Obsidian for Vim users

Tom Deneire
6 min readNov 29, 2024
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Why Obsidian?

I recently left my job as a software developer and started working as a digital transformation analyst — a job that entails a lot more note taking than before. As a developer, my primary tool was Neovim, which I still love for software development, but when it comes to pure note-taking, which does not natively happen in a terminal environment, I found myself looking at a GUI solution pretty soon. I briefly experimented with OneNote, but of course, I quickly found I was missing my beloved Vim keys. This is why I turned to Obsidian, which has a native Vim mode, and I have since customized the app to port as many features that I like from Vim as possible.

Vim mode

The first thing to do is obviously enabling Vim key bindings in Obsidian settings (Options > Editor > Advanced). Obsidian uses the vim emulation from the CodeMirror Editor, which does not include all vim commands, but most of them:

For more info on Obsidian and vim mode, see the Obsidian Hub:

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Tom Deneire
Tom Deneire

Written by Tom Deneire

Software engineer, technical writer, IT burnout coach @ https://tomdeneire.be/confident_coding

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