If you’ve been thinking about switching your writing software to Obsidian — or you’re already using it and want to get more out of it — I want to walk you through the five things that made me fall in love with it as a writer. For each one I’ll show you the tools and systems I actually use, because theory is only useful if you can put it into practice.
1. Themes and Customisation
The first thing I love about Obsidian is that it looks like mine.
Most writing software has a fixed aesthetic. You’re stuck with whatever the designers decided. Scrivener looks like Scrivener. Google Docs looks like Google Docs. I never quite loved how Scrivener looked, but there was nothing I could do about it.
In Obsidian, everything is customisable. Fonts, colours, how folders are organised, what lives in the side panels, how headers appear. All of it. You can download community themes or build your own, and you can theme the whole vault to match what you’re writing.
I once themed my science-fiction vault to look like a terminal interface. My D&D campaign vault uses a layout that looks like it came out of a source book. If you want to go deep on this, you can. If you don’t, there are hundreds of community themes ready to install in a few clicks.
The point is it’s your vault. Nobody else’s. That matters more than you might think when you’re sitting down to write every day.
2. CSS Snippets
Themes get you most of the way there, but CSS snippets let you make precise tweaks that no theme covers.
Here’s a real example. By default, Obsidian’s readable line length setting on a large monitor produces an absurdly narrow text column. It bothered me. So I wrote a small snippet, just a few lines of CSS, to set the exact width I wanted. Problem gone.
You can add as many snippets as you like: font sizes, line heights, custom colours for specific elements, anything. You don’t need to be a developer to use them. A quick search online will usually turn up something that does exactly what you need.
3. Frontmatter and Data
This one sounds technical, but bear with me.
Markdown files can carry a small block of structured data at the top, called frontmatter. For each story, I store things like the title, the type of project, what stage it’s at, and when it was last updated. A handful of fields per file.
That’s a small amount of data, but it’s enough to build a dashboard that tracks everything. Mine shows which stories are in progress, which are complete and ready to submit, where they’ve been sent, and how long I’ve spent writing each one. All of it comes from those few frontmatter fields, read automatically. No manual tracking involved.
The dashboard does seem like magic until you realise how little data is actually powering it. It’s surprisingly small.
4. Plugins
Plugins are small programs that live inside Obsidian and extend what it can do. The community plugin library is enormous, and this is where Obsidian becomes genuinely transformative.
The plugin I built and released publicly is the Shunn Exporter. You write your story in markdown, open the plugin, fill in a couple of fields, and click export. Out comes a properly formatted manuscript — Courier, double-spaced, correct running headers, everything — ready to submit to a magazine. No reformatting, no Word, just your story formatted correctly in seconds.
Another plugin I’ve been working on handles session tracking. Click a button when you start writing, another when you stop. That session data feeds directly into the dashboard above, closing the loop between writing and knowing what you’ve actually produced.
Whatever you want Obsidian to do, there’s a good chance someone has already built it. And if they haven’t, the framework for building your own is genuinely accessible.
5. The Markdown Format Itself
This is the one that matters most in the long run.
Everything I’ve described — the themes, the data, the plugins — is layered on top of the files themselves. And the files themselves are just text. Plain, universally readable, app-independent text.
If Obsidian disappeared tomorrow, my writing would be completely unaffected. All of my stories exist as simple text files in a folder. I can open them in any text editor on any device. My intellectual property isn’t locked to any app, any subscription, or any proprietary format.
That’s the fundamental argument for Obsidian. The themes and plugins are great, but they’re not the point. The point is that when you write in markdown, your words are always yours.
If you’ve been thinking about making the switch, the barrier to entry is lower than it looks.