Site Navigation

Edit on GitHub


Obsidian as a Tool Ecosystem

Introduced by: Pete Kaminski
Depth: Deep thread

Pete spent a large portion of the call demoing Obsidian to Dave, who had been using it as a dumb vault holder without ever opening the application properly. This was one of the biggest "I had no idea" moments of the call.

The Conversation

Dave's starting point:

Dave: "I downloaded Obsidian, and then Claude used Obsidian, but it didn't do anything else for me. I'm like, oh, it's just like a holding place."

Pete showed him what Obsidian actually looks like:

Pete: "This is what Obsidian is supposed to look like."

Dave: "Never seen that in my life."

Pete: "So this is the only reason people use Obsidian, not to make vaults, but to look at Markdown files."

Dave's realization:

Dave: "So, basically, Obsidian is, like, a Markdown reader, and it replaces, like, my Apple Notes?"

Pete: "Apple notes. Yeah."

What Pete Demonstrated

Wiki Links

Pete typed double square brackets and Obsidian auto-completed with a list of files. Dave was amazed:

Dave: "Oh, wow. And it automatically links, you just type it and it knows it."

Pete showed that you can link to pages that don't exist yet — click the link, and the page is created. Backlinks show you what pages link to the current page.

Dave: "Whoa. Whoa."

Pete: "So, you can kind of imagine that you could build complicated structures pretty quickly."

Dave: "It's essentially a database, with words."

DataView Plugin

Pete showed the DataView Plugin — running queries against structured data in Obsidian pages. Student lists sorted by name, filtered by track, broken out by Mac vs. Windows.

Dave: "So you're talking to Claude, and it's writing it into Obsidian?"

Claude Code in the Sidebar

Pete demonstrated Claude Code running in an Obsidian terminal sidebar. You can copy a file path, paste it into Claude, and say "summarize this" or "expand this." He highlighted text and had Claude expand it inline.

Pete: "Compare and contrast with plugins in well-known software."

Seconds later, Claude had written a full comparison.

Multiple Tools on the Same Files

Pete showed Typora and Obsidian editing the same file simultaneously — change in one, it appears in the other. Both read and write plain Markdown files.

Pete: "They're both reading and writing Markdown files."

Dave's Insight About Levels

Dave articulated the complexity of the tool ecosystem:

Dave: "There's, like, these 3 or 4 levels of knowing and acting and interacting and creating... A person needs to know what mode they're in when they're in a certain window."

He compared it to living in a city block instead of a single hotel — Pete's setup was an entire ecosystem of interconnected tools, not just one program.

Related

Pages that link to this page