Video Transcript

Alright, in the last video we created a vault and started a note at the very end. Now let's continue where we left off. You can see I've got this note here, sample vault first document and I've added some text to it. It says here's some text. Notes are the basic building block of an Obsidian vault. They can be as short as this or they can be really long including whole chapters of books or even more. One of the beauties of Obsidian is that it adapts to your needs, so if you like long notes or short notes, it's there for you. However, I would say that if you're not used to making short notes, I'd encourage you to try it as you start to build your Obsidian vault. You can always assemble shorter notes into longer ones if you need to, and having them at this small atomic level allows you to use them in all sorts of ways that you're going to learn as we go through the course.

I love the fact that with Obsidian, all of your notes really are just markdown files, and that's the transparency of this application that makes it so powerful. In fact, if we just go over to the Finder, you can see that I am in the sample vault folder of my Obsidian folder, and there is the markdown document for this very document. Sample, first document, you can see there it is right there, with .md afterwards, which stands for markdown. So in Obsidian, the first line of any note is going to be the title of the markdown document, and anything underneath it will be the containing text. So if I hit the space bar to give a preview of this, you see here's some text.

Now you could even edit it outside of Obsidian and it would reflect back in the application. Just to take a look, let's go back in the note and let's go ahead and put a bulleted list here. So bulleted list and here's a little mark down for you. I'm gonna hit the dash and here's bullet one. And then when I hit return, you see it adds a bullet for me automatically. bullet two and then bullet three. And if I now go back to the finder and look at that document again, you'll see that that text is in there with those dashes.

So there's something you need to understand about Obsidian Notes is that they have two different modes. They have what they call an editing mode and a reading mode. And if you look up here in the right corner, you can see the little book is here. That means that we are currently looking at the editing mode, the book would put you into reading mode. So I can go ahead and click that. And you can see now it's formatted better. With the bullets have spacing between them, there's spacing between the lines. If I hit the button, which turned into a pencil, to go back to the editing mode, you can see now it's all kind of compressed together.

Now that I've created this note, if I want, I can go over to these little buttons here delete the file and that will go away. You can also create a note via automation where you can have shortcuts or some other automation tool generate a markdown file inside your obsidian vault and it will automatically show up and indeed you can even do that manually if you want.

Now there's one last bit about notes and obsidian and that is that you can rename them and the Renaming is really interesting because let's take a look for instance at this favorite Disneyland activities link I have this note called jungle cruise jokes So it is linked in a separate note now if I went into the jungle cruise jokes note And I changed the name of it to silly jungle cruise jokes. You know let's just do that So I've changed the name right in the name field well when I do that you get this warning It says, wait a second, this note is linked to something else. And do you want it to update there? Because if we don't update the name everywhere that this note appears, then the links will no longer work because it's going to be looking, the note is going to be looking for something called jungle cruise jokes. And now the destination note has been changed to silly jungle cruise notes.

Make sure you understand this stuff before you move on. In the next video we're going to get deeper into the topic of managing these notes.