Obsidian is a fount of endless learning. I've been fully immersed in the application for months now, and each day, I learn something new about it that I hadn't realized before — including the fact that I've been ignoring some of its best features and over-complicating my vault with plugins I didn't really need. Obsidian's default functions and "core" plugins are drastically more powerful than most users give them credit for, and these are just a few I've begun to implement into my daily workflow.

Your most-referenced notes should always have an alias

Frontmatter is more than just tags

Obsidian's tagging feature provides a unique approach to organizing your vault that doesn't rely on a folder hierarchy, yet it's often discussed extensively while other frontmatter properties are ignored. The Alias property is a prime example of this. When you interlink to another note inside Obsidian using double brackets, you have to use the exact name of that note. In some cases, that's fine, but let's say you're writing a novel in Obsidian. Do you want to use a character's full name each time you try to link to them in prose? No, so you can use an alias instead.

This is as simple as adding the "Alias" tag to properties and then writing out any other ways you might reference that note. For example, I have a character named "Rowan Keeler." In the alias section, I have his name listed as both "Rowan" and "Mr. Keeler." I can link to the note with details about the character by using either of those names. Best of all, it also works with third-party plugins like Virtual Linker/Glossary, ensuring automatic links in my notes.

For a more general-purpose example, think of a note titled "Artificial intelligence." You could give it the alias "AI" and easily link to it without typing out the entire note name each time. Aliases also appear in "Unlinked Mentions," another feature that makes it easy to find overlooked connections between your notes. You can access this through the right-hand toolbar in Obsidian.

File Recovery provides built-in automated backups

Skip the elaborate backup system

Did you realize Obsidian has an automated backup system? It's the core plugin called "File Recovery." Inside Obsidian's settings, you can choose how often a snapshot is taken of your notes and how long those snapshots are stored. By default, Obsidian takes a snapshot every five minutes and stores these for up to seven days. Of course, it only takes this if actual changes are being made to a note; if you're not modifying a note in any way, then it will take snapshots less frequently.

These snapshots are automatically stored, but you can restore them at any time by accessing the core plugin's settings. You can also choose to clear all snapshots; if you have a particularly large vault, and you're working with a lot of images, doing so can clear up extraneous storage. While File Recovery alone isn't enough of a backup for my peace of mind, it's nice to know that it does exist in case something goes wrong.

The outline pane is more than just organization

You can use it to rearrange notes

The Outline pane is an easy way to jump between headings in a note, especially a longer one. It has a hidden function that many people don't realize: it's entirely interactive, and can be used to move headings (and their body content) inside a document. That means it can be used to reorganize a document without manually copying and pasting those sections. For instance, when writing a book, I can break scenes into different headers and move them around during editing. That goes for subheads, too.

These features aren't widely advertised

They're easy to miss

It's not entirely accurate to say I was "ignoring" these features for months on end. In some cases, I just didn't know about them. While Obsidian does have extensive documentation, how many of us take the time to fully read through the instructions? I prefer to learn by doing, and that has led me to miss notes on certain features and aspects. That said, some of these features aren't obvious, especially since I'm just learning about a few even after months of use. And the three main features I've listed here are just scratching the surface; other core plugins, like Note Composer, have powerful features that would need their own article (or two) to cover.

It's encouraged me to experiment more and read the documentation

There's always something more to learn

Some of the blame falls squarely on me for my own laziness in not reading more about Obsidian. But it isn't all bad; the discovery of these features has made me experiment even further, learning that I can do things I had no idea I could do. It's made Obsidian exciting again.

The sort of hands-on discovery has led to a better mastery of the application than if I'd simply read about the features, but I can't help wishing this kind of information was just a little bit easier to surface organically.

Obsidian isn't as dependent on plugins as you might think

Obsidian's massive plugin ecosystem is one of the main reasons it's so popular, but there's a fair bit of redundancy. Take the time to learn Obsidian's core functionality, and you might find you don't need as many of those plugins as you thought.