10 Hidden Obsidian In-built Features

How's it going, guys? In this video, I'm gonna be revealing about 10 inbuilt Obsidian features that most people are not using and show you how I'm using them to streamline my workflow and make myself more productive with Obsidian. So to get started, the first feature that I wanna share with you is called Workspaces. So most people don't realize this is actually an inbuilt feature in Obsidian. If you go to your core plugins and you scroll to the bottom, you can see over here, workspaces. Basically what it allows you to do is to create a pre-saved, uh, template of, uh, a couple of notes and a layout that you enjoy. So here's, uh, a specific workspace I created for this video, and you can already see it's already set up my notes exactly how I want them. And this is really powerful because, you know, if you've got specific notes that you're gonna be using on an ongoing basis together, you can simply just click on your workspaces, uh, type in a name, so name, and then save the workspace. And boom, that's the first thing that you've got. Since the new version of Obsidian, stack notes have become a default feature. And basically, if you go here to the top right-hand corner, you click on this down arrow, you see that it's got tab— stacked tabs and unstacked tabs. So basically, this is what it'll normally look like, where you've got two tabs next to each other. And then if you want to see them side by side, you just click on Stack Tabs. And now instead of having, um, multiple tabs like at the top, you can literally just open tabs like this and like scroll through them. I tend to like this better because from here you can kind of, um, like navigate quite easily through your notes. But this is kind of the difference with the new version of Obsidian, and, uh, it's really cool that we've got tabs now as well. So once you've got your tabs stacked the way that I'm showing you right now, What you can also do is you can right-click on the note title like this and then go to pin. Now, why would you want to pin a note? Basically what it does is it makes sure that this note cannot be closed. So if you click on any one of these links, instead of it automatically going to the next page and like removing this page, you can keep this one open and make it change this page over here. Uh, now this is extremely helpful when you're doing some reviews and you're going through your, your notes. Like, let's say you wanted to study some of these concepts that I've got over here, right? So we could click on action, right? And action will now open on the right-hand side. You can review it, and then you could go to the next one— attitude and attention, balance. And like, you can kind of just go through, um, all of your, all of your notes in one simple place while keeping this one, this main note pinned. Now, one of the main things that I love about Obsidian is how quickly you can navigate back and forth between your notes using the inbuilt shortcuts. So when you, uh, get started with a new vault, what you're gonna want to do is go to your settings and go to hotkeys over here. And there's a couple of main ones, about 6 that I use every single time. So the first one is navigating, right? Right? So you've got navigate back and navigate forward. On default, this is set to Control or Command Alt and then an arrow key. And basically what that looks like is if you've got a specific, like, uh, vault, right? Like let's say, or a specific note open. Let's say I open this note and I click on willpower and I click on this one. Um, with the navigation, you can very quickly just go back to your previous notes. I'm just using the forward arrow and the back arrow. And you can quickly see how this makes navigating really, really quickly. Cause let's say you're busy with this note and then you have an idea, you just go back over here, go back forward to this note again, and it allows you to have kind of a seamless experience that just makes things fast. The next shortcut that you want to set up is called Quick Switcher is Ctrl+O. So what, what happens if you just go Ctrl+O, You can see all of the previous, like most recent notes that you've had open and very quickly just cycle between them. So I could open up willpower, this thing, and it allows you to, to just very quickly, like find the notes that you had and you can see all your previous notes. So it's kind of like having a Ctrl+Tab function for your own Obsidian vault. And so just going back over there, the next hotkey I wanna talk about is commands. So commands are basically allowing you to access the functionality of all the different, like, things that are inside of your Obsidian vault. So whenever you get new plugins, there'll be specific things that you can do with them using the command panel over here. And the keyboard shortcut for commands by default is going to be Ctrl+P, so Command+P, right? And whenever you're in a note, like let's say I created a new note, if I go there, in fact, I could even use a command to do that. I just go to there, new note. So I open up a new note, right? And now I'm here inside of my new note. Let's say I wanted to populate that with one of my template plugins. So I just go Ctrl+P, templates, open command window. And then, um, if I just type that in, There you can see it's created the template. So, okay, next one. Sample. Now the next, the next keyboard shortcut is your checkboxes. So a lot of people, at least for me, I didn't realize that you could create Now the next, the next hotkey is checkboxes. So checkboxes, the next shortcut is gonna be for checkboxes. So I used to think that the only way you could create a checkbox would be by putting in this specific syntax, right? It's basically, if I just do that, um, you'll be able to see, hmm. The next keyboard shortcut is checkboxes. So I used to think that the only way to put a checkbox is using this specific syntax where you have a bullet and then the open table and close table. So that's creating a checkbox that you can then tick on and off. But there's actually a much simpler way to create checkboxes, and that is simply by setting your checkbox hotkey. So if I go— oh, it's called a checkbox Um, check toggle checkbox status. So it's Ctrl+Enter. So simply by pushing Ctrl+Enter, that creates the checkbox. And then from there you can actually say like task 1, task 2, task 3. And something else that's also really cool with, uh, the shortcut, the way I showed you here, is that if you've got a bullet list, like let's say you've got list 1, list, uh, 2, right, and you wanted to just quickly transform these into tick boxes, you just have to highlight all of them, Ctrl+Enter, and then boom, now they're also checkboxes. Now something else you can also do with tick boxes is that once you've created one, you can also hit Tab to create an indented one, and this is create— basically creating a sub-item. So you could say like sub-item 1, sub-item 2, And from there it allows you to fold the sub items. And then if you wanted to put it back on the previous line, you would simply just say Shift Tab. So there you go. This isn't really a shortcut, but it's just something that I think is helpful. If I go to one of my big notes, it's got like a lot of different points on it. Uh, something that you can also do to really help to make information stand out is simply just adding the arrow to the right, and then what this does is it highlights your notes. So I feel like a lot of people aren't aware of this, and depending on the theme that you have, it also shows up in a different way. Uh, but this is really helpful to kind of just draw attention to certain pieces of text. And then the last keyboard shortcut that I also use all the time is going to be folding and unfolding your notes. So if you go back to hotkeys and you type in fold, you can see it says fold all headings and lists. And this is currently set to Alt+F. And then you can also unfold with Alt+Shift+F. So let's say I wanted to quickly fold everything in this note. I just push Alt+F, and then you can see it, it folds based on the heading hierarchy. So if you've got specific headings underneath here, like if I created a Heading 3 and I said Test 1, Then when I push Alt+F, it folds that one and it folds the smaller heading, which is really cool. And the, the, the interesting thing is they've already fixed it. So now when you fold your notes and you go back, um, it stays folded. Uh, so that's really helpful. You know, if you have a huge list of notes and you want to just have one specific thing open and you go back to a previous note, you go back here, it's going to remember your state. So this is something I feel a lot of people don't know about it. I actually just recently discovered I could do this, and that is you don't have to just link to notes. You can also link to specific headings within a note. For example, if I wanted to link to a big note that has a lot of different headings in it, like this one over here, Cashvertising, um, I just push— so you just create the normal link structure with the two brackets. But then once you've, uh, already finished creating the link, you just push the hash key, and now you see it actually pulls up all of the different headings that are already inside over here. So if I just click on this heading, now instead of it being linked to the full note itself, it's linked to that specific heading. And you see when I click on it, it's going to actually highlight that heading and open exactly where I want it. Which is pretty cool, right? Now what you can do with Obsidian is simply by adding an exclamation mark in front of a link, you can have the note embedded on the page. So you see what I've just done now, it's now showing the full heading for the specific notes inside of the page. And, um, if I, for example, just removed, uh, this whole like hashtag first part over here, let's say up until the hashtag. Now it's just going to show the entire note embedded in the page. When you link to a note, you don't need to use the exact note title as the name. So kind of like creating a hyperlink inside of a website, you can also use a link alias. And all you do is when you've created a link to a note, right at the end before the closing brackets you're just gonna add a line, right? So you see I added like one of these, um, lines, right? Just like that. So let me just go back here. So after you've added the line, you can add pretty much anything after this, like Persuade, Persuasion Book, right? And what's gonna happen is that Persuasion Book is now linking to that exact note. So this is very helpful if you're trying to create a link to a specific note, like let's say if I was inside of Action and I had this externalizing my thoughts and I wanted to link externalizing my thoughts to, um, but I didn't wanna say externalize my thoughts. Like let's say I, I wanted to change it to thinking. So now it's externalizing your thinking, but it links to thoughts. Now with aliases, it's also important to remember that when you create this alias, it doesn't necessarily mean that Obsidian is gonna recognize that when you're talking about this specific concept, you're actually referring to this note. So what you can do is if you just like, like for example, if I remove this and I go into this Cashvertising note, inside of your YAML, you can actually create a specific meta tag called aliases and Obsidian is gonna read this meta tag and you can literally just put the exact alias that you want inside of here, and you can have as many as you want. So I could say persuasion note, copywriting book, et cetera. So what happens then is that now this is actually gonna— Obsidian is gonna recognize this specific text as another alias for this note. So if I'm inside of a note and I wanted to, for example, um, now go back and, and link to Persuasion, Persuasion book. Now you can see it's actually pointing to that already, and then you can just link to it like that. So let's say you've got a couple of different notes that you wanna make sure are always gonna be top of mind inside of your vault. Well, Obsidian's got a nice little function that you can, um, turn on inside of the core plugins. And that is your starred notes over here. So right where it says starred, just make sure that this is on. And then what you can do is inside of your right or your left-hand sidebar, you can see there's a starred panel right now. And basically anytime I have notes that are kind of, that I wanna make sure are easily accessible, things that I can just like, um, kind of give more priority, I can add them over here. So it, it really helps to just simplify what you're working on. Like this is something that I need to build out. And so I just keep it in my start panel. Yeah. So as you know, the reason Obsidian is so powerful is because it allows you to form connections between your notes. But what a lot of people don't realize is that there's actually inbuilt functionality where Obsidian gives you, it shows you more opportunities where, where two different notes can link together. So for example, if I open up a note, let's say Assumptions, right? So this is a note on some assumptions, and I wanted to see where else I can link. So by right-clicking on the title, it's going to open up this menu over here. And then what you want to do is say toggle backlinks in document. So when you toggle backlinks in document, you'll see right at the bottom of the notes, it's going to actually show your linked mentions. So this is where it's, it's basically showing all the other notes that are linking back to this specific note. And then you can also click on Unlinked Mentions, and these are actually where you're using this specific word but you haven't yet formed a connection. This is really helpful when you're studying your vault to kind of like further link everything together. You can actually start to see, um, where there's opportunities for you to create links. So now it's time to reveal my absolute favorite feature for for studying with Obsidian, and that is the local graph. So if I click on a specific note, let's say I'm using this one, for example, action, um, what you can do is that if you right-click on the, the title, you can go down to the bottom and go to open linked view and say open local graph. So now what you're going to see is that Obsidian is showing you all of the other notes that are linked back to this specific note. You can see that there's settings over here, and basically it shows you your incoming links, outgoing links. You can also click on neighboring links, and then basically what you'll see is that it's showing all of the connections, not only connected to this specific note, but also the connections between each other. So how can you actually use this? Well, what you can do is that we basically got this note open, and let's say I wanted to start exploring my vault. So I start on a specific topic. I say, for example, action, and then I can go into perfectionism. So I click on perfectionism and now it's showing me all of the notes related to this. So you can kind of see how this is really helpful for your studying because on your left-hand side you've got a panel where you can kind of read what the note is about. And then on the right-hand side, you can just go to the next note and yeah, just start browsing through your entire vault. Going through it like this. I think that this is a really powerful feature, and this is really helping me to kind of go back to my previous notes and study using Obsidian. So thanks so much for watching this video. I hope that you enjoyed and got something out of this. And let me know in the comments which one of these features was your favorite. I'm going to be making another video similar to this except talking about the plugins that you can add to further make Obsidian more powerful. And so stay tuned for that video, and I'll see you in the next one.