An Introduction to Obsidian: Legacy Editor

Legacy Editor

Andrew Molloy
1 min readDec 23, 2021

Until today if you’ve tried Obsidian or seen any tutorials, you will have seen or used the legacy editor.

It has been somewhat of a drawback of the Obsidian editor and most markdown editors. That there is a distinct difference between editing markdown and viewing it. The way Obsidian handled editing and viewing was to have two different modes. You could select which view you were in by clicking on the mode symbol in the top right of the note pane.

Edit mode is selected when you click on the pen symbol, and preview mode by clicking on the page icon (the icons are located in the same place and change depending on which view you’re currently in).

Edit Mode

In edit mode, some of the Markdown text gets displayed correctly as the intended view, but you will see all the markdown symbols too, which gets messy, especially with things like links that show the entirety of the link markdown and URL.

Preview Mode

In preview mode, you only see the formatted text, so with a URL, you may only see the link text itself, which is selectable. Embedded media is displayed instead of the link to the media.

One workaround is to see as many panes of notes as you want so you can split the view and have one in edit mode and one in preview mode. This way, you can edit and write in one pane while seeing the fully formatted text displayed in the other.

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