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Obsidian corpus overview

docs/research/sources/obsidian/corpus-overview.md

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Obsidian corpus overview

Purpose

This page is the first compiled summary of the official Obsidian docs corpus.

It bridges:

  • the raw help docs repo in ../raw/obsidian/help
  • the raw developer docs repo in ../raw/obsidian/developer
  • the compiled Obsidian source pages in docs/research/sources/obsidian

Corpus shape

Current raw sources:

  • help docs repo
  • developer docs repo

Current English markdown counts:

  • help docs: 171
  • developer docs: 1312

The developer repo is much larger because it includes TypeScript API reference pages and CSS-variable reference pages.

Structural take

Obsidian's useful behavior truth is split across two very different lanes:

  1. product help docs
    • editing modes
    • internal links
    • backlinks
    • outline
    • search
    • Obsidian Flavored Markdown
  2. developer docs
    • editor extensions
    • editor API
    • markdown post-processing
    • CodeMirror-facing extension seams

That means Obsidian is both:

  • a product reference
  • a developer platform reference

Plate-relevant use

Use Obsidian when the question is about:

  • live preview vs source mode
  • linked-note navigation
  • backlinks and note graph UX
  • plugin/editor extension seams

Do not use Obsidian as the one primary markdown-native authority. That still belongs to Typora.