Love love love obsidian. The tool is aesthetically pleasing, built-in vim mode surprisingly well (a few minor glitches with the cursor blinking) — but above all else, the plug-in community takes the cake.
Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "second brain." Previous note taking applications I've tried in the past (e.g. Zettlr, Bear) lacked the vibrant developer community that Obsidian has cultivated.
The biggest fundamental difference is that Logseq is an outliner whereas Obsidian is more flexible to any kind of text you throw at it. So if I am trying to write prose it feels constraining for everything to be a bullet.
That said Obsidian and Logseq are interoperable since they both run on a local folder of plain text files. Meaning you can switch over to Logseq for your outlining needs and use Obsidian for everything else.
(slightly biased since I helped on Obsidian 1.0, but I am a lover of all plain text tools)
I always feel like the term “outliner” misrepresents the approach to note-taking that tools like Logseq, (Org-)Roam, RemNote, etc. have chosen. I don’t really have/know a good alternative label, but there is so much more to it than just “outlining” your thoughts in a list of bullet points.
Often when I write down my thoughts this way, it is more like following associative threads. I focus on a particular thought and relate something to it, which now becomes my new focus. Then I defocus and focus on something completely different. Kind-of like these threads here on HN. I wouldn’t call this outlining, it is more like spawning local contexts, nested textual environments to think in.
This is something that I miss the most when working with linear text structures as in Obsidian. I know you can indent and fold indentations in/out, but for me it doesn’t feel natural the way it does in notebook apps that organize text in block-trees. I also cannot reorganize or reference those indentations easily. I feel liberated (in thinking) with those bullets rather than constrained, but of course it is a matter of personal preference and habits.
I like this approach too, just drilling down and fanning out as needed as you research or think.
I’ve used dozens of outlining and mind mapping tools from FreeMind to Logseq to OmniOutliner and more… But for me Obsidian, still wins because of the plugins. Check out the selection of outlining, link management (in particular link graphing) and crucially the refactoring plugins.
At the basic level the outlining plugins give you shortcuts keys to rapidly realign, reindent, fold and navigate a large tree of indented text, and when you combine that with the ability to take an entire level of that tree and just slice it out into its own document, leaning a link to the new document in its place (which other plugins can use to display an inline preview of that document) … it’s just amazing.
I've been using Obsidian for a while and have some plug-ins, but nothing like you're talking about. Would you make some specific recommendations on the plug-ins you're referring to?
Happy to share some of what's been working for me. Some of this is stuff I'm actively using, some of it hasn't quite made it into the "day to day use" yet, but I've been experimenting with. (Random personal advice: Never let your note taking tools feel like using them is work, that's the first step towards not keeping notes!)
- For fans of "outline workflows" Outliner is excellent. A whole bunch of outline/indented text movement and manipulation commands: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner
- For easily refactoring notes that are getting too large you want to have Note Refactor. It gives you tools to easily take blocks of text and quickly cut them out into new notes. Its not magic out of the box, but its a powerful tool you can use when building workflows with other plugins. https://github.com/lynchjames/note-refactor-obsidian
- Local images is another good one, working with online content can get messy when you copy notes and then want to be able to work any where you have Obsidian synched. I've got it on my Laptop, two desktops, phone and tablet... I want to carry as much of my related content with me so having an easy way to convert remote images to local copies is a big productivity boost when making notes about content from the internet. https://github.com/aleksey-rezvov/obsidian-local-images
- And a real force multiplier is adding https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands to your setup. It lets you run scripts and prompt for information and really invest time in procedural automation without having to build your own javascript plugins. So you can setup your system so that when you use the refactor to cut out a new note, the automations will trigger, ask you to give the note a new heading, tags, and you have a little script that checks last modified time of the folder tree of text files, and looks at the folder of the last modified time and asks you in that popup if you want to move the new note to the folder the note you cut it from is located in. Or anything else you can imagine using outside automation and scripting tools on your plain text markdown files.
These are just a start and if you haven't already browsed the plugins at https://obsidian.md/plugins I wholeheartedly recommend it, people are adding new cool things pretty often and other plugins add new functionality that makes them worth checking out if they were previously not something that you found interesting. I do a read through of the plugin list probably at least once every month or two just to see what's new, and more often if I'm experimenting with changes to my workflow.
org-roam or more generally org mode in emacs is less fixed in it's page structure than logseq. I think outliner is in fact the correct choice for logseq. You cannot move outside of the structure logseq provides for you for the files. org mode in emacs allows you to use any structure you want.
So I think while outliner might be misplaced for emacs it is not for logseq.
Oh I forgot that Org-Roam is different in this regard than Roam since it is based on Org-mode. I don’t have much experience with it, but you are right, it is less fixed like Obsidian.
However, I think Org-mode’s headings (*, **, …) have great nesting and folding capabilities that are more similar to the structure Logseq or Roam provide, but I don’t like having to create a heading hierarchy for my thoughts, so its not really the same.
My critique was more that the term “Outliner” does not really describe how I work with tools like Logseq and Roam, since I don’t really outline my notes/thoughts but use nested bullets more like a focus hierarchy that helps me to “anchor” them in the context of a previous note/thought (I hope this makes sense).*
I wanted to use logseq (I felt good about "Obsidian, but open source") but when I tried to find some text in a page I was writing it didn't work. I'm a total logseq noob but as far as I could tell I needed to install an extension/plugin to search through the page, which was weird. Plus, the plugin didn't work for me (I typed in the thing to search for, clicked "go find it" and nothing happened, I think - it's been a while and I didn't use it much).
I kinda boggled my mind that logseq wouldn't have a 'Find' feature for finding text in the page I'm editing.
Please tell me that I missed something obvious so that I can feel dumb for missing that obvious thing but happy that I can take another look at logseq :)
Ctrl+K or the macOS equivalent provides a universal search dialog with a toggle for page-only search.
The UX is extremely lacking, but it's open source, gaining steam, and they recently closed $4mil in funding so I expect it to massively improve over the next two years. Notably, page search should function without needing a dialog+overlay, and should support highlighting/navigating every match.
Cmd-K to find any line in your notes and Cmd-shift-K to find any line in your page. Starting with 0.8.3 there is also a native find-in-page feature, https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/Find%20in%20page, which can search anything that is visible including results of queries
Pretty sure search works, used it mang times. Anyway the major logseq power from my point of view is the ability to tag every bullet point, and then query it. Granted I never needed to write a query, I just search for the tag and find all references to it.
First note taking tools where I actually *read my notes*
Logseq strongly encourages you to represent all forms of information in the form of checklists or bullet points... which is great if you're making a grocery list but terrible for longform documentation.
I loved Obsidian to death, but felt a bit of friction. As nice as it was, I wasn't getting sucked in and resorted to writing my own bespoke bash program for organized note-taking.
Enter Logseq, and after a 20 minute learning curve, ideas just fly off of my fingertips. I reach for it daily. Can't recommend Logseq enough.
I’ve read similar narrative before on Reddit (while I was trying to decide Logseq vs Obsidian a few weeks ago). But I don’t get it.
When you open Logseq, you start with bullet points. Is that the only thing that pushes you to create more? In Obsidian, you can just start bullet points on your own.
Same experience here.
I was die hard fan of obsidian till I used Logseq.
Obsidian doesn't have proper outlining as they have another commercial app called Dynalist.
They probably don't want competition between their own products.
Lack of folders in logseq is a feature.
It force the user to follow zettelcasten style which results in serendipitous encounters with older notes.
You can do exactly the same with Obsidian, just don't create any folders and voila!
Nits aside, I use both and sometimes folder structure came in quite handy (like having separate notes for course modules and having 15 topics). I wouldn't remember even the names of these topics to come by when I need to.
But I agree also that the magic in Logseq happens more often than in Obsi (rediscovery). I think what contributes to it is the atomic nature of blocks as opposed to pages and daily scroll of all topics encountered recently.
I had the opposite experience with Syncthing + Logseq. The way Logseq is designed, refreshing the entire graph is a must before you even consider editing your pages in another device. I forgot to do it once and after some time editing my pages, I realized that I lost a good chunk of my notes from several days back.
Oh my that is beautiful. Just looking at the GIFs with the / shortcuts for TODO status, linking to headings using curly braces, the beautiful highlights on "dynamic" areas. I tried Obsidian and didn't feel the same "pull" to keep using it, will definitely try Logseq out.
I checked out logseq, and pdf internal linking is amazing! I tried to find the equivalent in Obsidian, but pdf highlights/annotations extensions on it do not seem to have the same functionality. I'll definitely look into switching to logseq maybe in the future if not now.
While I think it's an interesting metric, it wouldn't capture the utility of my notes for me (emphasis on "for me", since everyone's probably different when it comes to notes).
Often, the act of writing the note helps better commit what I'm writing to memory. At a super rough estimate I'd say that 80% of the utility of note-taking is the act of producing the note itself, and only 20% of the utility is being able to refer back to specific facts.
That's definitely an exponential distribution. I'm a data scientist and I keep going back to a few key notes over and over and adding little bits. I tried to track things like ideas, tasks, and just journaling, but it just didn't fit right. It's unbeatable for my work related stuff though, and the key things for me were mathjax support and being able to paste screenshots directly onto the page. Fantastic product.
I agree there is value in just creating the note and distilling your thoughts even if you never revisit.
I'm not quite sure how I'd use the metric or if I'd use it to purge notes.
Searchability or recall can be a problem sometimes though, so "searches where I had no results or didn't visit anything" could be interesting.
Especially if I try searching later and find a note answering my question with bad "SEO".
Another idea I had was to make a Firefox extension that searches my notes and displays results before search engines since I reflexively search things in browser sometimes.
Oh, I 100% agree that there would be some kind of exponential falloff in which notes I go back to.
I just, again, for me personally, gain a lot of value from writing the notes even that I never go back to revisit.
So for me personally, the metric is interesting, like I said, but doesn't capture "how useful" a note is, because I have most of my utility outside of that use case.
1. I have it committed to memory.
2. I never needed it.
I have no way to discern whether either (1) or (2) will happen as far into the future as you care to specify; so it's mostly a moot point. In any case, I will sometimes just do random walks through my notes, wikipedia style, and find a lot of value in it.
Would be interesting to see how to capture this metric within Obsidian. I can imagine a similar metric: "elapsed time between note created and first time note opened." This data might help answer whether or not we are creating notes that are never revisited, an opportunity to purge the note itself.
I'm very very very disorganized by nature. Some people I know seem to be organized at birth. All the systems I put are really just mechanisms are really aspiration, ways for me to emulate their behavior, keep me accountable, and gamify it a bit.
That's awesome. Personally I found that I end up spending too much time on configurations and tinkering with the notes, so I end up going for the simplest system I can.
There it is! I am with you 100%. All of these massive plugin systems are a giant time suck. You spend soooo much time just setting things up only to forget the little stuff you need to do when something breaks. Every plugin I have installed requires some level of configuration. The more feature rich plugins (with no surprise there) are basically apps in and of themselves.
I keep hearing praise about this being a simple app, but I found it to be very fiddly if you want more than just markdown rendered in your editor. Lots and lots of time to get things working/configured.
Sync has been a massive PITA for me with Obsidian. Unless you are willing to pay, there is going to be pain there eventually. I had similar problems with OneNote, but those sync problems have mostly disappeared. Further, OneNote's handwriting experience is really good. It is very easy to export all notes from OneNote to Markdown with Pandoc, so while I may be "locked" in, I can "get out" if I want.
Edit: So thank you Obsidian for helping me convert my notes in OneNote to markdown to try you out! I now have a verified escape hatch if I should ever need it. However, I am not sticking around. Too much trouble for little stuff and OneNote is just a really good all arounder.
even better, it asks you to type a specific vim command before enabling it. Great "here there be dragons, are you a dragonslayer?" UX choice, and fun easter egg too ;)
Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "second brain." Previous note taking applications I've tried in the past (e.g. Zettlr, Bear) lacked the vibrant developer community that Obsidian has cultivated.
Hats off to the founder and the Obsidian team!
[0] - https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com/p/stop-zettelkas...