Video Transcript
Alright, let's take a look at the Obsidian user interface. I'm going to start on the far left with the ribbon. The ribbon is this narrow list of icons down the left side of the screen. It's got a set of the most commonly used tools. The first is the ability to search Obsidian. If you click on this, it opens up the feature where you can type in the name of anything and it finds a related document. You can also access that with the keyboard shortcut command O. Next to that is the graph view. Now in Obsidian, they've got this really cool graph view that lets you visualize your data. We haven't got to that yet in the field guide, but as we get deeper, you'll see that this is actually kind of an interesting feature.

Next to that is the ability to create new canvases. Canvases in Obsidian is a setup of the user interface that's customized for specific types of work. You can create different canvases for different kinds of work and we're going to get into that later in another video. Next to that is the daily note. One of the features a lot of people use in Obsidian is running a daily note where they can put links to the various pages and things they worked on. Following that is the ability to insert a template. Again, this is stuff we're going to get later in the course, but there's a button for it. And finally you can open the command palette, which is a very powerful tool in Obsidian.

Now this top set of tools may change depending on your usage of Obsidian as you add additional third-party plugins, some of those things will show up in the ribbon. Now going down to the bottom of the ribbon, there's some more, you can open and manage vaults with that button. You can get help and you can access the settings.

Now up at the top, you get the title bar and the title bar has a set of tools above each sidebar, but it also has a list of tabs that you currently have open on the left sidebar. You've got a couple of buttons. The first one allows you to star a page. That's another way to find it. It's a sort of metadata. The next one allows you to search, and the last one allows you to manage files. So currently, I'm showing the files view.

Search is really powerful in Obsidian, and you've got a different set of tools for that to match case, explain the search items, collapse the results, show more content, change the sort order or copy the search results, and then for starred items, you just have the ability to assign a star or unstar an item.

While you're in a specific file, that's on the workspace, which is the main area of Obsidian where you can get your work done and you can switch between edit and reading view here. And then under these vertical dots are many more options. So you can close it, you can pin it, you can link it with a tab. You can see the backlinks in the document. And if I do that, it shows the backlinks at the bottom as opposed to on the right sidebar.

Now, while you're still in the title bar, I'm going to go over to the right sidebar and you see that you've got a different set of features available to you there. One is to get the backlinks into a file. The other one is to get the outgoing links in a file. Like if I click this, you see I've got links outgoing to several different files. This allows me to assign and see tags. And this last one allows me to see an outline. So if I've got heading levels, you can see the outline right here on the right side. This is actually one of my favorite buttons here because I can navigate through a file very quickly.

So there you have it an overview of the Obsidian user interface.