Obsidian is a relatively new entrant in the increasingly crowded Markdown knowledge base and note-taking market. Obsidian’s excellent Markdown support and its simple, straightforward design makes it a standout application in the category. Desktop and mobile applications are available.
Obsidian sports virtually all of the standard fare common to the other applications in this category, but it ups the ante by including a number of other features for power users. There’s a visually-striking graph view that’s a kind of “mind map” of all your files stored in Obsidian, a “Markdown format importer” that can find and replace certain Markdown syntax elements in your files, and support for math and diagram syntax. That really just scratches the surface of Obsidian’s capabilities. Obsidian is extensible, and there are hundreds of free community plugins available within the application.
Two other features are worth mentioning. Obsidian provides a simple way to publish notes to the internet, and it stores all of your files in plaintext Markdown files containing only the text you enter.
Obsidian Markdown Support
Obsidian provides support for the following Markdown elements.
| Element | Support | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Headings | Yes | |
| Paragraphs | Yes | |
| Line Breaks | Yes | |
| Bold | Yes | |
| Italic | Yes | |
| Blockquotes | Yes | |
| Ordered Lists | Yes | |
| Unordered Lists | Yes | |
| Code | Yes | |
| Horizontal Rules | Yes | |
| Links | Yes | You can link to other notes in Obsidian by using the [[file name]] syntax.
|
| Images | Yes | |
| Tables | Yes | |
| Fenced Code Blocks | Yes | |
| Syntax Highlighting | Yes | See the list of supported languages. |
| Footnotes | Yes | |
| Heading IDs | No | |
| Definition Lists | No | |
| Strikethrough | Yes | |
| Task Lists | Yes | |
| Emoji (copy and paste) | Yes | |
| Emoji (shortcodes) | No | |
| Highlight | Yes | |
| Subscript | No | The sub HTML tag is supported.
|
| Superscript | No | The sup HTML tag is supported.
|
| Automatic URL Linking | Yes | |
| Disabling Automatic URL Linking | Yes | |
| HTML | Partial | Some HTML is sanitized for security purposes. Markdown inside HTML is frequently left un-parsed. |
See Also
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