In this howto guide, please take all of my "Suggested Setup" steps and "Suggested Plugins" with a grain of salt. I'm showing you what works for me. It might be a good starting place for you, but if you have different ideas, go for it!
Experiment with different settings, in a sandbox Vault.
The first time you open Obsidian after installing it, you are prompted to add a new vault to your setup.
A vault is a top-level folder of your notes. It contains
In the welcome screen, click the Create button to create a new vault to be taken to the "Create local vault" screen:
Set Location to the container folder where you keep notes or projects, or where you store files synced with your other computers. For example, you might choose:
$HOME
(your home folder)$HOME/Documents
NextCloud
or DropBox
Vault name will be the name of the vault's folder under Location. For example, you might call it Journal
, or Obsidian Journal
.
When you click the second Create button, the folder "$vault_name
" will be created under "$location
".
You should now be in an Obsidian window with your new empty vault with a default Welcome
page in the middle, a vault navigation list ("Files") on the left, and a Graph view on the right.
You can close the Graph view can call it back later if you want it, and you can right-click on the Welcome
file in the Files list and delete it.
Before you start filling out the structure of your vault, I suggest making a few configuration changes and installing a few plugins via the "⚙" settings screen — the button is in the bottom-left corner of your Obsidian window, next to the vault name and the ? Help button.
⚙ → Files and links → Automatically update internal links
Set to true
.
⚙ → Files and links → Detect all file extensions
Set to true
.
⚙ → Files and links → Default location for new attachments
Set to "In the folder specified below" and enter the following in the next field, "Attachment folder path":
`/Asset
⚙ → Core Plugins → Daily notes
Set to disabled
. We're going to setup our own monthly structure that doesn't work with the Daily Notes plugin's structure.
⚙ → Community Plugins
Turn on community plugins
In ⚙ → Community Plugins, use Browse to find and install:
We will go over the recommended configuration for the plugins in the following pages.