Note Details
- The application I’m writing in at the moment. This is the source of digital notebook / digital gardens.
Obsidian is a local-first, markdown-based knowledge management application developed by Dynalist. Its core philosophy centers on two principles: your data should be future-proof (stored as plain text files on your own device, not locked in a proprietary database), and your knowledge should be deeply interconnected (through bidirectional wiki-links, tags, and a visual graph view). This combination of data sovereignty and networked thinking has made Obsidian one of the most popular tools in the personal knowledge management space.
At its foundation, Obsidian is a markdown editor that treats a folder of .md files as a “vault.” What sets it apart is how it layers powerful features on top of this simple base: [[wiki-links]] create connections between notes, the graph view visualizes the structure of your knowledge, and a robust plugin system allows the community to extend the application in virtually any direction. Core plugins handle daily notes, templates, backlinks, and search, while community plugins number in the thousands, covering everything from Dataview queries and Kanban boards to Zotero integration and spaced repetition.
Obsidian has become a foundational tool for the digital gardens movement — the practice of cultivating interconnected, publicly shared notes that grow and evolve over time rather than being published as finished artifacts. Its local-first architecture means users retain full ownership of their data, and its plain-text format ensures that notes remain readable and portable regardless of what happens to the application itself.