Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Settings Overview.

If you’re using Obsidian, one of the first things worth knowing is where everything lives. All your settings are stored per-vault, meaning each vault you create has its own independent configuration. That configuration lives in a hidden folder called dot-obsidian, sitting right inside your vault directory. You can get to your settings at any time by pressing Control and comma together, or by clicking the gear icon in the bottom left of the interface.

Let’s walk through the main sections you’ll find in there.

The first section is Editor. This is where you control things like your default editing mode, how wide your lines are, what font size you prefer, whether you want vim keybindings, spellcheck, and whether brackets automatically pair up when you type them.

Next is Files and Links — and this one is particularly important, so we’ll come back to it in a moment.

Then there’s Appearance, which is where you pick your theme, set your font, switch between light and dark colour schemes, and even load custom CSS if you want to go further with visual customisation.

Hotkeys lets you remap any command in Obsidian to a keyboard shortcut of your choosing — again, we’ll cover the key defaults shortly.

After that you’ve got Core Plugins, where you can enable or disable Obsidian’s built-in functionality, and Community Plugins, which is where you’ll find the restricted mode toggle, the plugin browser, and any plugins you’ve already installed from the community library.

So let’s zoom in on Files and Links, because the choices you make here have a big impact on how your vault behaves day to day.

The first setting is where new notes get created. You have three options: the vault root, the same folder as the note you’re currently in, or a specific folder you define yourself. The recommendation here is to go with a specified folder, so new notes don’t just scatter randomly across your vault.

Next is wikilink format, which controls how Obsidian writes links when you reference other notes. Your options are shortest path, relative path, or absolute path from the vault root. Absolute from the vault root is the recommended choice — it keeps links consistent and less likely to break when you move files around.

There’s also a toggle for whether to use wikilinks at all, and the recommendation is to keep that switched on. Auto update internal links is another one worth keeping enabled — when you rename a note, Obsidian will automatically update every link pointing to it across your whole vault, which saves a lot of manual fixing later. And if you’re storing non-Markdown files in your vault, turning on Detect all file extensions means Obsidian will recognise and work with those as well.

Now let’s talk hotkeys. You can remap any command through Settings and then Hotkeys — just search for the command by name and click to assign your shortcut.

Out of the box, here are the defaults you’ll use most often. The Command Palette opens with Control and P. The Quick Switcher, which lets you jump to any note fast, is Control and O. Search across the whole vault is Control, Shift and F. New Note is Control and N. Toggling between edit and read mode is Control and E. Opening the graph view is Control and G. Getting back into Settings is Control and comma. Closing a pane is Control and W. One worth noting — splitting a pane to the right has no default shortcut assigned, so if you use that feature regularly, you’ll want to set one yourself through the Hotkeys section.

Finally, let’s cover where the config actually lives on disk, in case you need to back it up or sync it across devices. On Windows, macOS, and Linux, the answer is the same — it’s a folder called dot-obsidian sitting inside your vault directory. The platform path looks slightly different on each system, but the location relative to your vault is identical.

If you’re syncing your vault using something like Nextcloud or Git, you can include that dot-obsidian folder in your sync to carry all your settings across to other devices. One tip though — there’s a file in there called workspace dot json that stores your current pane layout. If you work across multiple machines with different screen sizes or setups, you’ll want to exclude that file from sync, otherwise your layout may get overwritten every time you switch devices.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.