The traditional Obsidian app takes time to load before it’s usable, since it’s built with Electron. Because of that, I’ve become reluctant to open the app, especially when writing a quick note. The loading delay alone is enough to put me off. When an idea is supposed to take a few seconds to write down, waiting for a few seconds feels like friction.

I looked around for an alternative, and found neorg.nvim. The format itself is plain text, but support for .norg outside Neorg is limited, and Markdown is far more widely supported across other apps and platforms. I wanted my notes accessible on mobile and other platforms, and that’s exactly what Obsidian already gave me.

Considering my terminal is open all day for programming, having notes living in the terminal too means zero context-switching. So I found a way to keep Obsidian’s format without the Electron overhead. Since I’m already using Neovim and I’m used to its keybindings, I switched to obsidian.nvim. It gave me direct access to my vault without ever leaving my terminal, so capturing ideas is faster than opening the traditional app, and I also keep Neovim’s features like fuzzy finding. So basically it’s still using Obsidian, but not just the app itself.

Obsidian is built with Electron, which bundles Chromium and Node.js. That means launching the app involves starting the Electron runtime before the interface is ready. I’m not replacing Obsidian - I’m only replacing the desktop application. The best part of it nothing needs to be migrated - it’s still the same vault, same Markdown files, just a different front door.

How I set it up

Here’s what my config looks like for getting obsidian.nvim running with lazy.nvim:

{
  'obsidian-nvim/obsidian.nvim',
  version = '*',
  ---@module 'obsidian'
  ---@type obsidian.config
  opts = {
    legacy_commands = false,
    workspaces = {
      {
        name = 'personal',
        path = '~/vaults/personal',
      },
    },
    picker = {
      name = 'telescope.nvim', -- might vary on your picker
    },
  },
}

By default, obsidian.nvim requires that conceallevel be set to 1 or 2. It’s because Neovim shows raw Markdown syntax while editing. It is meant to hide syntax to render close to Obsidian’s app clean view.

Option 1: Use obsidian.nvim’s built-in UI

Pick one of the two approaches below, depending on whether you want conceal everywhere or just inside your vault:

vim.opt.conceallevel = 2

Or, enable conceal only inside your Obsidian vault:

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd('FileType', {
  pattern = 'markdown',
  callback = function()
    local path = vim.fn.expand '%:p'
    local vaults = vim.fn.expand '~/vaults'

    if path:match('^' .. vim.pesc(vaults)) then
      vim.opt_local.conceallevel = 2
    end
  end,
})

Option 2: Use a dedicated renderer

If you aren’t a fan of its conceal-based UI (like me), use a dedicated Markdown rendering like markview.nvim. Since markview.nvim handles the rendered preview, disable obsidian.nvim’s UI option to avoid two overlapping - this also gets rid of the conceallevel warning.

opts = {
  ui = {
    enable = false,
  },
},

I configured my keymap to toggle rendering and see raw Markdown while editing.

return {
  'OXY2DEV/markview.nvim',
  lazy = false,
  opts = {
    preview = {
      icon_provider = 'mini', -- might vary on your icon provider
    },
  },
  keys = {
    {
      '<leader>tm',
      '<cmd>Markview toggle<cr>',
      desc = 'Toggle Markview',
    },
  },
}

Not a full replacement

There are things the plugin doesn’t cover, such as community extensions, CSS snippets, graph view, and other GUI only features that are exclusive to the Obsidian app. Because of that, I still open the Obsidian app for a quick glance at the graph and if I want to read with the CSS snippets I implemented.

On the mobile app I use the official app for reading and quick writing when I’m away from my computer. To keep everything in sync across devices, I use Syncthing instead of Obsidian’s built-in Sync - it’s free and open-source, fits well with my workflow, and can also synchronize any file type, not just Obsidian vaults.