User Interface

A user interface, otherwise referred to as a UI, is the visual parts of a program you interact with when using it. For Obsidian, the UI is the entire window. Let’s break it down piece by piece.

Appearance

Before we go any further, we should go over the fun part. Making it your own. If your left bar isn’t already open, hit the button on the top left (it’s a little square with lines in it). Once open, you hit the cog on the bottom right of the left bar. Under the options bar, you hit “Appearance.”

By default you can make minor changes, but the big stuff comes from Themes. These are made from people from within the Obsidian community. They range from slight color shifts to total makeovers. To really get into note taking, you should love the experience; all parts of it. Take your time to go through and find your favorite. You can install them pretty quickly to try them out.

Drag and Drop & Tabs

Once you have a decent amount of notes, sometimes you’ll need a few of them open at once. You can open up notes and drag them next to one another to tab them. You can stack them horizontally or even vertically.

Tabs work very similarly to how they work in browsers with a little more flexibility. You can either add a new tab with the plus sign next to your current note tab, or Ctrl+T. You can pin tabs by right clicking them, and you can navigate them using Ctrl+Tab to go forward, and Ctrl+Shift+Tab to go backwards.

Hot Keys and the Command Palette

Hot keys, or shortcuts, are commands mapped to the pressing of specific keys. Bold? Shortcut. Italic? Hot keys. The name is interchangeable. To see a list of the available hot keys, you can press Ctrl+P to open up the Command Palette.

The Command Palette is a powerful tool. With it, you can just start typing for a feature you’re looking for. Want to rename the file? Search for rename, and you’ll see the command is F2. You can either click it with the mouse, or type it out further and press enter, or even hit escape and use the shortcut. Lots of options.

There are many commands that don’t have hotkey set yet. You can scroll to see them. Explore with things you haven’t heard of before- what changed? You can always undo with Ctrl+Z.

In the settings menu, you can change them. If it’s a taken key combination, it’ll appear in red.

Ribbon

The ribbon is the bar on the left hand border of your Obsidian window. By default, you have a few options. Common functions that are used daily are stored here, and obviously like other aspects of Obsidian it’s fully customizable.

You can drag and drop the order of the functions, and go into the user interface settings and decide what’s there. The more plugins we download later, the more options we’ll have.

Not to be confused with the ribbon, you’ll have two side bars on desktop. You can see that on the top left and top right there are show/hide buttons for both.

By default, on our left hand side we have the physical file manager aspect as well as a search and bookmark feature. The right hand side will have a the incoming and outgoing links, as well as tags and properties. Thankfully these are both customizable and can be rearranged/modified to your pleasure.

Status Bar

The bar on the bottom right by default will tell you information about the document we’re currently working in. Not a lot special going on here, but as we develop our vault, we’re going to see more uses for this. For now, it’ll just let us keep a nice word count.

Next: Editing and Formatting