keeping larger lists or related notes or sketches together in a way that's easier to rediscover or look back on. I do wanna try out a homepage too (I had one in Notion and liked it enough), but for now I'm doing okay with just the current daily note being my homepage. Hope that helped or gave you some ideas, and thanks for the comment!

@@cyanvoxel thanks. Yes it helped. Appreciate your response.

Thank you so much!! All the styling possible CSS is really what got me more interested in developing my vault further as well. Markdown files are great for long term use and portability, but it can get tiresome looking at the same old kinds of notes everyday. Happy to hear I’ve given you some motivation! 😁

@@cyanvoxel Just another question, how exactly would one go about organizing Notes about specific topics? As an example, I am currently studying computer science in University, and I'm unsure on how to structure my notes for the courses. Would those go into Areas? Do I make a subfolder for each semester with subfolders for each course, maybe even subfolders for each topic in those courses? Or would it be better to use tags? Or do I not do those things at all and just use links to organize my topics with "main" pages that link to subpages? How do I organize those pages? Or do I at all? And when I'm taking notes during lectures, do those go in fleeting? Just a little guidance on how to start this off would be amazing, it's a lot to take in in the beginning. Thanks for any help! And once again, great video. I don't even know whether you asked to "SUBSCRIBE AND RING THAT NOTIFICATION BELL", but even without you asking for it, that already happened. :D

@@profpyrus9247 Hey! So I’m actually at a similar stage with Obsidian as you. Recently began upgrading my Vault after the inspiration from this video. Also a beginner programmer using Obsidian for notes😂 Anyways, I’m no expert, but I thought I’d share what helps me with the kind of questions you have. So first - remember that nothing is permanent. Like coding, you can approach your Vault with a constant re-factoring mindset. Yes, having a perfect plan to execute means less work down the line. You won’t have to go back and re-edit anything. But it usually isn’t realistic. You won’t know what style of organization (tags or folders) works better for you until you try both, etc. So try stuff! There is no ‘right way’ to organize. At the end of the day, it’s what works best for you. It’s your Vault. One trick I’ve been using for considering where to put a note or folder for optimal organization is asking myself “where would I look for this first?” I just started using CyanVoxel’s PARA/Zettelkasten system as well. For my CS course notes, I actually haven’t decided where to put them. I’m thinking in a ‘Coding’ folder under ‘Areas’ in folders organized by course. Another consideration is putting them in ‘Permanent’, but I haven’t quite decided what my permanent folder will be used for or if it’s even necessary for me to keep around. I use ‘Fleeting’ for quick notes or observations throughout my day. Hope that helps!

Thanks for smashing that notification bell! 😉 So for something like course notes (I can relate to CS especially), what I do is I try to ignore the courses entirely when it comes to thinking of how to organize them. Knowledge is knowledge, no matter where you've obtained it from. So with that in mind, personally I break up all my CS notes by the broadest categories I can, or that I at least think of them as. So under a main "Computer Science" folder, I have subfolders for Algorithms, Networking, Hardware, Server, etc. I also want to add that I use Tags primarily to categorize, especially nested tags such as "CS/Programming/Java" or "CS/Linux/Server" in order to really finely organize things - folders for me are more of a way to visually break up the files themselves. The beauty of all this is that over time, you can include additional notes and information gathered from outside your courses, but they'll fit right into your vault! Now, obviously that won't do you a whole lot of good for trying to study material linearly for a class haha. For this, I'd recommend creating a Map of Content in addition to this that outlines and links to your notes as they would appear in your courses. This gives you a more traditional notebook outline of your studies, but doesn't disturb the underlying tag or folder structure. Also, I'd just like to wholeheartedly agree with @CashsCoffee 's reply here! Your mindset and way of thinking may very well be different than mine, and there could be other methods that work better for you but less so for me - the only way to find out is to give it a go! Hope that all helps or gives you some ideas! 😁

@@CashsCoffee @cyanvoxel Thanks to both of you for these delicious nuggets of wisdom! Now that you say it, that definitely was my brain going into it's endless pursuit of perfection. Especially cashcoffee's remark of "nothing in my vault is permanent, everything can be refactored and reworked for my needs" is something I'm probably gonna need to remind myself of. Alot. xD So then, I'm probably going to start off with a similar approach as Cyanvoxel described it; put my uni knowledge in generally categorized folders, and give them tags for more specified distribution into topics, but especially into which Uni courses they're from, as I wanna try the approach of boiling it all dkwn into atomic notes that I can use to study like with Anki, just directly in Obsidian. Alright, I think that's enough walls of text from me for now! Thanks again for both of your replies! Time get my new Obsidian journey off the ground. (I love the internet man, in the right places you just meet the nicest people I swear it's beautiful)

Thanks! That "credit system" has been something I've been trying out to keep myself more productive during my free time. Essentially it's a way for me to lock away distractions (in my case, lots of RU-vid videos) behind certain tasks. For example, for every hour I were to spend working on a productive personal project, then I'd give myself a "credit" that I could use on something like a cup of coffee or a 15 minutes of RU-vid. As someone who's always struggled with my own time management, it's helped out during times where motivation isn't that high for my own projects.

Thanks so much! I've actually got the General Tweaks file right over here: github.com/CyanVoxel/Obsidian-Vault-Template/blob/main/Vault/.obsidian/snippets/CyanVoxel's%20General%20Tweaks.css (I'll make this easier to find in the video description!) Good luck with your Obsidian/Journaling journey! Obsidian is one of those types of programs that lets you really get under the hood, which is great if you love tinkering and fine-tuning but can definitely be daunting coming from anything else. I think it can be pretty rewarding though once you've gotten the hang of it!

@@cyanvoxel Thank you for your encouraging reply. I found the vault template you'd posted and pasted it into my vault to overide my .obsidian and things have been working much better. Just using the template file and the settings I could glean from the video, I couldn't get the fields in the properties section of the daily templates to format the way you had them. They would just stay raw code and I'd get date format errors when trying to generate the note via the button on the left column. Still not sure what does it but glad it works now. Looking forward to learning more about Obsidian and markdown after work tonight.

my thoughts, exactly.