If you’re preparing for the Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP) certification, effective note-taking becomes crucial for organizing your research, documenting your findings, and maintaining a knowledge base for future reference. While there are numerous note-taking apps available like Notion, Logseq, Bear, Cherry Tree and many more that I haven’t even explored. But Obsidian stands out as a powerful tool that can greatly enhance your OSCP preparation journey. In this article, I will let you know why Obsidian is the ideal companion for OSCP and discuss its edge over other alternatives.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
Plugins: Extending Functionality to Suit Your Needs
Everyone who tried Obsidian before agrees with me here, that Obsidian has an extensive plugin ecosystem. Obsidian offers a wide range of community-developed plugins that can be easily installed to enhance the app’s functionality and tailor fit your specific needs. When preparing for OSCP, this flexibility becomes invaluable.
You can leverage plugins like
- Templater to create templates for your future notes to have a certain template structure.
- Obsidian Git to make your entire obsidian notes vault a git repo to make it portable.
- Dataview to organize and view the notes and data to your custom index pages.
- Kanban to maintain a Kanban board to track different things effectively.
And many more plugins, all those integrate together to make Obsidian a treat to use.
Open Source (its free forever)
Obsidian is an open source project built by community members which means it’s free for everyone forever. New features, improvements, and bug fixes are all developed by the community and trust me obsidian has a very great and active community.
Markdown First: Focus on Content and Portability
Obsidian is built with a “Markdown first” approach, which means it is formatted using Markdown syntax. Markdown allows you to structure and format your notes in a lightweight, human-readable format that emphasizes content rather than visual distractions. You can easily create headings, lists, tables, code blocks, and more, ensuring your notes are well-organized and easily scannable. Additionally, Markdown files are highly portable, which is essential for a certification like OSCP where you may need to access your notes across multiple devices or platforms.
Vibrant Community for Themes
Obsidian has a thriving community of users who actively share their themes and contribute to the ever-growing collection of user-created themes. This vibrant community ensures that you have access to a wide range of visually stunning themes, catering to different tastes and preferences. Whether you’re looking for a professional-looking theme or a creative and colourful design, the Obsidian community is a treasure trove of inspiration.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, you can even work your way to OSCP with notes taken down with pen and paper. It’s just the convenience you will have if you have a software copy so that you search, have multiple backups or have easy access to references. If you haven’t tried Obsidian try it out once for taking and organising your thoughts I am sure you will find it useful just like me.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Obsidian the only option in market?
Absolutely not, there are wonderful other applications such as notion, cherry tree, roam, logseq, it depends on individual on what to use based on feature set of that sepcific app.
Is this note taking app free?
Yes, Its free forever
Is this only for oscp? Can I use this for other note taking?
You can use this for anything you want to note for.
Have a different question and can’t find the answer you’re looking for? Reach out to me here.