Obsidian 1.0 Is Here! Here’s What’s New

Obsidian 1.0 is finally here! This long-awaited update brings a wealth of new features and improvements to our favorite note-taking app. The Obsidian team has been working hard on this release for years now, and we think you’re going to love it.

What has changed? First and foremost, the interface of Obsidian has been revamped. The new design is sleeker, cleaner, and more intuitive than ever before. If you saw our article on v0.16, then you’re already familiar with many of the updates:

There’s a brand-new tabbed interface

You can “stack” tabs, similar to the Sliding Panes plugin
Lots of other visual improvements all over the app
Lots of improvements to keyboard shortcuts: the app is now even more keyboard accessible

For a full list of changes, see the change notes on the forum.

An example of the new Obsidian 1.0 interface.

An animated gif showing the new tab stacking function. — Images created by the Obsidian Team.

A Warning on Updating

The team says that, if you rely on community plugins, you should be careful when you update. They say to update your plugins and themes first, before you update Obsidian.

Personally, I’m not too worried about it: I use a lot of plugins, and I haven’t had any trouble with any of them so far. The most popular plugins all support the latest updates fairly well, although you may experience some weirdness from time to time.

Themes are a little more hit or miss: you might have to stop using your favorite theme for a bit if it hasn’t been updated in a while, but there are many good themes that do support the latest version.

Note: if you’re a theme developer and don’t yet support the latest version, the Obsidian team wrote a handy guide for you.

If you do update and it breaks an essential plugin, then you can roll back to v0.5.9, but it’s a little tricky. Follow these instructions on the forum to roll back to a previous version.

Is Obsidian 1.0 Available on Mobile?

Yes! For the first time, we’re able to use tabs on Obsidian Mobile. Both Android and iOS received completely overhauled interfaces for 1.0. Below is an example of what the app now looks like on iOS.

Obsidian 1.0 example screenshot from iOS. — Shown here is the Dracula Official theme.

Should I Try Obsidian 1.0 or Wait?

Of course it depends on your situation, but we would encourage you to give it a shot! Make sure your work is backed up first, ensure you have at least one extra copy of all of your files. Then update your plugins and themes, and then update Obsidian.

As we said before, there might be some weirdness with community plugins for a while, but in our experience most plugins support the update pretty well.

Also as we mentioned above, you can always roll back if some essential feature breaks for you.

Good luck and let us know how it goes for you!