How I Recreated (and Improved) My Obsidian Note-Taking Workflow in Neovim

Author: linkarzu Date: February 14, 2025

A comprehensive guide to migrating from Obsidian to Neovim for markdown note-taking — covering every feature that Obsidian offers and its Neovim equivalent.

Overview

Linkarzu was a heavy Obsidian user (countless hours configuring plugins) but ultimately moved to Neovim. This post walks through recreating (and in some cases improving) every Obsidian feature in Neovim.

Key Topics Covered

• Folds — Neovim equivalent of Obsidian’s collapse/expand
• Outline plugin — sidebar document outline
• Note linking — [[wikilinks]] in Neovim
• Images — viewing and pasting images inline
• Imgur upload — paste → auto-upload → embed markdown
• Daily notes — create and open daily notes from Neovim
• Task management — checkboxes, todo tracking
• Auto-push to GitHub — script for git auto-commit + push
• Markdown preview — rendered HTML preview in Neovim
• vim motions in Obsidian — how to get Neovim keybindings inside Obsidian (for hybrid users)
• Dataview take — opted out of Dataview intentionally to avoid vendor lock-in

Quick Start (his config)

git clone git@github.com:linkarzu/dotfiles-latest ~/.config/linkarzu/dotfiles-latest
NVIM_APPNAME=linkarzu/dotfiles-latest/neovim/neobean nvim

Alias: alias neobean='NVIM_APPNAME=linkarzu/dotfiles-latest/neovim/neobean nvim'

Key Insight on Dataview

“I was never a fan of the Dataview plugin in Obsidian, as it makes my markdown files and also myself rely too much on a tool that I don’t know I’m sticking with.”

Linkarzu deliberately avoided Dataview to keep his markdown portable — which paid off when he migrated to Neovim.

Related

• Obsidian
• Neovim Workflow