Import from Obsidian

If you have been using Obsidian and want to move your notes to OriginText, the process is straightforward. OriginText can import a .zip archive of markdown files — which is exactly what an Obsidian vault export produces. Your notes and their [[wikilinks]] come across intact because both apps use the same double-bracket link format.

Step 1: Export your Obsidian vault

Obsidian vaults are folders of plain .md files on your disk, so there is no special export step in most cases — you can open Finder or Explorer, navigate to your vault folder, and compress it directly.

On macOS: right-click the vault folder in Finder and choose "Compress". This creates a .zip file in the same location.

On Windows: right-click the vault folder in Explorer, choose "Send to > Compressed (zipped) folder".

The resulting .zip contains your markdown files in their folder structure. If your vault has subfolders, those are included in the archive.

Step 2: Import into OriginText

  1. Open OriginText and make sure you are in the workspace where you want the notes to land.
  2. In the Explorer panel on the left, look at the panel header. There is an Import Markdown button — hover over it to see the tooltip "Import a .zip of markdown files (e.g. an Obsidian vault)".
  3. Click the button. A file picker opens — select the .zip file you created in Step 1.
  4. OriginText extracts the .md files from the archive and imports them into the current workspace. When it finishes, a confirmation message tells you how many markdown files were imported.

That's it. Once the import finishes, your notes appear in the Explorer and are immediately editable.

What gets imported

  • Markdown files (.md) — all of them, preserving their content.
  • Wikilinks — [[double-bracket]] links are preserved as-is and continue to work in OriginText, since both apps share the same syntax.
  • Notes that already exist — if a note with the same name already exists in the workspace, it is updated with the imported content rather than duplicated.

What is skipped

  • Attachments and images — files that are not .md (images, PDFs, audio files, Obsidian plugins, .canvas files, etc.) are ignored during import. Only markdown text comes across.
  • Obsidian-specific metadata — things like Obsidian tags in frontmatter remain in the markdown text but have no special behavior in OriginText. You can clean them up manually or leave them in place.
  • Folder hierarchy — notes are imported by file name into the current workspace rather than recreated as nested folders. If two files in different vault folders share the same name, they resolve to the same note.

After importing

Once your notes are in, your wikilinks form a live graph automatically — open the graph view to see the shape of your imported knowledge base. Backlinks are computed from the imported links immediately, so the structure you built in Obsidian is fully navigable in OriginText from the start.

If you were using Obsidian's encrypted vault feature, note that the .zip you export contains the plain text of your notes (not encrypted). Keep that in mind when handling the export file — once your notes are in OriginText, they are encrypted at rest on your device.