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Obsidian

Wiki entitysoftwareknowledge-managementmarkdown ↳ show in map Markdown
title
Obsidian
type
entity
summary
Local-first markdown knowledge-base app with a community plugin / theme ecosystem; the canonical PKM target this wiki is built against
tags
software, knowledge-management, markdown
created
2026-05-13
updated
2026-05-13

Obsidian (obsidian.md) is a local-first markdown editor and PKM (personal knowledge management) tool. Files are stored as plain .md on disk; wikilinks ([[page]]), embeds (![[page]]), and YAML frontmatter (Properties) are first-class. The app is closed-source but free for personal use; revenue is from optional Sync / Publish subscriptions and a small commercial-use license.

The plugin and theme ecosystem is the differentiator. The Obsidian API shipped in 2020; by 2026 the community has produced over 4,000 plugins and themes, with cumulative downloads past 120 million. Plugins are TypeScript modules that mount into Obsidian's editor, view, and command surface — table-of-contents generators, Excalidraw integration, Dataview queries over frontmatter, Templater scripting, dozens of AI assistants, custom property types (obsidian-bases), and so on.

The Second Brain itself is an Obsidian vault — every wiki page renders correctly when opened in Obsidian, llm-wiki-pattern explicitly assumes Obsidian conventions, and the CLAUDE.md schema is constrained to "Obsidian Flavored Markdown" so the human reader can use Obsidian's graph view and backlinks freely.

Plugin distribution and review (2026 reset)

In May 2026 Obsidian launched the Obsidian Community directory — see obsidian-future-of-plugins — replacing the GitHub-PR submission model with a developer dashboard and an automated review system that scans every release, not only the first. Manual review is preserved for popular / featured / flagged plugins. Roadmap items: per-plugin capability disclosures (network, filesystem, clipboard), verified-author labels, support for team-private plugins.

  • obsidian-future-of-plugins — summary of the May 2026 Community-site / automated-review launch
  • obsidian-ai-complete-guide — Huashu's production implementation of the LLM Wiki pattern on top of Obsidian
  • obsidian-bases — the built-in database views this vault's dashboards are built on
  • obsidian-markdown and obsidian-cli — Claude Code skills inside this vault, not pages
  • llm-wiki-pattern — the wiki pattern these pages all serve
  • quartz — static site generator that publishes an Obsidian vault as a digital garden
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