Moving your notes · Updated October 6, 2026

Move your notes out of Obsidian

Your vault is already a folder of Markdown files, so there is nothing to export. The work is in the few things Obsidian writes that other Markdown apps don’t read.

Why people leave

Obsidian got the important thing right: your notes are a folder of Markdown files, and you can walk away with them any time. People who leave usually want less, not more: fewer plugins to tend, a mobile app that doesn’t feel like the lesser half, sync without the $4 a month for Obsidian Sync or the fiddliness of doing it another way, and a plain editor rather than a system. None of that is a complaint about the files. It is the few things Obsidian writes into them that other apps don’t read, and this guide is about those.

What is Obsidian’s own

Standard Markdown, Obsidian reads and writes as anything else does. Its own additions are what to look for:

• Wikilinks: [[Note]], [[Note|shown text]], [[Note#Heading]]. Other apps show them as text in brackets.
• Embeds: ![[picture.png]] for a picture, ![[Note]] for a note inside a note. The first is the one that matters: without converting it, your pictures don’t show elsewhere.
• Callouts (> [!note]), which elsewhere are quotes with the [!note] left in; highlights (==text==); comments (%%hidden%%), which become visible; block IDs (^abc123 at the end of a line) and links to them.
• Plugins’ blocks: a Dataview query is a code block that produces nothing elsewhere; a Canvas is a .canvas file; a Base is a .base file. None of these has a plain-Markdown form.

Properties are ordinary YAML front matter and travel well: Skysa Notes reads title, tags, and dates under created, updated, date created or date modified, and leaves every other property alone. Tags written inline as #tag are plain text elsewhere.

The easiest way

1. Copy the vault folder somewhere safe first.
2. In Settings › Files and links, turn off Use [[Wikilinks]] and set New link format to Relative path to file. From now on Obsidian writes standard links. It does not change the ones already written.
3. Install the Link Converter community plugin, set its final link format to Relative, and run its command to convert the whole vault’s links to Markdown. Links and embeds alike become [Note](Note.md) and ![](attachments/picture.png). Open a note with pictures to confirm.
4. If you want each note’s dates inside it, install the Linter plugin, turn on its YAML Timestamp rule, which writes date created and date modified from the file’s own dates, and set its format to something any app can read, such as YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ssZ, before running it on the vault. The default format spells the date out in words, which other apps don’t parse.
5. Search the vault for [!, == and %% and decide what to do with each. The vault folder, minus .obsidian, is your notes.

With a terminal

obsidian-export writes a copy of the vault as CommonMark, resolving wikilinks and embeds (an embedded note is written in place), honouring an .export-ignore file with gitignore syntax, and leaving the original untouched. The destination folder must exist.

# A prebuilt binary is on its releases page; or, with Rust installed:
cargo install obsidian-export
mkdir ../notes
obsidian-export . ../notes

It supports most of Obsidian’s flavour, not all; add --frontmatter never if you want the properties stripped, and copy with cp -p or rsync -a if the files’ own dates matter to you.

What to check afterwards

• Pictures. The one thing that must be right. Open a few notes with images in another app.
• Links to headings and blocks. Note.md#heading works in some apps; a link to a ^block works in none but Obsidian.
• Callouts, highlights, comments are still there as text. That may be fine.
• Canvas, Bases, Dataview. Export what they showed, if you need it; the files themselves won’t open elsewhere.