I like Obsidian, too, having recently switched over from 9 years of OneNote (the fact that there's a tool to import my OneNote notes helped a lot).
The most important tip for getting started with Obsidian, in my mind, is to absolutely ignore all of the Obsidian "power users." I'm 99% convinced that no one actually uses zettelkasten seriously, but even if so, it's overkill for when you're just checking out the app. And, please, don't buy one of these $500 Obsidian courses. It's just not necessary.
With that said, I have started extending out my own setup, and one of the plugins that I like the most is DataView, which allows me to automatically link to other notes, or pull in tagged text, or to-do items. It has allowed me to really take daily recaps reliably for the first time ever, because, even if I have nothing to write, I at least have a repository of what I was doing for that day.
1. Obsidian imposes its own take on Markdown. For instance, why can't we disable "indent using the tab key"? It's so annoying to accidentally indent/quote text while pressing tab to do something like "accept autocomplete suggestion". Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/...
2. I had to install tens of plugins to give Obsidian the features I needed, which felt too hacky and unstable in the long term.
3. I don't want to learn a new set of keyboard shortcuts for simple things like expand/collapse the sidebars. You can customize lots of things but at that point, why not stay in your IDE (e.g., VSCode) and simply add Vim Wiki extenions?
> Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring
This is my main worry about choosing Obsidian for the long run. The devs seem very opinionated about a system that is meant to be customizable to each user's workflow.
Their Vim implementation does not support setting hard line breaks, making modal editing a little funky (every paragraph is just one long line and any action working on a line will work on the entire paragraph, such as "dd").
Came from Vim-Wiki (and Org-mode and some other short-lived note-taking systems) and I think the plugin hell of Vim/Emacs (or VS Code) is much worse than Obsidian. You can get by without any addons in Obsidian as it's built to be a notetaking system first, not a general text editor. You can't do the same with Vim (hence needing "Vim-Wiki" plugin).
I've also noticed that Obsidian hides text automatically inside of <div> or other HTML elements if they contain the property "markdown='1'", thereby blocking you from writing perfectly valid HTML inside of a Markdown file which was designed to be HTML-compatible.
Attributes dont need to be in the spec, if I add an attribute mycustomattr="xyz" and it changes how the document is rendered, that probably violates the HTML spec.
Yeah, I wasn’t super-thrilled with their response. OTOH, I eventually came back to using it, my (arguably justified) snit in that thread notwithstanding.
I kept trialing alternatives like VimWiki, Joplin and Logseq, but everything else is even quirkier. Org-mode is about the only thing that seemed really competitive, but since I’m not an emacs person there’s a big ramp there for me. Plus, as with most of the alternatives, that loses Markdown compatibility entirely.
Re learn new hotkeys, that’s actually not been a huge issue. Most of them simply aren’t mapped by default, which is its own pain. I did a lot of bouncing between VSCode hotkey lists and the Obsidian hotkeys UI to align shortcuts. At least they do enable you to remap most every UI action. I haven’t used the built-in vim bindings, but supposedly they also work fairly well, fwiw.
For now, Obsidian + Obsidian Tasks just does way too good a job for my work journaling for me to completely ignore. Plugins do work around most of the more questionable behavior, though it does sometimes make for an inconsistent experience.
> I don't want to learn a new set of keyboard shortcuts for simple things like expand/collapse the sidebars. You can customize lots of things but at that point, why not stay in your IDE (e.g., VSCode) and simply add Vim Wiki extenions?
This is what I used to do with Vim, but I had two problems: (1) I would often forget to `git push`, (2) I wanted to easily access notes on my phone.
Importing into Obsidian and paying for Sync made both issues go away.
Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understand the passion for our tools!)
#3 I'd likely be using my IDE (nvim) as well, except that I rely a lot on media and attachments for my work. And I just like to have dashboard/Kanban style views of things.
In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments.
I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say.
All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports.
Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed.
As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over.
But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.
Since the time of that thread, the dev team has grown, and WhiteNoise has joined the team officially in charge of bugs. I don't know the full systems they use in the background.
But I think I can definitely see where some of the burden of sorting and cleaning things up (following bug templates, or avoiding duplicate feature requests, etc.) could be abstracted away from the users, so that even if they can't be guaranteed any followup, they at least don't get the experience of being instantly shot down, just because we're trying to organize a busy forum.
For example, I really like how Linear App takes feedback. They have a button in the app, with a simple text-field prompt, "What if...". All the sorting and prioritizing is invisible to the users, but then somehow they even send a courtesy email to users after a related change has been made. That might be a function of team size vs. userbase size. No idea.
Definitely some room to improve. I'll pass this conversation on to the team, thanks.
Off the top of my head, things like "Paste URL into Text" (which VSCode Markdown supports out-of-the-box), an extension for being able to define shortcuts for heading 1, 2, etc., connecting to Zotero, converting links to Markdown before exporting PDF, exporting PDF using pandoc templates, "Zoom" in sections while hiding the other sections (it was a neat extension), etc.
As a heavy OneNote user, I was stymied by Obsidian for a long while as the mental models are different. OneNote is best thought of as an actual paper notebook, where pages can inserted, re-arranged to one’s liking, images pasted into the page, etc.. Obsidian is better thought of as a sophisticated overlay to the file system. It’s ultimately more powerful than OneNote, but does have some frustrating limitations for the OneNote/Notion/Scrivener user as not being able to manually sort notes. For now I’m using both but ultimately will switch to Obsidian as it develops (hopefully) further.
As a OneNote person for two years now, how do you deal with the added friction of linear notes in Obsidian (or any other plaintext based tool)?
In OneNote I can just dump down anything literally anywhere (because each page is an infinite canvas). It feels as easy as having a pen and random free papers. But with my notes increasing, I do want to have some way to manage this data which OneNote fails at. I can do basic text/OCR search but that's it. There is no linking etc. All note management is manual.
I usually search for an actual open source OneNote alternative (with easy jottable infinite canvases) every 6 months or so. Obsidian has added Canvases but they are definitely not a OneNote alternative at the moment.
I never understood the appeal of infinite canvas. Something about it makes me feel like I'm not in full control of my notes/documents. I like it when the information is clearly structured.
I don't use the width of the canvas, but what I do love/appreciate is the way I can click anywhere and start writing. It feels as easy as pen and paper. I can go in any direction.
It doesn't have to be infinite canvas in practice, just allow enough width and length to let you put down your cursor anywhere and start writing/pasting images or whatever you wish.
I use OneNote at work, but it's just for mostly plain text and a few images pasted here and there. However, OneNote seems to get really flaky when the Notebooks themselves become too big or have too many PDF attachments inserted.
I ultimately just didn't end up missing it as much as enjoying what I gained. I do miss how in OneNote I could keep a list of study questions next to the notes, but it's okay that I don't have it in the end, because I'm taking better notes in Obsidian.
I tried zettlekasten and found I just didn't use it enough to justify the effort involved.
Instead I just have an org-mode folder that I dump documents in. I search across them with Deft in Emacs. Sure, the links between documents can be incredibly useful to some people, but I've found I'm more chaotic than that.
I’ve written off Zettelkasten. It’s not for me. It seems to be optimized for turning notes into publications, but that’s not my own goal behind taking notes. For me, good ol’ wiki style interlinking is much more useful (and vastly easier). I use the “Map of Content” ideas to have a few quick indexes, like “Current work projects” or “orders from restaurants we like”, but that’s about the most formal organization I do.
If I had a career in writing, I might seriously consider Zettelkasten. But even then, I’d be cautious with its output. I’ve seen some results that looked like it was great for shoving words onto paper, so long as you don’t worry about the quality of the end result.
I do write for a living, and I found Zettelkasten too high friction to be worth using. Plus, as Cal Newport has argued, it solves the wrong problem. The whole pitch of ZK is that you can jump into your notes and quickly generate new ideas. But experienced writers and researchers rarely struggle to come up with ideas—rather, the real challenge is execution.
My guess is ZK is used primary as a very complex and tedious form of procrastination. Writing the book is hard, so instead, one can endlessly tweak and tune their notes and feel like progress is being made.
I have read a bit about Zettelkasten and watched a video explaining it, and to me it feels like a pretty random collection of mostly good ideas on organizing information.
Esoteric and personal are both adjectives I didn't find before to describe what Zettelkasten represents. That kind of thing that you need to visit again and again until you realize it doesn't fit to your own way of thinking
I just use "search" on my Obsidian notes, and that's enough for me. Instead of zettelkasten, I would prefer to have AI hooked to my notes, which I can query like "Find my notes about Symfony request life cycle". I don't think it would be a life changer, just a nice addition.
100% agree. The barrier to using Obsidian can seem intimidatingly high before jumping in. I tried and failed a few different systems before I just started using the daily notes as scratch pads. From there, I figured out more and more slowly over time. I’m now at a kind of system that works for me, but probably won’t work for anyone else.
Obsidian has the sama problem as Bullet Journaling does.
It's really simple and not complicated unless you want it to be, but then you watch a video about one Mega User who is really into the System and get demoralised by the amount of crap and whizbangs you see.
Why would anybody get demoralized? Does the tool get the job done or not?
Your goals are not the same as the person making a Youtube video. Nobody's going to put down "Highly Proficient with Obsidian" on their resume in hopes of it giving them an edge in the job search.
The problem is that in niche tools / gear / whatever, the message 'you must do it this way' plays to the curiosity and concerns of new users looking to get into something.
A cottage industry of people have thus sprung up around providing this content, and recommendation algorithms and search results wind up being dominated by this content.
For a new user who's just heard about something, the path is often straight to this content, which then leads some to bouncing off of it because it seems too daunting.
One thing I appreciate about Ryder Carroll‘s original explanation about bullet journals, was that it was pretty simple. It seems it was the Pinterest and other such social media folks who complicated it.
I use a semi-bullet journal method in my Obsidian notebook for work, but it’s even more basic than what Ryder Carroll outlined and I don’t care that much. Not caring is extremely helpful.
I have a similar thing, I was a semi-regular BuJoer some years ago but then I noticed that even though I did enjoy the physical action of writing stuff down - I forgot to write things down eventually. The time from idea to finding my notebook and the correct place to write something down was too long.
Now my system is geared towards minimal friction from "crap, I need to remember this" to actually storing it in Obsidian.
Currently I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that activates when I double tap the key on the left side of 1 on my keyboard, which then will activate Obsidian (or start it if needed) and brings it to the front with a QuickAdd dialog where I can write down whatever I was thinking about.
QuickAdd will then append it to an Inbox file with a timestamp. I might take a look at it later or maybe not, but at least it's written down _somewhere_ =)
I was doing something similar for a particular work function where I had to log things constantly throughout the day. However, since Obsidian simply uses text files, I used a keyboard shortcut to bring up a text prompt, which then appended the text to the correct file (which was based on the current date. This way it didn't matter if Obsidian was open or not, it would all get logged. In theory, I could have switched to a different text editor to manage the notes and kept by automation in place, I like that flexibility.
On the Mac I was using Hammerspoon for this. On Windows it would have been something like AutoHotKey.
yeah exactly. The problem is that the Mega Users are the ones who are most likely to share their system. People who say "I just use X as a notepad" aren't as likely to share.
In case it helps anyone: I use Obsidian as a notepad. I put in text in notes and sometimes put those notes in some folder if it seems to make sense. It works great and the only plugin I added for editing is a latex helper. You don't need a system or many modifications to be a happy Obsidian user.
Agreed on the power-user stuff and the courses. I use Obsidian in a simple way, but it's nice that the extensibility and the community is there.
Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
As mentioned elsewhere, users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. I don't think most of those drive-by open-source commenters have thought about the work that goes into running an open-source project.
In other words, on some theoretical plane I'd like Obsidian to be an open-source native app, but in reality those things haven't bothered me at all. The app is as simple as I want it to be, as complex as I need it to be, and it's regularly improved in a thoughtful way.
> Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
VS Code feels fast to me (on linux), but perhaps I'm just slow. I remember when VS Code came out, I was surprised at how responsive it felt, compared to Atom which felt like typing with a molasses membrane keyboard.
Actually, I realize now that I'm using Codium with lots of things disabled that made it less responsive to me (like code completion), so I'm probably an outlier.
You can paste images now as of the latest version; it was driving me crazy as well. Even in older versions you can drag an image in but that was an extra step.
> Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
Dude, VSCode is a freaking IDE, running all sorts of processes in the background (at least one terminal, language servers, type checkers, linters and formatters, possibly extensions, etc.) whereas Obsidian is just a text editor.
> running all sorts of processes in the background (at least one terminal, language servers, type checkers, linters and formatters, possibly extensions, etc.)
That's a terrible excuse.
Your terminal is a separate process and should not affect how the editor itself feels. The language server exists out of process. The linters / type checkers exist out of process. (Or at least shouldn't block the main interaction/GUI thread) If those things make editing slow, either the design or the implementation is bad.
Sublime text runs the same stuff for me and works much faster than vscode. No excuses.
This is an example for context. We've got 3 cases: Obsidian (non-ide/electron/fast), vscode (ide/electron/slow-ish), sublime (ide/non-electron/fast). My point was that neither the electron not the ide part is an excuse for vscode not being responsive, because we've got counterexamples for each.
Not arguing with that. In discussions about Electron, there are often comments along the lines of "Electron apps can be fast if done right, just look at VS Code" and that just doesn't hold true for me.
> users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me.
Completely agree. Not everything needs to be open-sourced. If I'm looking for a framework/library to build something upon, sure, I'll prioritize open-source. But -- and this may be a hot take -- for a consumer-oriented software, sometimes a great vision trumps community development.
"I'm 99% convinced that no one actually _understands_ zettelkasten"
Fixed that for you ;)
For real, anyone interested should go read the original book (How to Take Smart Notes[1]) and you learn that it's not about creating backlinks between your notes (that's just a wiki or personal knowledge base). It's about capturing ideas inspired by your reading, etc. and linking them other ideas.
Yes, building your own personal knowledge base can be very powerful, but that's something different.
That was one of the worst books I’ve ever read. I went into it expecting practical advice and found mostly vague hyperbolic promises of the magical benefits. If the hypothesis was that this note taking method produces lower effort, higher quality output, then the author either didn’t use the system or the book is evidence against its effectiveness
Thank you. Those are my thoughts exactly. The title was wrong: it should've been "Why to Take Smart Notes". I'd already decided I was interested before I ever bought the book and I wish it hadn't wasted 3/4 of pages trying to further convince me. I finished it and still had no idea how to practically implement the magical system it described.
I've also never read a book so packed with redundancy.
I kind of understood Zettelkasten only after I implemented it with slip notes in analogue form. I had read How to Take Smart Notes, zettelkasten.de, watched several videos, etc., but I only got more confused. Then I read Antinet Zettelkasten, by Scott Scheper, implemented the system on paper, and finally I understood the system. Now I could go back to Obsidian and implement my Zettelkasten in Obsidian again in a way that would be much more straightforward than what I had tried the first time (and honestly, sometimes I think of doing that because of the convenience of digital). But I enjoy writing on paper and using my fountain pens.
Zettelkasten was created for a world which didn't have computers.
People are cargo-culting it today without thinking if it still makes sense.
Zettelkasten author would not have created it today, because it makes no sense when you have much more efficient ways to index/search information with a computer.
What many people ignore from Ahrens description of Luhmann's Zettelkasten, is that it isn't an indexing system to find pre-existing knowledge/texts. It is the place where he stored his own insight, his own summaries, his own formulation of ideas he found somewhere. The book quotes Luhmann even before the table of contents with "One cannot think without writing." Strictly speaking, this is obviously not true. Metaphorically speaking it is something that many proficient authors have concluded as well. They need to write in order to make progress. And then Luhmann used this one space of notes, the Zettelkasten to work on all his publications. This allowed him to find shared ideas between different projects of him.
I've got the impression that many tried Zettelkasten as the one true note taking system just dumped stuff they found in blog articles into pages in their storage system for later retrieval. Nothing is wrong about that, but that is not Luhmanns idea of Zettelkasten.
Me too, one of my favorite pieces of software (I've been using Obsidian for a few years now). The fact that there are courses is hilarious, but anyways. I found it enjoyable to start from the absolute bare install and add notes like a regular to-do. Eventually adding up additional plugins that you need. My use case is daily software engineering notes, and I have a simple button/command that creates a new note for the day in a specific format. I love that there isn't so much extra junk that came along with the big note taking apps.
Other than that, I have vim mode and a few other things, but not much. Themed it to match the rest of my setup and terminal, it feels like an easy extension to the workflow. I have a few folders broken out for commands and constants I like to refer back to (and can search for!) Maybe a neat one-liner. Plenty of code snippets.
No affiliation, just a happy user for over a year now.
If you take kindle highlights when you read, the https://github.com/hadynz/obsidian-kindle-plugin plugin is amazing for auto generating source files with those highlights in (and other templated sections you wish to include in a review).
It started with Notion and Roam. There's a whole cottage industry of courses designed to make you "master" these tools. A lot of their users are in school or university, and given that the marketing of these tools is all about improving productivity, I can see why those courses sell.
One tip I’d have is to go easy on plugins. One can try to explores what are available, but when committing (to have it enabled and relying on it) be cautious about its implications on performance and startup time (there is a setting that can show you plugin load time at every startup.)
And as you scales the number of plugins and files, test it on multiple platforms.
P.S. I learn this the hard way that each time I open Obsidian on iPhone (14 Pro which is not slow) it will hangs indefinitely without being able to open a file. On iPadOS it is ok albeit slow to start. I suspect it is related to having too many files (including git and git sub modules) inside and relying on iCloud sync. But basically I tested out things works great on Mac without constantly checking how well it works on iPhone and then now I’m in a situation it’s difficult to roll back some of the decisions I made.
This is good advice for anything that supports plugins. Web browsers, VS Code, whatever else. Plugins can be useful, but too many is almost always a problem.
iCloud removes files from local storage randomly and downloading them again is very slow and gets stuck often.
I think that is the main reason why obsidian hangs at the start on the iPhone.
I have not yet figured out, how to keep iCloud files reliably on local storage on iOS. It seems independent of free storage and file size and is driving me mad.
Very sad that Apple does not succeed in syncing files. The same issue was there with iTools, mobile me, and now iCloud.
People using Obsidian Sync said it solves these issues (I guess by using a database rather than directly via file I/Os.)
There are other solutions via plugins too. E.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, or GitHub. There was a post earlier in HN which is a reimplementation of Obsidian Sync, but it seems their reversed engineering uncovered something not secure there and Obsidian soon made a patch breaking that. There might be workarounds to fix it, but I haven't closely follow it.
When I have the time to do the refactoring and cleaning, I will probably choose one of these alternatives (or even an alternative of Obsidian if there are better solutions for me.)
That’s what I was alluded to when I mentioned GitHub. I have that app, but I already foresee that workflow won’t work for me and my wife. So I didn’t do it that way.
But the way you say it seems to mean it no longer work?
You definitely can't just jump into zettelkasten, but it is actually used in various modified forms. I've been doing so for years and know of a number of others that do as well.
Yeah, most of the academics I know have a pile in OneNote or mountains of paper notebooks. I don't know if zk is good for research tbh, but I do think you can take some ideas from it. I personally use "bullet journaling" + a modified zk method.
I'd be curious to hear what the "highly productive" academics you know use.
OP here. Absolutely! I didn't want to go too in-depth into plugins because I wanted to emphasise Obsidian's basic features but DataView is also a plugin that I love!
I don’t use Obsidian, but I use wikilinks in markdown.
Recently I wrote a lightweight alternative to Dataview, which renders directly into the markdown itself. It’s a lightweight standalone script that embeds any references and builds those “recaps” in a more portable way.
More specifically, Obsidian shows me, at this moment, 1382 plugins available from the app itself. Some more are probably not available there. And an insanely large amount of them also seems to be already broken, abandoned or having a rather poor quality or just duplicating each other's features with a slight twist in flavor.
I guess, it's now big enough, that having some pre-selection of high quality-plugins accessible from within the app, would make sense.
It feels like WordPress. Core product is solid but minimal in features, expectation is for plugin developers to provide the rest. WordPress was FOSS though.
I was unaware of this until a few weeks ago, so I'd like to raise awareness for anybody who it affects: Obsidian is not FOSS, and purchasing a license is required for any work that generates revenue at a for-profit company of 2 or more people.
Obsidian looks awesome to me, and for a long time I've been thinking about adopting it, but this licensing issue caused me to back away and look for alternatives. I'm not suggesting that paying for software is a bad idea, but the free distribution of it led me to believe that it is FOSS, and it is not.
It's what caused me to pick it. Selling usage for commercial use is a smart move, and I want to ensure the original developers are incentivized to keep working on the product.
Looks like it's still alive and kicking. I guess you're probably upset by a lack of updates or something - luckily upgrading to a paid plan would be a good way to incentivize whoever is developing it to continue working on it, at least at the margin.
Both Workflowy and Dynalist were treated as finished software for years. Workflowy did pick up again when it started losing customers.
Subscriptions do motivate ongoing development, but only if there's a threat to stop going or start incurring subscriber losses. Product software categories have different ratios of customers who buy subscriptions for the current utility vs the investment into future utility.
Long-term heavy Workflowy and later Dynalist user here. I am not upset that the developers started working on Obsidian instead, since I see Obsidian as the superior product, which has replaced both Workflowy and Dynalist for me.
I made the choice at the time I knew this, and preferred FOSS, but the alternatives just wasn’t as usable, so in the end I still chose this, partly because at least I still have complete control over the data (not true for some alternatives.
P.S. my comparison was done probably a few years ago and the landscape could have changed quite a bit. One solution I tried was a code extension that promised to do something similar. I thought it would be good as I use vscode all the time. Then I find out it is bad because exactly of that. Obsidian and the like is dedicated to notes taking so this single software is unambiguously for that task. In vscode there’s just too much other things going on as distraction.
While Obsidian may not be FOSS at all, my understanding is that in general needing to purchase a license is orthogonal to whether something is FOSS - correct?
If you cannot use the software however you wish (including for profit) then it is not Free Software. The developers can choose to not distribute the software to you unless you pay, and they can choose to provide support if you pay (which if you're making a profit from their software is a reasonable thing to pay for), but with Free Software the developers cannot decide how you use it once they have distributed it to you.
However, this becomes less significant when the applications are interoperable. If you ever stop using Obsidian, you can just grab your files and use another Markdown editor on top.
What I am wondering about is that although the basic files are markdown, some of the plugins might be proprietary. So that the part of the contents in the markdown files in effect creates a lock-in?
I would suggest editing and reading the markdown files in other editors to make avoid getting "locked in."
You certainly could create your own lock-in by making some unique workflow that requires a combination of plug-ins to function. The plugins are all third party, some of them are just annotating the existing markdown files, some are just visual.
My workflow isn't reliant on Obsidian's plugins, they just make stuff easier.
Like having a template for my Daily Note that also automatically includes all files tagged #todo using Data View. Or a few global shortcuts via Keyboard Maestro that open specific notes on Obsidian.
I could maybe whip up a similar system in a day on top of any editor that can render Markdown and handle links, but now I don't need to.
No, becasue the plugins are just JavaScript running against markdown that generally produce more markdown.
You might get a plugin that produces an image and that would "stop working"; but it hard for the JS to be locked down/etc.
I think it’s pretty likely that a lot of Obsidian users use it for their professional activity without paying.
Personally I haven’t considered it because of that. I have no use for a complex notes app in my private life, and there’s no way my employer would pay for the subscription.
> I have no use for a complex notes app in my private life
I thought so too, but then I noticed I was searching the internet for the same things over and over again. (Or asking it from GPT).
Then I started writing stuff down as I searched it, with a sentence or two of my own text + a few tags.
Now I can find stuff directly from Obsidian (or more like from the set of markdown files on my drive) instead of having to sweep the internet _again_ for the same thing.
That really belongs in the browser I think. Ideally we could just highlight the info we want to save, type a note, and the whole page gets saved offline as plain HTML, along with a markdown file that points to it.
When I already have access to the iCloud ecosystem, and Notes is excellent across iOS and macOS, I have never really seen much point in trying to use Obsidian.
The killer feature of Obsidian was the wikilinks, but now that other editors are getting that feature it is replaceable.
But the other killer feature is avoiding vendor lock-in. With some apps your notes are on their servers in an inscrutable data format, and some apps don't even let you export without paying.
With markdown notes on the other hand you can take your notes anywhere, sync them with git, dropbox, syncthing, etc.
You're not bound to obsidian, and your markdown notes format will always be readable, unlike many of today's formats! See [1] "LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"
I found that trying to sync (Windows Obsidian app «=» Android Obsidian app) just via a cable would get the files over fine, but would not produce usable results, at least not without a lot more fiddling that I wanted to do. I was hoping that we could simply transfer the folder structure over and just have it work, but no such luck.
Evidently it requires not only transfer, but some kind of transformation that they do in their cloud, and I'm not interested in another cloud subscription, particularly one so specific. (Happy to pay for the software & updates, just not to maintain the subscription and maintain the concern about another connection in the loop)
This was a couple years ago. Perhaps this has changed, or there's now a plugin to make such a bidirectional transfer work?
There is a popular method which I use. Syncing the vault between devices with Syncthing.
It reportedly causes problems if you edit the same file in two different places at the same time, it will generate a conflict when saving since the files won't match, doesn't affect me in my workflow (if I have access to my desktop I won't use it on my phone) but YMMV
Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.
You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.
I can highly recommend to use Git, the Obsidian Git plugin on Desktop and Termux on Android for syncing. Works great!
I have documented my setup here: https://github.com/davidkopp/termux-scripts/
I think it depends on what you use notes for. Just a scratchpad of random, mostly ephemeral ideas or simple folders? Notes is probably good enough.
Obsidian is designed for those people that want to minmax their note taking and find reasons to increase productivity by providing robust linking and search capabilities within any document. The photos in the OP are a good example of how many people use Obsidian.
That said, I'm not an expert (never used it personally), but that's how I understand it.
Mainly I prefer to be able to move my data around. I'm pretty sure those formats are really hard to you data out of. I know it doesn't seem like an issue now, but it might be if you ever decide to leave Apple's Ecosystem. On principle, I will not support systems that design their products to lock you into platforms.
I'm syncing using Syncthing, across three devices which are only syncing intermittently (home laptop, smartphone, work computer), and it appears to work fine. I cannot recall ever having a sync conflict. But then again, I'm hardly using any plugins in Obsidian.
I like Obsidian, but I really dislike the annoying design-philosophy which restricts my usage.
For example, it's not possible to open any random folder with it, you need to first register the folder as a vault, and then can open the vault. It also doesn't handle file links under Linux correctly. For whatever reason, any link pointing to a file inside the vault, disappears. Probably some flaw in their file system-abstraction, but that made several workflows for me impossible. And then there is the problem with every vault having its own isolated configuration. Basically, every vault has a folder ".obsidian" which contains all installed plugins, configurations and whatever. For any new vault, you need to link this folder, and for whatever reason they are still unable to let obsidian handle this automatically.
Overall, Obsidian is designed to have mainly one, or at least just a very low number of vaults. But considering how poor obsidian scales with file numbers, this is not working well for every one. For me, this removed any motivation to use Obsidian for everything.
Yeah it's just not meant to do that. That's how these apps have worked for over a decade. Obsidian is far from the first app to work this way. Notational Velocity, nvalt, Bear, Ulysses - they all worked that way IIRC.
Having used these apps for a while, your comment sounds like “these fishing poles really suck as tent poles. Sure, I made them work by tying twigs to them, but they really don’t seem designed well for my use case of holding my tent up.”
> That's how these apps have worked for over a decade.
No, because Obsidian is not one of "these apps". It's not using a database, nor an organisational layer to abstract away the data. It's directly reflecting the filesystem and changes in it, and they are even advertising it with this.
There is no technical reason for those limitations and bugs at all.
> It's not using a database, nor an organisational layer to abstract away the data.
Neither do the other apps I mentioned. They use folders of text files (sometimes with a proprietary database option). They are not general purpose editors meant to just open whatever random file you want on the drive.
Not true. I don't know about nvalt, but Notational Velocity Bear and Ulysses are all saving things in a local database and sync them to the cloud. And all have their own special view on the data too. There is no direct filesystem-access.
> They are not general purpose editors meant to just open whatever random file
I was talking about folders, not files. And not just any random file or folder, but obviously folders with files supported by Obsidian. Which BTW is also not limited to Markdown, thanks to the plugin-system.
And Obsidian is even supporting this, but only through the clunky Interface.
The killer feature for me is how extensible the software is made to be.
It truly lets you operate how you know best, making very few assumptions on how you use it.
Case in point: one of my favorite productivity plugins is a full-fledged Kanban board. It has deep integration into Obsidian features:
You might like my own note-taking app, Plume[1] that's built with Qt C++ and QML. You can integrate a Kanban board (with underlying Markdown text) right within your document[2]. It's still a work-in-progress, so this is why it's not featured yet on the website. But I'll finish implementing it very soon.
Unlike Obsidian, Plume's editor is a block-editor. That gives it the flexibility of Notion (to put advanced blocks like Kanban within the same document, to do drag & drop, etc.) with the performance of native apps by utilizing Qt C++ and QML (actually, Plume is 4x faster than the fastest native block editor on macOS - benchmarks on the website).
EDIT: Also, Plume is opinionated compared to Obsidian. That means much better ease-of-use at the cost of extensibility. I believe this is a trade-off worth to be making. I know first hand the intimidation of starting to work with something as complex as Notion or Obsidian. Plume is taking the block editor abilities of Notion with the familiar Apple Notes UX/UI while all the data is still plaintext underneath.
Plume is built on top of my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. Since Plume is based on Notes, I'll of course comply with the MPL license and release all existing files that were changed (and must stay MPL licensed).
But I recently discussed my reasoning to go close-source[2]. I've been working night and day (every day) converting 4 cups of coffee into code for the last 4.5 months to create Plume. I don't want to risk not being rewarded sufficiently for it. But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.
> But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.
Why withhold the remaining 1%? If you aren't so confident about your decision to open source, there's no need to commit to that decision now.
It's good that you are leaving the door open, but keep in mind that if some folks suddenly become successful with a service that can turn any GitHub repo into a nice looking SaaS, at the click of a button and for a super low fee, I'm pretty sure you'll be hesitant to open source all your hard work so it can harvested.
Because I'm very much still a believer in open source. And you're right, that's a horror scenario I want to avoid. I'll only open source it in a way that won't compromise the sustainability of my work. I've yet to come up with the right model, so until then, it will stay close source.
That being said, there are a great many apps with support for kanban-style boards that one could use before resorting to jira. Notion, for example, can do it.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on your favorite notetaking app OP, it's more than I've done for mine. I'm glad it works for you, the in-between applications trying to do notetaking is a pain.
I settled on OneNote because I'm always trying to capture context with my notes, codify my knowledge. Usually that means screenshots, handwriting, file copies, rarely video or audio embeddings.
I'm not going to try to convince you to use onenote, I want to instead complain about how this makes me boring and uncool, I see how trendy/popular the 'markdown files plus some goodies' notetaking applications are, but somehow I just don't get why those have enough ROI for my usecase, but still, my ego of not being a cool 10x developer who uses only certified organic grass-fed markdown files for my notes means I write rant comments like this.
Anyways, that's much ado about nothing on my part, again, thanks for sharing!
I love the way OneNote handles images - and the ability to include ink annotations. I wish there was a FOSS equivalent on Linux with a similar UI experience (Obsidian image handling is incredibly clunky), although the improved availability of various exporters from OneNote makes me less leery about committing to a proprietary database format and the risks associated with potential dataloss from a random bug or database corruption.
Speaking of boring, my entire life runs on Apple Notes. Everything to-dos, from family, kids, work, car, etc. I am just not sure how to migrate all of my 2,000 plus notes on to a new system. Plus with limited mobile data signal, I’m not sure if apps like Obsidian will work.
It’s Good Enough. Other tools have a million cool extra features, but in practice most of those just give me an excuse to screw around with the tool instead of work with the information inside it.
Notes isn’t flashy. Howver, it does all of the things I truly need such an app to do. So fine.
It also has the huge, free feature that I can share notes with my wife and we can edit them together. That came in handy over Christmas with our shared shopping list.
This might have been necessary at some point but if you sync your notes with icloud then they can be exported by logging into privacy.apple.com and clicking "request a copy of your data"
You can also get your icloud drive and photos this way.
I once had a job where I needed tons of notes on hundreds of clients and dozens of subjects. Detailed technical notes with screenshots and code snippets and names and birthdays and to-do lists.
I used OneNote. It worked brilliantly.
Until my notebook file corrupted.
Obsidian does the same job, but I miss the tabs. At least it’s all text files - no proprietary files to corrupt.
Lovehate OneNote; the easy paste and type and draw, all WSYWIG, is great. But it feels like a place to lose notes and never find them again. "OneNote for Windows 10" gives a weird hierarchy view of notebooks on the left, which slides into folders and pages; "OneNote" shows the same data as a dropdown list of notebooks at the top, tabs along the top for folders and tabs down the right for pages; why so different?
And it's obsessed with slurping your data up to Microsoft. If you want to stick with an older (unsupported) classic Desktop OneNote, you get a modal dialog box every. single. time. you. open. it. saying "Get more out of OneNote. A newer version of OneNote is now available for free. Go to www.onenote.com to download."
So you can programatically add and update content in pages in a shared team notebook, for example. And because it "runs" in MS cloud it supports things like asking the cloud services to "screenshot this webpage for me and add it as a note" and "extract content from this website and add it".
I mean, obsidian has support for audio and video out of the box, you can paste a screenshot into the note, and this all gets synced or published like normal
I wrote some generator to scrape a mandarin learning site to download all the audio files, sentences, etc into a markdown table for obsidian. My biggest complaint is that the "master vocab sheet" I made with hundreds (thousands?) Of words+sentences lags like hell, especially on android.
I'm also a fan of the excalidraw plugin, but it could be a bit more user friendly
Tl;Dr those features exist but IDK if their UX suffices for you
I believe it's a UX issue for most. Being able to float images to the side of text versus only being able to paste them linearly is a bigger deal than it sounds, organization-wise. And I know there's the canvases but I'm actually not a fan of those either. I don't want infinite in every direction, I just want the ability to move things around in the way that I want within a page-like document.
Honestly I like everything about obsidian except the markdown, but I know for many people that is it's big selling point.
Obsidian is a killer app and I've moved all my note taking to it over the past few months. The app is top notch in my opinion and with git integration you basically get a free Evernote with no restrictions and control over your data. I would say the one downside is that it's only "free" for those that have the technical knowhow to setup git sync. I tried converting my stepfather to using it but he didn't like that you had to pay for sync and wasn't technical enough to setup git integration and maintain it.
I actually do both. On one machine I keep it in the dropbox folder, and have Sync turned on.
Importantly, don't do this in multiple machines. Either:
1) Use Dropbox to store and keep your notes in sync across multiple machines
2) Use Dropbox as a backup on one machine, and use Sync on that and all other machines, but on the other machines, only point the Obsidian app to a copy of your vault outside of dropbox.
Otherwise, I could see you ending up in a horrible sync/dropbox update loop that would be a mess.
I do it this way so if Obsidian ever dies as a Sync service, I have a secondary backup. I might even eventually git a github repo for extraness.
Search for “Logseq data loss $current_year” and you’ll see horror stories of people who did everything exactly right and still lost a bunch of data from it. The most recent one I saw involved someone getting on a plane and thus losing Internet access to the paid syncing service. They did a bunch of work as they flew across the country. When they landed and the connection resumed, it synced everything back to the pre-takeoff state and erased their work.
Logseq is so very close to being exactly what I want, but there are way too many tales like that for my comfort. Yes, I could come up with something involving Git or rsync or whatever, but at that point I’ve conceded that I don’t trust the tool. And if I don’t trust the tool, I’m not going to use it.
This exact issue happened to me. I think it was related to crossing timezones during the flight. The experience has definitely made me think twice about adopting Logseq my primary notes tool.
Logseq is great, but it's another VC-backed app with non-interoperable files. The devs are further working towards lock-in by switching from files to a database.
You can also use Foam, a FOSS VSCode extension that is compatible with the basic markdown files from Obsidian. You can just open your vault in it and it will probably work if you're not using the fancy features in Obsidian.
Logseq really needs the ability to add YAML frontmatter (title:, date:) to the text files. Every text file created by Logseq has a starting bullet point (" - ") because it is an outline. But this makes it impossible to render the file as a web page in a Markdown-friendly CMS as they all require frontmatter at the start of the file.
It's been a while since I've used Logseq, but IIRC you can use yaml front matter. The very first block in the page is special and if you enter YAML there, the underlying markdown will have that yaml block without any bullet points. It renders just like the `foo:: bar` properties.
There was a limitation though that it didn't handle nested YAML. (Obsidian has the same problem I believe though I haven't tested recently)
While not my personal knowledge base yet, my personal use case for Obsidian is probably what gives me the most joy for it: as a Dungeon Master’s Worldbuilding Notes / Interactive DM Screen
Where I have used pen and paper in the past to track everything, Obsidian has supercharged my ability to sit down and flesh out my homebrew world in a way that was hard to do for myself prior. On top of the ease of writing and linking together notes, it also allows me to simultaneously tie in my pre-written lore with the session notes I take, so I don’t forget stuff that happens or that my players are supposed to pick up on.
I’ve also encouraged my players to use it, so that if they are taking notes on the right things, they can piece together stuff or make their own assumptions to inform how they choose to play.
It works for us, I get it’s not for everyone. But versus my old DM Binder in OneNote, it works perfectly for my needs!
On a similar, yet separate note, I’ve found the folder/note structure to be conducive to learning new TTRPG rules and essentially having my personal SRDs for different games (currently chunking my way through the Shadowrun 6e SRD and making my own notes or expansions on it to make it make more sense).
It has a lot there, and not every DM needs everything in here. However, I love this resource as another way to understand all the different things you could do with and without plugins.
So the author is keeping notes in a flat hierarchy and then using the graph.
He stated that the goal is "greater understanding," and then he just (in all honesty) states that the nice graphical topology represents my learning journey and keeps me motivated.
That is exactly the problem: motivation and a history of learning do not always lead to "greater understanding." On the contrary, I find that our 'notes' are often transient while our internal understanding morphs subtly yet swiftly (especially when learning something new).
That is why I think 'organic linking' works better for very large AND more definitive content. Wikipedia is the best example.
For personal use, I prefer more structure. The outliner/database combo (like logseq) is the best tool for that.
And Frankly as long as I can easily download my data in a readable format, I'm OK with any tool. It does not have to be built as plain text files.
I often hear of people using Obsidian or other feature-ful not taking and task organization apps creating PKMS (personal knowledge management systems) in then. They often state that linking things together, categorizing and organizing them well, and using appropriate tools to help view these associations that it results in... "realizations", or "understandings"? But I've yet to see anyone mention a concrete example of what they mean by this.
I can use my imagination to come up with some potential examples, but I'm curious these conclusions actually often occur or if people are just chasing some idea, when in reality they just get enjoyment from the organization process.
Either way, I use Obsidian lightly and am trying to refine how I use it, but I'm definitely not "there" yet. I mostly enjoy having a personal wiki basically of any information that I've researched or need to keep on hand somewhere. Main downside I've run into is that I'm not a huge fan of the layout / UI (maybe there's plugins for that) and tables are horrendous in it (I know they just added an update for them recently but I've already offloaded my table-style data elsewhere and I don't plan on bringing it back).
Btw, I also like the CEO's[1] writing and philosophy. I think he is also active here on Hacker News. One such is “File over app”[2] which I have sent to quite a few friends, kids, to read and think over it.
If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.
I prefer Logseq. It does not need plugins for basic things (PDF annotations). And is completely opensource with transparent development on Github. And I find its workflow much better.
Obsidian is commercial closed source app with subscription. Free for personal use only, commercial license is $50/year. I am not going to build my PIM around proprietary tool with subscription!
> I am not going to build my PIM around proprietary tool with subscription!
If your concern is about the lack of a clear migration path, Obsidian vaults are just folders with markdown files, which can be used with absolutely anything, you can literally use them in Emacs or VSCode if you want. The most popular PDF annotation plugin is AGPL-3 licensed and its format is also transparent so you can migrate to something else.
I'm saying that because I actually tried. There are Obsidian and customizable markdown modes/plugins for both Emacs and VSCode. My notes are usually cross-referenced, have pictures, occasional Mermaid diagrams, and are often heavy on math and code.
> markdown has tons of tiny implementation details. And I can not use PDF annotation plugin in Emacs
The same can be said about any other open format, I guess. There's no free lunch, you're always locked in by the implementation/workflow details, and have to write actual code (or use the code written by someone else) to migrate off to a different tool. The point is to not be locked by the format obfuscation or the storage.
I have text notes that go back to 1997, PDF annotation notes back to 2003. I use PDF annotations for books, articles and webpages (save to PDF). About 70 gigabytes of annotated PDFs at this point.
I need to be absolutely sure PDF annotation tool will be around in a year 2050! Obsidian may withdraw their subscription offer at any time! Or raise subscription to $10000 per year (someone here says much higher price would be a steal!). I will always be able to run Logseq PDF annotator! Maybe in virtual machine. Or I will patch it (I have source code!!!). I have control over it!
And I really really hate fiddling with plugins. I was never much of Vim/Emacs guy for this reasons (prefer integrated IDEs such Idea). Logseq just works without setting up dozens of plugins and scripts. I use vanilla version with two plugins (video timestamp annotations and extra theme).
If you don't need the extensive extension library of obsidian and want an open source tool, I would advise for Joplin. Tthe philosophy of logseq is completely different of obsidian (and joplin), being centered on lists instead of documents
Joplin having data in a db is a non-starter for me. The flat-file nature of Logseq makes it much easier for me to script/mine/garden my digital garden.
I want my data checked into git, and directly accessible. I don't feel like custom schemas and database drivers, as a user, do anything but make the operational loop painful.
I can quickly use any mdast library/toolkits and some terrible shell scripts to make anything possible in moments.
I guess it depends the person, dealing with sqlite + python doesn't need dependencies or custom drivers and is easy to do/easier to manage for me than bash scripts
But rather than having a self explanatory markdown & flat file, now I have to start learning about the schema & making specific tools (in my preferred language) for manipulating Joplin's schema.
Suddenly I'm digging through 20 different technic specs to decode what data is where, how it works, and what I can do to it. Want to edit history? This is the best help you'll get, pray it's adequately technical to expedite you to your purpose: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/dev/spec...
As I began with, I struggle to imagine anything that generates anywhere near as much user agency as flat files and markdown. Having boring common data & systems lets me apply portable skills I already have, rather than having to skill up in some particular product's own ecosystem.
Logseq is journaling app with graphs. Notes are not organized in folders, but tags. I find journaling much better. I never procrastinate deciding into what category/folder/doc notes should fit. I just put everything into journal and fluently refactor as time goes.
Take bullet point, and move it to new page. Or extract all mentions of tag into single page. There are some basic hotkeys and commands.
Refactoring is perhaps strong word, more like mouse dragging and copy&paste. It just feels like refactoring code. I can move things around without worrying something disappears or gets forgotten. I can also leave things half finished, without negative effects on readability and discoverability.
Wait, really? I thought it was going to be like $300, $50 would be a steal for the ability to use the Templater plugin to generate all of my business reports from YAML.
On desktop: Nvim with some markdown plugins plus Goyo
On mobile: Obsidian
Syncthing for sync (though previously I've Dropbox as well for the same)
On desktop I find Obsidian's vim mode slightly uncanny valley-ish. Close enough to be able to emulate my vim flow. But not _quite_ right.
On mobile, I've found Obsidian to be just top class. Though admittedly most of my real note taking happens on desktop, on the few occassions I've had to jot down something quick on mobile, Obsidian app has been perfect.
I also tried Syncthing to sync my Obsidian vault between my desktop PC and my Android smartphone. However, I don't like having a file synced multiple times in the background while I'm editing it. Since I want my notes to be versioned with Git, I ended up finding a sync solution using Git that works just fine!
I used VimWiki for a couple of years and build up a sizeable set of notes with it. Although it seems to have most of the features you'd want, in the end it feels a little clunky to use in practice. A huge minus for me (at the time; perhaps this is fixed now) was the lack of ability to open multiple windows / notes simultaneously. I'm not aware of any other text editor which lacks that feature.
I since switched to Emacs + Org Roam, and I'm much happier. If there's something I don't like or a feature I feel is missing, I can either find a plugin for it or just change it myself.
I have indeed tried Markor and used it for quite a while. Atleast several months if not a year. It doesn't hold a candle to Obsidian.
Just two things off the top of my head among plenty of others:
1. No live edit mode in Markor. You can either edit or see the live preview. (Not sure if that's changed in recent times).
2. Here's the most thoughtful killer feature IMO of the Obsidian mobile app: it let's you configure the order of formatting tools that appear on the toolbar above the keyboard. This let's me put the checkbox edit and indent as the most frequent actions on top left. This makes my life so much better.
No your point 1 still stands, and 2 sounds like a feature I would enjoy as well.
I still much prefer Markor for all the quick notes, todo.txt, images and speed in general.
I was an Evernote subscriber for a time, then I asked: Why am I paying just to save notes? So I switched to plain old text files. After a while, on a whim, I tried Obsidian, and I love it! I find the Android app very responsive, and with the files saved locally, it's future-proof.
I don't pay for syncing or anything. If I need a note on my PC from my phone, I send it via Bluetooth. It's a system that works for me.
The deal breaker with obsidian for me is that it is not opensource. It's great that it's at least using a markdown derivative format.
I am using Emacs Org Mode and quite happy with it. You can link different files, include images, embed and view LaTeX, encrypt your notes with GPG and much more. I think it will stand the test of time better than Obsidian which is something I care a lot for note taking and journaling.
I prefer Obsidian over Logseq as it performs better in lower RAM conditions.
It would have been nice if it could work with AsciiDoc instead of Markdown as I like the syntax better.
Perhaps, perhaps, this is something for you to look at. I use Obsidian on the Desktop but I don't do much work/editing on the Mobile, so I just use iA Editor (you an choose any editor of your choice). As the files are that -- files, I just browse and open the file I want to edit. I get to the files with Obsidian on the Desktop and iA Editor on the mobile to edit/read it.
But the notes are maintained as plain markdown files?
I don’t find it weird they would want to keep the source for their commercial application closed when there are so many copy-cat apps in the same space.
The incentives are aligned -> If a specific car model won't be safe, people won't buy it. Also, there is regulation in place.
I think we need exactly the right combo in software too. Obsidian is not open source, but you can gauge what they track in their privacy policy. You can try to confirm it using apps like Little Snitch. Also, all their notes are just plaintext so your data is portable.
> If a specific car model won't be safe, people won't buy it.
The world is not this black and white. This assumes the customer actually knows all of the pros and cons of available options and is able to take the time to make a decision that best aligns with their values. In practice (at least in the US) we have and infrastructure that makes it practically impossible for many people to live their lives without a car, and purchasing decisions are based almost exclusively on marketing materials and social forces.
> Obsidian is not open source, but you can gauge what they track in their privacy policy
A privacy policy is a pinkie promise. Why depend on something so fragile for such an important function in your life, when there are much more trustworthy options? Logseq, Org Roam, and Joplin immediately come to mind.
Safety-wise, the chance of choosing a non-safe new car today is very low since they're not on the market (a lot due to current regulation).
> A privacy policy is a pinkie promise. Why depend on something so fragile for such an important function in your life, when there are much more trustworthy options? Logseq, Org Roam, and Joplin immediately come to mind.
Yep, I agree. This is why my own previous note-taking app is completely open source[1]. But this comes with many difficulties, and often times subpar experience compared to closed source apps. That's why I decided to close source my next note taking app[2].
Whenever there's an Obsidian fanfare going on here on HN (and it happens quite often :P) I wonder around among the comments looking for a simple, minimal, and clean knife (or maybe a light bow and arrow) while people are discussing their AWPs, customised Dragunovs, and bespoke Abrams. Good fun :)
I have a bludgeon. A permanently open markdown file with my life stuff in it (chores, ideas, projects, backburner, vacation plans). I think the closest is probably this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38733968
Tried Obsidian for a while, loved a lot about it, but....mmm.
Obsidian out of the box is a bit limited; plugins are great and add tons of features, but then you start hitting issues with plugin maintainers abandoning plugins you rely on, or needing to make a decision between three different plugins that all do the same thing slightly different. Depending on your use case and expectations that may not be a big deal, but I really missed not having what I personally saw as core features not being officially supported.
(Also, FWIW, the sync service is a bit pricy for what it is. I get that it's how they're trying to monetise it, but...I would have preferred another pricing model, even if the total cost was just as high.)
I've personally switched to Trilium Notes which I'm finding nicer. One element I particularly like is that it has first class suport for notes being able to exist at multiple places in a tree simultaneously. I know it's a very personal thing, but for me personally being able to file notes in multiple locations "clicks" in a way that tags didn't.
A few weeks ago I started splitting knowledge between that which is worthy enough (for me) to remember via flashcards and spaced repetition, and that which I don't need to even write down anywhere. Meaning, in practice, that I don't feel the need to have a proper note-taking system. I just need proper flashcards, which I already have in Anki.
I just started this split so maybe I'll come back to it, realizing limitations I'm not aware of yet, but at least for now I feel way better not having a proper note-taking workflow.
Compared with Zettelkasten-based systems, this might make it harder to add connections between pieces of knowledge, but I never got around to actually using a Zettelkasten so I am not entirely sure what I'm missing. On the other hand, one's brain is IMHO the best way to connect pieces of knowledge together, and recalling the vertices frequently might be enough to recall the edges of this knowledge graph as well.
I haven't seen this (lack of) "approach" mentioned before so I'm curious if I'm alone with this realization and mistaken somehow.
This is basically what I tried to do using the spaced repetition plugin for Obsidian but it's just not very good yet. I just checked and the author asked for a co-maintainer yesterday. I really hope they can find someone to put a bit of time in because it's a great idea and a great foundation.
You’re not alone. My “note taking” is essentially what you described. I do have a single google doc where I paste temporary notes though. This gives me a space where I can properly decide to either delete the content, or ankify it.
What's the point of Obsidian in this case, since all the useful information is already in Anki by definition of "useful" (see previous comment), thus eventually (after a few reviews) in my brain?
Not all information needa to be remembered. Most of useful information should just be easily available. It's good to have a single place for all of that with the ability to easily move stuff from one place to another. It saves a lot of time and effort as well as makes everything work in the first place (you are making notes, actively thinking what to write, what is generally important and what is super important to be memorized; that process alone makes your thinking and memory clearer and better).
So that's where I'm experimenting with this stance: it's either useful and I'm better off remembering it, or it's useless and I don't even need to write that down (see my first comment in this thread).
> It's good to have a single place for all of that with the ability to easily move stuff from one place to another.
Why aren't our brains better places for this, provided we can retain the information? With SRS such as Anki, the cost of remembering the information on top of writing it down is negligible, and once I remember it, why would I write it down in some other system?
>it's either useful and I'm better off remembering it, or it's useless and I don't even need to write that down
No, that's obviously not how the universe and information work. Pareto principle here at play as well.
> Why aren't our brains better places for this
Because they aren't. That's a strange question. Reality is reality.,
Our brains are not made for remembering (rote memorization; a mere 3-7 items can be short-term remembered and juggled with at one time), but for thinking and making connections.
Computers are amazing at storing information, but can't think.
If one is smart, he utilizes the strengths of tools/opportunities that are available to him instead of using them inefficiently.
We're not talking about remembering whole Wikipedia articles though, and I'm guessing nobody puts entire encyclopedia articles in their Zettelkasten. Granted, we're not made to remember TBs of data, but the information I envision to find in somebody's Zettelkasten (well, mine, if I had one) is far more amenable to be remembered via SRS than TBs of random data. That was my conditional "provided we can retain the information": in my case, it'd be just as costly to enter it in my Zettelkasten as it'd be to remember it, so why not remember it instead?
I guess I'd need to see somebody either solely using a Zettelkasten, or Zettelkasten and SRS, and see what's in the Zettelkasten that I couldn't put in an SRS just as conveniently. It must also be content-specific; maybe I'd see a benefit if I were a sociologist like Niklas Luhmann was, but I'm not.
Another thing that changed since Luhmann's time is just how cheap it has become to retrieve most information. His Zettelkasten probably allowed him to quickly fetch information he remembered vaguely, faster than it'd be to open his books and see where it is. This benefit is mostly gone now that there are even faster options.
Just last week I fully committed to Obsidian with the git sync plugin. It took some fiddling and a bit of trust to sync 4 years of notes. (Previously I was just using Sublime Text and my notes folder as a project hooked up to my gitea instance.) But now, its like second nature and I'm looking for neat plugins that you cant live with out.
It does so far - I have not had more than 3 or 4 commits in a single push though so it hasn't broken for me yet. The notes said that if you do have many changes it can run out of memory due to the git plugin it is using.
I tried Obsidian for a while and the whole "second brain-thingy" until I watched a video about complex procrastination (basically, using tools like Obsidian as a means of not doing actual work).
Another term for it is "knowledge p*rn", basically getting off to the idea that you're learning by watching another power user video, or reading another blog post, instead of simply doing the work.
I love Obsidian for being a dead simple UI for managing my markdown files. I’ve found that the cloud features are not for me. What I need is to wire it more organically up to a GitHub repo.
I use this setup. My notes folder is a git repo, I have a private repo on GitHub as backup. Then two moving parts.
a backup.sh script, which boils down to: `cd ${obfolder}; git add .; git commit -m "auto backup $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S)"; git push`. Give it a `chmod +x` and it's ready.
a crontab entry: `1 17 * * * ${obfolder}/backup.sh`, which is "at 5:01pm every day, run the backup script.
${obfolder} is the actual path of the vault directory and I haven't had to think about it in years.
Obsidian is too clunky for a daily driver text editor. Compare to Sublime. Obsidian also sometimes breaks. Last week it gave me a fully white window, I couldn't use it at all despite a reinstall. It should be ported to a C lang or similar.
Linking is an exceptionally good idea. It is very transformative to how I think about organizing information and doing it with Obsidian the past few months has felt great. Besides future proofing, I love the speed of processing a simple text format like markdown (plus local first) allows. Everything opens instantly, which feels very different from things like Google docs or Microsoft Word. About the only note tool it doesn't replace for me is spreadsheets that use math. There are plugins but it doesn't feel quite as clean as Google sheets for this purpose.
Unpopular opinion: I dislike obsidian. I came to the realization that any reasonably large collection of notes requires structure, which goes by the definition of types (for people, places, organizations, ...). Obsidian is very rudimentary in this regard: it offers properties, folders and templates. Those are workable at first but fall apart soon enough: you can derive many instances of a type from a certain template, but obsidian will happily let you change the template later on without offering the means to propagate the changes to existing instances, leaving your notes in an inconsistent state with no way to tell. Anytype, SiYuan, LogSeq have the same problem. Notion is a bit better considering its "databases" help finding and patching such discrepancies, but is also limited in that it doesn't let you extend types (polymorphism). None of them support cardinality (should there be one or multiple references) nor defining forward and backwards relationships when the property is relational.
As I was about to give up, I found out about Trilium which checks all the good marks when it comes to data modeling and consistency, in a super simple and straightforward manner. And on top of that, it's opensource, local first, self hostable, syncable, has a web UI so you don't have to install anything if you can't, and lends itself to emacs levels of hackability. IMO, anyone claiming to be managing a large collection of notes should give it a serious look.
Looks really cool, aside from the lack of Android support or a managed cloud option.
My big issue with Obsidian is just performance. Android likes to kill the background process and you're waiting 10 seconds or more just to be able to write a 5 word shopping list entry.
I eventually switched to Google Keep, with always listening assistant turned on.
> Looks really cool, aside from the lack of Android support or a managed cloud option.
For Android, you can use trilium as a PWA currently, I do that and it's not bad at all, but offline isn't supported yet. I would say that the UX through the PWA isn't worse than that of Obsidian.
If offline on your phone is a requirement, you should be able to run trilium server there (haven't tried): https://github.com/Nriver/awesome-trilium#-android
There is managed hosting too, at a very fair price I'd say (compared to the alternatives): https://trilium.cc/
> Android Server+Hosted Cloud Server+PWA seems a bit hacky though. And it's hard to beat free when you're on a low budget.
I self-host, so for me the practical free, sustainable option with all features included is Trilium. I'm generally wary of the freemium core + (no so) optional paid features + early access plans paid towards companies which haven't turned a profit yet. After all, that's how many people are now discovering Obsidian, while escaping an ever enshitifying Evernote.
> Keep also has some fairly unmatched deep integrations with Assistant and Wear OS.
Absolutely, if I want reminders and things showing up in GMail, Google makes sure that I can't adventure very far away from its walled garden.
The type of notes I take in Trilium are personal thoughts, family matters, logs of memorable activities (meetings, meals, outings, …), work notes, summaries, elements to later compose in deliverables or emails, that kind of stuff. And because this is all relational and "typed" in nature ("meetings" implies "places" and "persons", "deliverables" implies "projects" or even "milestones"), Obsidian just doesn't cut it.
Apparently, SiYuan, which is very much a competitor of Obsidian with an opensource core is in the process of implementing a basic version of Notion's "databases" [0]. It still falls short for my needs (no polymorphism to extend types, no cardinality to specify the type and directionality of relations), but it might be a big step forward for many people here having started on Obsidian and bumped into its limitations.
I tried both and am using Joplin. Has less fuss around it and I focus more on simply taking notes .. the syncing is also cheaper and you can use for work
I've been using Joplin for over a year after spending too much time testing all of the options out there. Joplin's syncing sealed the deal for me, free and it works well. Obsidian was something like $100 USD a year just to get things synced to my phone.
I've tried both. No UI issues to complain about in Joplin. But Obsidian seems to use its own style of title bars, and it uses the GTK file chooser when my OS is using KDE.
Obsidian is that thing in the back of my mind which is Markdown+Synch. Service.
I’ve never really gotten into synch. since I tend to monocompute a lot.
I write things in Org Mode. Not a power user of that thing, just the markup I use. I don’t use links in Org but I would like to. I sometimes make very informal and tedious links. So that would be a welcome feature.
> Obsidian’s choice to work with plain text files make it future-proof
Future-proof yes. It is. But as a customer this doesn’t sound that exciting. A company could offer to print all my data and mail it to me when I terminate the plan. That’s also future-proof.
Ditto with
> Obsidian allows structure to grow organically
I haven’t read the links but 95% of the time this means “because there isn’t any structure (YOLO)”. Yeah okay I am free as a bird, cool. But I can’t make a decades-spanning personal wiki based on completely unstructured data and links alone.
All in all: most MD tools kind of fade into the background for me. People want all kinds of bells and whistles with that semi-language like a dedicated editor so that they can write headers and unordered bullet lists with a preview. Overall the marketplace feels excessive.
My setup is a little complex, but I'm very happy syncing plain-text notes between my Mac, several Linux machines, and my iPhone.
I'm still using (and loving) Notational Velocity on my Mac. Thankfully it's open source, so I was able to hack together arm64 support even though I don't know C/ObjC/C++ [0].
On my iPhone, I've been very happy with 1Writer, which has a similar interface, and is scriptable with JavaScript for power users.
I have NV configured to store plain-text notes that are stored in 1Writer's iCloud folder, so syncing happens seamlessly between them.
Finally, I sync that same directory with Syncthing to my Linux machines, where I mostly use neovim for editing.
The only feature that I'm often wishing I had is shared editing with my wife. At some point I whipped up some launchd scripts to automatically move notes tagged with `#shared` to a shared subfolder, but it never worked very well. Thankfully my wife is not really all that interested in sharing notes, so we just use Apple Notes when needed.
Tried Obsidian but was miffed at the inability to recognize / store as .txt files instead of .md (or perhaps it was vice versa) without a community plugin, and I prefer FOSS, so uninstalled after a couple days.
Have LogSeq installed but can't convince myself to use it, what I have fits my needs well enough. I'm also concerned about their funding model and the longevity of the project, the other side of the coin of FOSS I suppose.
I've really fallen for Obsidian myself. I became somewhat of an evangelist for it in my office. Much like the author i tend to use it as a "backstage for my life". In the interest of sharing my system with my colleagues i even turned my work vault into a template of sorts [^1].
Though that's also the most interesting part about Obsidian. What works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another. When i presented my template to my colleagues i definitely got some comments like: "oh man, my brain doesn't work that way" or "this feels overly complex". It's interesting how a simple markdown editor has become this analogue for some of our brains.
What I like about obsidian is how it’s a very good front-end for my notes, that’s it, just a front end, in case of anything or if obsidian tomorrow ceases to exist, all my notes are in my git and they are also backed up daily somewhere else, I don’t feel I’m locked to anything or any company. The addons too are very nice extra touch but it isn’t why I like obsidian.
As a high school student, I also use Obsidian over more mainstream alternatives such as Notion or OneNote. I find it primarily useful because of the no-internet feature and I find the linking ability to be extremely useful since most ideas are related to other ideas, and in totality this creates a concept.
Anyone tried Dendron (https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron)? It feels like it could almost become a competitor to Obsidian and plus is essentially a vscode plugin, so you get the benefit of using vscode as your code editor as well.
Too bad the project has ended as there is no clear approach for the Dendron team to make it financially sustainable (with their cloud sync subscription, much like Obsidian Sync). But it's basically opensource now so hopefully can be forked and the lessons learnt from Obsidian be applied to it (e.g. Any folder of textfile should be openable under Dendron. Unfortunate at the moment you have to initialize a separate repo and then port it over)
I quickly switched to Dendron from Obsidian because I preferred it being open source, and I liked the creator's views on the hierarchical search and categorization instead of just a tangle of wiki links, and liked the idea of it being a VSCode extension and then other extensions would also be available.
I think Dendron is high quality, and encourage everyone interested in markdown notes and Obsidian to check it out, and watch some of the creator Kevin Slin's introductory and overview videos or read the blog posts. He worked for Amazon and had to remember too many things and find them quickly, and that drove the Dendron hierarchical layout and features for managing lots of notes.
But personally, I'm not a big fan of VSCode or markdown; mostly what I want is to take quick screenshots and stash them for later - "here's how it looked before", "here's where to find this option" - and markdown is not great at that, you need to open 'markdown preview' to render your notes and see images. So you get a VS Code interface, and the editing window and the preview window. It's computing pre-WYSIWYG. And no way to draw on images like in OneNote. Similar with snippets of code and command lines, having to write them in markdown fiddling with word wrap and then preview the markdown to see them rendered properly in monospace isn't very convenient.
And of course hierarchy isn't free, it depends on me organizing and categorising (does this command go in "computers.aws.s3" or "software.amazon.s3.cli" or "tickets.12345678-Amazon-s3-client-weirdness" ?) which I'm not very committed to.
I used dendron with vscode and the extension really screwed up vscode for me. It seems to hook into a lot of things within vscode and created quite a few annoying prompts and added some weird markdown previewing issues.
I used it for a while but I started to have issues of it becoming slow. I'm not 100% sure dendron was responsible of it but I switched to Joplin. The interesting things was is integration with VSCode that I use for coding
Obsidian is nice, I use it to write articles. But I don’t like to take notes in it. IME notes are something transient, so recording them as files generates too much pollution/trash. Having paper notebooks around is much more fun, gets me in a flow easier, there’s close to no commitment with structure, the mind works better, can use colored pens, etc. Plus, it’s so much fun to go through old notebooks, it has historical weight, it makes me remember other aspects of my life surrounding the events, you can tell the mood of the writing, etc. So, my take: Use the tool relevant to the desired output format.
I keep my notebooks around. But I get your point about the paper making industry. I think it’s mostly water waste than by-products pollution, though, since most sources nowadays employ reforestation. Those industries evolved a lot. Unbleached paper (what I use) has less of an impact. I actually meant pollution to signify “mess”, but English in not my native language.
I've tried to like Obsidian for a long time. It had never clicked with me, despite it's simple interface and seemingly great support.
But I recently finally found a great use case for it: saving code snippets. Specifically: code snippets found on Stack Overflow and ChatGPT.
You can simply select the answer (usually written in markdown), copy and paste it into Obsidian, and it retains all the formatting, and even applies language-specific color schemes.
I've tried to use Obsidian three different times, and I always end up going back to Standard Notes. I love Markdown, I love note-taking with Markdown, but I really just want something that's clean, simple, and fairly basic. I'm very fluent in Markdown and am not trying to do something crazy to munge into a Markdown representation, and I also don't want to deal with a complex plugin architecture to get things done.
Before I used Standard Notes, I was mostly satisfied with a private Github repo, containing Markdown files and NeoVim.
Not to put to down the author, just trying to understand it better - But the tasks described in the link seem a bit trivial. I can already write a Asciidoc file, tag it, and add links to other .adoc files. Are tools like Obsidian/Logseq just adding a layer of tools on top of that to search and sort files based on tags/dates/etc.?
I keep plenty of notes in asciidoc and orgmode files, so I'm genuinely curious to hear from someone with experience. I've tried running Logseq and didn't really get what I was supposed to do...
Anyone know of an alternative that stores data locally and looks and feels a bit more like Notion? The plain list like note view is just so ugly and when I create a new note I'd want it to be in the context of whatever I'm currently looking at, not at the root. I know about tags and the graph view but it's just not what I need.
There was a comment to a Notion related submission the other day that talked about something Notion like but self hosted, that's be fine too but I can't find it right now.
I'm a happy Obsidian user too, it's probably the application I use the most.
The amount of plugins available is incredible (my favs: Excalidraw and Calendar, Obsidian Git)
I also wrote an article about why I switched from Notion to Obsidian a few years ago.
I tried obsidian but felt it had too many gears and knobs and spent too many times fiddling with them. I fell back on this app which is based on local markdown storage but takes it up a notch.
I've recently moved from vimwiki to Agenda (https://www.agenda.com) because I wanted a "proper" native app, and have been quite happy with it. Logseq and Obsidian always feel unnatural either on desktop or mobile (Obsidian, in particular, has a mobile UX that never seems to have full parity with the desktop one, and that is very painful to use on an iPad)
Logseq is more opinionated than Obsidian:
- It's an outliner, meaning you don't have paragraph but collapsible block.
- It's focused on journaling. The default view when you open the app is a journal that's internally a list of all `<date>.md` (today's file is automatically created).
- Backlink are built-in instead of being a plugin (albeit an official one). It's automatically displayed at the bottom of the page, meaning I can have a [[SecretProject]] page and have a list of all relevant blocks/page in one go (in LogSeq, all tags are regular pages, so I put a #SecretProject page in the top of my page)
- Obsidian ecosystem is massively bigger
- LogSeq is FOSS (AGPL), Obsidian is not. I cannot (or rather, should not) use Obsidian at work (but nothing mechanically prevents you), so I'm using LogSeq.
- I'm not clear about LogSeq funding
Whenever I read about Obsidian or similar software, I feel like it's great, but I also feel ashamed, because... I have absolutely no idea what I'd write in them.
What do you people write about? Do you really have genius ideas all day long that you need to write down? Or do you want to keep track of everything you've seen / discussed?
I decided to start note taking with VimWiki. It's organization is the same and has full vim support where Obsidian has partial keybindings. I still feel like I'm missing out. Can anyone opine on if it's worth switching over?
Don't fall for the trap of note taking tools. At the end of the day, if you can write down your thoughts then it does the job. Spend less time on thinking about tools and more time on writing notes.
At the same time, in my opinion you should feel comfortable in your tool. If VimWiki does not suit your needs but you still want to use vim (like I do), you could look into https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim to edit notes in neovim, and then view them in Obsidian using :ObsidianOpen. I like to have my terminal and Obsidian open side-by-side for this workflow.
I'll go ahead and do a shameless plug for an alternative built with similar philosophy around privacy & data ownership aimed at developers https://acreom.com
> Do you support collecting individual checkbox items into a unified view as well?
yes, acreom is pretty flexible when it comes to creating views over your pages, you can create views with pages with tasks and save it with all tasks surfaced.
> Would you also consider adding an outline view/toc?
already supported!
I have moved to Obsidian after One Note, Notion, and Trilium. I learned something from using each; but ultimately I wanted the portability of Markdown and with Obsidian I can always fall back on the root folder container all my markdown. (which I backup)
I can share my user flow if it helps people...
1. You can turn on support for other file types, so you can move source code/etc in.
2. I have the Day Planner plugin; but it's just JavaScript; so mine is highly customized and uses various sources to generate me a daily calendar/planner in the morning.
3. I don't use Zettelkasten; but all of those systems have something to learn from them in regards to organization. I have a setup I like; but with a personal rule that if I'm not finding something or I feel stuck; I spend time reorganizing.
4. I use tags a lot now; it would take an entire blog to explain why - but the TLDR is that I switched to focusing on WHEN and TAGS instead of trying to perfectly put the right content in the right place.
5. I'm able to use Obsidian on a plane really well - tablet on tray, K380 on lap. I'm frequently getting out 2,000 words on a flight.
6. I manage my work (software dev), campaigns (D&D), personal project, etc all on Obsidian. I even have some code in it when appropriate and its nice.
7. !!! Templates. I've started creating and using templates. So if I want a checklist, ctrl+shift+t/cmd+shift+t and I choose one of my markdown templates and it gets inserted. I currently have "meeting", "1:1", "Pomo Checklist", "Campaign Session".
8. I mentioned this; but I don't hesitate to go into plugins and just change their code to do what I want; it is one of my favorite features.
I'm using https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync with IBM cloudant as described by the documentation. It handle my android phone, a windows laptop, a windows desktop and a linux desktop
Tried Obsidian multiple times, can't make it work for me.
Tried Zettlr a week ago, same result.
Somehow I seem nobody noticed anytype - https://anytype.io/
They're still in beta, looks like they draw inspiration from Notion but it's more closer to what I need.
obsidian is good for what it does, but in the last month I saw someone share heynote[1] with me that I have grown fond of as a support to my obsidian note taking
Apple just needs to add Markdown to Notes and it would be the perfect app.
Right now I am making do with creating little sections where I put monospaced fonts, but it's not ideal. I just need to plop down code between my notes once in a while, and Markdown's ``` makes that very easy.
I agree. I’ve considered trying to use Keyboard Maestro to implement an ersatz Markdown mode, like “replace '##<space>' with ‘trigger the Set Heading Format menu’” or “replace ``` with ‘trigger the Monostyled format menu’”.
Huh. Having actually written that out, that should be easy. I know what I’m doing this morning.
Welp, I did it. I can share the macro if needed, but it ended up exactly as I described it. I also made macros for #, ##, ###, and --- while I was at it.
> allows structure to grow organically
> powerful feature ... Internal Links.
> plain text files
Well, they're not _plain_ text - there is some markup. So that invites the question - why not HyperText Markup Language?
Doesn't HTML have all of these features - hyperlinks, folder structures, "plain" text? Isn't HTML also future proof? It's been around long enough. And doesn't it also work offline? There's a bunch of different apps out there that support viewing these both on and offline.
So, do people just use Obsidian/Markdown because they like dislike "<em>HTML</em>"?
edit: I'm not saying it's "wrong" to dislike HTML. I'm 50% trolling and 50% saying none of these are features of Obsidian. They're features of HTML (and Markdown is its shorthand).
The main benefit is that markdown is really readable _without_ rendering. You don't need to edit and then open in a browser.
You can comfortably read plaintext that has a little structure, while HTML adds some ceremony that makes it a bit harder to glance at the material as the tags are much more in your face.
You’re getting smashed for no particularly good reason in my opinion.
I am in the camp if I like the idea of Obsidian but I have a bunch of other stuff I want to include and do stuff with like JSON-LD data for example.
But the idea of writing raw HTML is in fact a huge pain in the ass as everyone was all too eager to point out here.
We have had markdown to HTML converters and visual editing experiences for a long time now and I don’t know why the argument has to be “write in raw HTML” I barely even want to write Markdown when taking notes, I just want to write.
So in that spirit I think HTML and and in browser experience is in fact the right answer I just need to put an editor on top of it and a way to run code when I hit publish to update the graph visualisations and statistics that people seem to really like with Obsidian.
I actually think this might be a really good usecase for the built in IndexedDB API built into browsers so long as you can also back it up and sync across devices.
But I still don't know what Obsidian gives you besides letting you write in Markdown instead of HTML. And that is basically a Markdown to HTML converter, as you pointed out.
You are dismissing what people are telling you. Several have pointed out that Markdown is easier to read and write when taking notes. For example, lists where each item has an additional ~14 keystrokes per item, links which have an additional ~20 keystrokes.
Your answer was that that doesn't matter. If that's your view, you are welcome to it, but that's why /other/ people choose Markdown over HTML for notes.
Not dismissing it at all. My original comment asks that very question. I was just wondering if there's anything else that Obsidian offers besides Markdown syntax, since hyperlinking documents and application-agnostic data formats are also features of HTML.
I don't understand where all the feelings are coming from. :)
Because you're not actually caring to listen to what people are saying.
People do not find writing SGML-based formats ergonomic for focusing on the content of their writing. SGML-based formats are great for formats that need to be both human-readable, but also unambiguous and extensible for machine parsing, but awful when the task is purely just producing writing.
If I need HTML from my writings in Markdown, there are a plethora of tools to handle that; I don't need to waste vital brain bandwidth on writing perfect spec-complaint HTML when Markdown handles only the task of writing structured text and does it well.
Markdown does not handle layout, and barely handles tables. It is the technological equivalent of HTML 1.0, and does not contaminate itself with the task of presentation like how the evolution of HTML over the years has.
You just dismissed what I said. One primary draw of Obsidian is the ability to write in Markdown.
> I was just wondering if there's anything else that Obsidian offers besides Markdown syntax, since hyperlinking documents and application-agnostic data formats are also features of HTML.
Yet you reply asking if there is anything beyond Markdown. That's dismissing what a lot of people have reiterated: Markdown is the main thing.
You keep looking for a different killer feature because you are dismissing everyone else's killer feature.
It's hard to overstate the flowstate Obsidian enables with live / wysiwyg editor view -- enjoy the clean look of rendered HTML while typing simple markdown and kbd shortcuts -- "the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts". There are many other reasons I love Obsidian, but most of all it's the core function -- the editor interface, atop my local, private markdown files.
We could have that exact same workflow and user interface with HTML.
I (presumably along with the person you’re replying to) don’t understand what value Markdown as the storage format is providing here exactly but I can think of many limitations it imposes.
Right, but the scenario we are describing explicitly makes the “in the raw” part not particularly relevant.
I’m not against markdown as an idea of file format, I’m just saying that it has some pretty clear limitations that I think are very much within the scope of what I want out of a tool like that and that weird MDX format they have as a substitute is a step backwards in my opinion.
I disagree that markdown is a shorthand for HTML. It's a plain text doc with standardized ASCII stylistic features, that is basically exactly the way you would want to write a plain text document most of the time. It's not really markup. It's markdown.
I agree the noted features aren't really special to obsidian, but they might feel special when you consider markdown first and foremost as a plaintext format, and only second as a style convention
Do you write your documentation and notes using HTML? Serious question because if not not, why even ask the question? Why does this invite the question? One can easily see that markdown requires less characters and is a quicker flow for jotting down notes. You can open up a markdown file in any file viewer and easily read it without any view processing...not the same for HTML. Silly question.
Well, markdown is a lot easier to read "unrendered". It's a lot more accessible to non-technical people as well, since with html sometimes you need to put the content between two matching tags (h1), sometimes it needs to go between a tag and inside a tag (a), and sometimes there isn't even a matching tag! (img)
The most important tip for getting started with Obsidian, in my mind, is to absolutely ignore all of the Obsidian "power users." I'm 99% convinced that no one actually uses zettelkasten seriously, but even if so, it's overkill for when you're just checking out the app. And, please, don't buy one of these $500 Obsidian courses. It's just not necessary.
With that said, I have started extending out my own setup, and one of the plugins that I like the most is DataView, which allows me to automatically link to other notes, or pull in tagged text, or to-do items. It has allowed me to really take daily recaps reliably for the first time ever, because, even if I have nothing to write, I at least have a repository of what I was doing for that day.