Why I Like Obsidian

https://www.ddanieltan.com/posts/obsidian/

by ddanieltan • 3 years ago

293 367 3 years ago

    > 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).

el_oni• 3 years ago

they like it because

# title

this is the paragraph

is more natural to write than:

<html> <head>...<head/> <body> <h1> title </h1> <p>this is the paragraph</p> </body> </html>

when you're just jotting some thoughts down.

jimmytucson6• 3 years ago

So the answer to my original question is - yes :)

putsan• 3 years ago

Totally agree

skinnyarms• 3 years ago

Markdown is so much easier to read and maintain in its raw form. I can't imagine trying to take meeting notes in html.

``` - [ ] Item 1 - [ ] Item 2 ```

``` <ul> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 1</label></li> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 2</label></li> </ul> ```

hiAndrewQuinn5• 3 years ago

Pretty much. You want to optimize for fluidity in writing, and angle brackets just get in the way too much.

aeonik• 3 years ago

The main point of Markdown is that it's easy to write and read without any extra rendering processes.

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosop...

Here is a nice article of many light weight markup languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language

I like Markdown a lot, though I prefer org-mode due to the extra features it comes with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode

wooptoo• 3 years ago

HTML was not really meant to be generated by humans. Just like XML, it's supposed to be machine readable first and foremost.

jimmytucson6• 3 years ago

This has to be factually wrong, no? The first web servers just served documents from a directory called `htdocs`.

paxys• 3 years ago

HTML is (1) a lot more painful and verbose to write and (2) impossible to decipher in source mode. Markdown fixes both these problems.

infecto• 3 years ago

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.

mdhb3• 3 years ago

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.

jimmytucson6• 3 years ago

Yeah, clearly I touched a nerve :)

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.

atrus• 3 years ago

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)

IggleSniggle• 3 years ago

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

PurpleRamen5• 3 years ago

Well, they're not _plain_ text - there is some markup.

Markup is still plaintext.

why not HyperText Markup Language?

Why not json or yaml? If you remove the users ability to write the text directly, then why limit yourself to the unstructured mess that HTML is?

Doesn't HTML have all of these features - hyperlinks, folder structures, "plain" text? Isn't HTML also future proof?

Markdown is human-friendly. There is a whole ecology around using it for those usecases. And you can create HTML from markdown anyway.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

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.

abelaer• 3 years ago

I've done exactly this, and set up a cron job to sync regularly. Still very sub-optimal imo.

midasz2• 3 years ago

I used the git-sync plugin, worked fairly well.

have_faith• 3 years ago

I'm just using the icloud sync, do you use git repo feature with your notes? or is it just a dumb store.

adbachman• 3 years ago

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.

inferense2• 3 years ago

obsidian is awesome.

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

outlore• 3 years ago

I love the design of acreom! When I tried it, I was impressed with marking notes as Active/Done etc.

Do you support collecting individual checkbox items into a unified view as well?

Would you also consider adding an outline view/toc? Tysm!

inferense2• 3 years ago

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!

px43• 3 years ago

Super weird IMO that they refuse to release source code. Hard to trust something as important as notes to an opaque app.

drakenot2• 3 years ago

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.

cpach• 3 years ago

If you want something open source there’s a bunch of alternatives out there. Logseq, Joplin, Zettlr, Standard Notes, etc.

I prefer Obsidian since I like the UI and they offer a subscription for sync, which is very convenient.

iCarrot• 3 years ago

It's built with Electron so not entirely opaque.

Car manufacturers don't release their source code either, yet people trust something as important as their life to it daily.

Zambyte3• 3 years ago

Car manufacturers don't release their source code either, yet people trust something as important as their life to it daily.

I personally find it extremely disturbing. Two bads don't make a good.

hiAndrewQuinn5• 3 years ago

Obsidian is my IDE for Markdown, if that makes sense.

midasz2• 3 years ago

I really like Obsidian but the long startup time (on mobile) has stopped me from using it as a daily driver.

drakenot2• 3 years ago

Are you on Android? This is me launching from a cold open on iOS and it was near instant.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/90sbrx0esggnsmbsva2hg/Video-J...

Did it progressively get worse over time? I only have a couple hundred notes.

pityJuke• 3 years ago

iCloud Sync does hurt the initial startup sporadically.

readparryrepost• 3 years ago

I don't know if it helps but disabling sync plugins and then turning off all the ones I didn't need massively sped up my load times. (~10x increase)

Brajeshwar2• 3 years ago

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.

tester4573• 3 years ago

I tried out iA writer on android because Obsidian's loading times are bad but was disappointed to see you can't set a folder in iA writer android.

Editing files is even slower since you have to pick a file from the android file search.

It's a well designed app otherwise.

kepano2• 3 years ago

This is a priority for the Obsidian team over the next few months. This should get a lot better soon.

machomaster5• 3 years ago

Can you elaborate? There is no mention of that in the roadmap ( https://obsidian.md/roadmap/ ).

zschuessler• 3 years ago

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:

- https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban

rubymamis5• 3 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.get-plume.com/

[2] https://imgur.com/NIgDLOU

ghosty141• 3 years ago

Will it be open source?

ElongatedMusket• 3 years ago

I'm going to give it another try, I had no idea the only feature I like about jira could be added to a notes app. Thanks for link

pyrophane• 3 years ago

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.

mofosyne• 3 years ago

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)

candiddevmike• 3 years ago

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.

jddj• 3 years ago

Interesting. Maybe codium for notes and code for code?

poulpy1235• 3 years ago

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

jodrellblank2• 3 years ago

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.

hannofcart3• 3 years ago

My notes system is:

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.

twiclo2• 3 years ago

Why not use VimWiki on desktop?

Loxicon2• 3 years ago

I used to use vimWiki and then changed to normal vim because I like netrw and vim-vinegar + Goyo + netrw makes for a simpler workflow.

jbstack2• 3 years ago

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.

Loxicon2• 3 years ago

+1 for Goyo and markdown.

ChatGTP2• 3 years ago

So your notes are sprawled across different apps?

hannofcart3• 3 years ago

Sure, I suppose that's one way to look at it.

From my perspective though, I like that my notes are simple plain text files in a single folder whose backup and sync is entirely under my control.

This often lets me run grep on my notes to quickly find old note topics.

crimsontech• 3 years ago

Both apps can edit the same notes because Obsidian is just a folder with markdown notes in it.

minzi• 3 years ago

How are you using syncthing on mobile? I didn't know that was even possible.

cybert• 3 years ago

It’s available on Android but not iOS unfortunately

proxycon• 3 years ago

hey, this is exactly same as my notes setup too!

For neovim markdown plugins my recommendations are SidOfc/mkdx and dbridges/vim-markdown-runner.

mrpotato• 3 years ago

Mine's close to yours also

desktop: nvim + syncthing + vimwiki (md markup instead of default)

mobile: syncthing + Markor[1]

On mobile I have a todo.txt[2] in addition to the vim wiki files which are all synced.

All this works pretty well for my personal needs. For work I use OneNote because the whole company uses OneNote.

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/net.gsantner.markor/ [2] http://todotxt.org/

drio04• 3 years ago

Which mobile app do you use for todo.txt?

ta9884• 3 years ago

Give a try to Markor it is much more usable than the mobile Obsidian.

hannofcart3• 3 years ago

Strong disagree.

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.

david13022• 3 years ago

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 have documented my setup with Git, the Obsidian Git plugin on Desktop and Termux on Android here: https://github.com/davidkopp/termux-scripts/

Nevertheless, I still use Syncthing to sync other files between my devices. Great tool!

fsiefken• 3 years ago

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.

twiclo2• 3 years ago

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?

taopai• 3 years ago

Just try it.

Also consider trying Emacs org mode.

pprotas• 3 years ago

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.

logtempo• 3 years ago

Keep complexity monster away, and don't fear the fear of missing out. Does VimWiki suit your needs? If yes, work on real problems.

tester4573• 3 years ago

Try it. You tried vim which was a large time investment and it paid off.

Try Obsidian too, for a week to write down your thoughts. Don't even commit to it, just use it to journal for a week to see if you like it.

kisamoto2• 3 years ago

Obsidian is great.

For those looking for an open source alternative (or don't want to pay the Obsidian fees for professional usage) check out Logseq: https://logseq.com/

kstrauser8• 3 years ago

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.

kisamoto2• 3 years ago

Ouch - I hadn't heard of that so thanks for raising awareness.

I'm trialling both with syncthing across multiple machines and so far no data loss but I'll make sure backups are in place!

iamjkt• 3 years ago

Logseq's native sync now has smart merge which I have found prevents issues like this.

kirso2• 3 years ago

Pretty much a weekly occurrence for my work with Confluence.

Never happened to me with Logseq, also why are we making a trend of something that has happened to 5 people out of 10000 users?

Kind of a bias when you see only horror stories of people losing data, but not the rest who are fine.

asdfgeoff• 2 years ago

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.

rchaud7• 3 years ago

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.

recfab• 3 years ago

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)

swizzle12• 3 years ago

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.

merdaverse• 3 years ago

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.

https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

basedrum• 3 years ago

I prefer logseq over obsidian

olenczyk• 3 years ago

Can you elaborate? I need to chose one among those two

rabbitofdeath3• 3 years ago

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.

TSiege• 3 years ago

Can you share a link to the git plugin you're referring to?

llimllib• 3 years ago

I use this one, and I presume they do too: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git

_fat_santa• 3 years ago

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.

RobKohr• 3 years ago

You can also put it in a Dropbox directory.

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.

dustincoates2• 3 years ago

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.

rthkljlkrj• 3 years ago

The plugin ecosystem for obsidian is insanely large, and I say that not in a good way.

I agree, just ignore all of that. Plain files and internal links, that's it.

PurpleRamen5• 3 years ago

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.

rchaud7• 3 years ago

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.

jdksmdbtbdnmsm3• 3 years ago

Because who doesn't love running random github repos in a root process?

aosaigh• 3 years ago

No mention of Github repos in the parent comment.

ssgodderidge2• 3 years ago

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.

This is the way.

theshrike796• 3 years ago

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.

klum2• 3 years ago

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.

georgejfrick3• 3 years ago

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.

rubslopes• 3 years ago

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.

behnamoh6• 3 years ago

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.

Ballas• 3 years ago

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.

packetlost2• 3 years ago

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.

JoeJonathan2• 3 years ago

On the other hand, I'm a professional academic, and I haven't ever met a highly productive scholar who uses ZK.

BenFranklin100• 3 years ago

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.

behnamoh6• 3 years ago

I tried it a few times but had to stop because:

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?

awill• 3 years ago

Agree. I generally dislike relying on a bunch of third party plugins. Over time they don't get updated and you're left with a mess.

dsp_person• 3 years ago

For #2 could you share some of the plugins you needed?

radlad• 3 years ago

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.

singhrac• 3 years ago

What were the features that you needed from Obsidian?

muwtyhg• 3 years ago

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).

akkad33• 3 years ago

What note taking system do you recommend ?

geoelectric2• 3 years ago

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.

rigmarole2• 3 years ago

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.

sergiomattei2• 3 years ago

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.

In case anyone is interested, let me know: https://twitter.com/matteing/status/1746598313745371263

JHonaker• 3 years ago

Yea, throw the link to it out here. I was about to write something similar, so you’d save me the trouble! ;)

ddanieltan• 3 years ago

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!

nullandvoid• 3 years ago

If you want to setup a zettelkasten like system for free, with minimal effort / requirement on any plugins (just "templater" will be helpful) I highly recommend https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-...

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).

bloopernova• 3 years ago

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.

safety1st• 3 years ago

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.

Right up there with drinking coffee on exactly two specific days per week... https://zettelkasten.de/posts/practical-integration-deep-wor...

I think this stuff is esoteric and personal enough that we are under no obligation to follow it to the letter.

kstrauser8• 3 years ago

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.

ParetoOptimal2• 3 years ago

I use links, but only when important. And when I notice a really important group of pages I make an index page.

mklepaczewski• 3 years ago

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.

smusamashah3• 3 years ago

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.

behnamoh6• 3 years ago

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.

vondur• 3 years ago

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.

dustincoates2• 3 years ago

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.

KolenCh4• 3 years ago

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.

Jakob• 3 years ago

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.

al_borland4• 3 years ago

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.

fzil• 3 years ago

And, please, don't buy one of these $500 Obsidian courses.

It's weird how there's even a large enough market for all of these in the first place.

rchaud7• 3 years ago

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.

jasonpeacock• 3 years ago

"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.

[1] https://a.co/d/5Ntl43P

121789• 3 years ago

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

douglaskayama• 3 years ago

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.

dist-epoch2• 3 years ago

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.

funcDropShadow• 3 years ago

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.

SnowingXIV• 3 years ago

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.

Multicomp• 3 years ago

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!

lawgimenez2• 3 years ago

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.

pantulis• 3 years ago

People have reported success using Exporter, which is reasonably priced.

http://falcon.star-lord.me/exporter

Hoefner• 3 years ago

Also Obsidian has Importer plugin for Apple Notes

https://help.obsidian.md/import/apple-notes

kstrauser8• 3 years ago

I just moved all of my stuff into Notes.

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.

FredPret3• 3 years ago

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.

Feathercrown• 3 years ago

Obsidian has tabs, you can right click --> open in new tab

jodrellblank2• 3 years ago

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."

On the plus side, if you do use Microsoft Cloud storage then you can query and work with the OneNote data through the MS Graph REST API: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/integrate-with-oneno...

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".

pomatic2• 3 years ago

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.

brimwats• 3 years ago

Sabre Notes is aiming to get there sooner rather than later. incredible progress last year from basically nothing https://github.com/saber-notes/saber

hughesjj• 3 years ago

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

aaarrm2• 3 years ago

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.

Bo0kerDeWitt• 3 years ago

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.

innethread• 3 years ago

What are people’s opinions on Obsidian over Logseq?

PetitPrince• 3 years ago

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

boiler_up800• 3 years ago

A friend has a very popular post on obsidian templates. Never really followed it until he told me it was the most visited post on his site by a large margin, https://dannb.org/blog/2022/obsidian-daily-note-template/

sgt2• 3 years ago

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.

drio04• 3 years ago

I don’t have a Mac so I couldn’t access my Notes natively, or export it to use elsewhere.

Another reason stopping me from using apple notes is that their search sucks (both within note and across all notes)

kstrauser8• 3 years ago

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.

sgt2• 3 years ago

Please do share the outcome. I believe there is interest in this. Apple Notes is always there and convenient, which pulls me back.

Brajeshwar2• 3 years ago

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.

1. https://stephango.com/about

2. https://stephango.com/file-over-app

wrycoder• 3 years ago

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.

hoherd• 3 years ago

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.

https://obsidian.md/license

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.

https://obsidian.md/pricing

brightball2• 3 years ago

The big win for Obsidian here is that everything is just saved as markdown, so you're not locked in even with their license.

arnejenssen• 3 years ago

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?

firecall• 3 years ago

And also no Synching with a subscription!

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.

But then maybe I'm missing the point of Obsidian?

WJW• 3 years ago

It's entirely possible to just stick your files in dropbox or something like that and they sync just fine.

yurishimo• 3 years ago

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.

samrolken2• 3 years ago

You can sync just fine without a subscription. As you already mentioned iCloud, just put your vault there and get syncing for free.

tester4573• 3 years ago

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"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906331

poulpy1235• 3 years ago

you can use alternative for syncing that are quite well integrated even if a bit more complex to set up

runiq• 3 years ago

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.

trinsic2• 3 years ago

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.

spinningarrow• 3 years ago

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?

Zambyte3• 3 years ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn5• 3 years ago

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.

Tomte2• 3 years ago

That didn‘t work so much for Dynalist.

KolenCh4• 3 years ago

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.

benhurmarcel• 3 years ago

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.

theshrike796• 3 years ago

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.

D13Fd3• 3 years ago

This doesn't bother me. If there was a FOSS alternative I'd be all for it. But I can't fault them for charging for good software.

kuter• 3 years ago

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.

jbstack2• 3 years ago

There's also Org Roam which adds some useful ZK-like features to Org Mode.

jpgvm• 3 years ago

I picked up Obsidian after reading a post by the CEO here. Good leadership is usually a sign of a good product and I wasn't disappointed.

igtztorrero• 3 years ago

Does anyone have a simple and concise manual on how to get the most out of Obsidian ?

ryangs• 3 years ago

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.

stared• 3 years ago

I really like the calendar plugin - it makes it easy to write daily notes, https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-calendar-plugin.

ncrmro• 3 years ago

What’s the best way to sync iOS app to say git for consuming in Linux else where.

It seems like they really want you to use iCloud

samrolken2• 3 years ago

If you have a git client for iOS like Working Copy, then it's pretty straightforward to set it up.

wey-gu• 3 years ago

I prefer Logseq :)

bbx• 3 years ago

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.

Here is an example: https://i.imgur.com/GBFr431.png

It's absolutely brilliant.

pers0n• 3 years ago

If you want an open source alternative use Zettlr or Logseq

ladyanita22• 3 years ago

I'm surprised nobody here's mentioning AppFlowy. Is Logseq that much better?

stemlord• 3 years ago

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.

rcarmo• 3 years ago

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)

georgejfrick3• 3 years ago

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.

paradite• 3 years ago

Currently using Joplin with self-hosted NextCloud WebDAV.

It has a couple of minor UI/UX issues, even with the plugins.

Anyone tried both? How does Obsidian compare against Joplin?

aprdm4• 3 years ago

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

ElCapitanMarkla• 3 years ago

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.

weberer• 3 years ago

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.

theshrike796• 3 years ago

I moved from Joplin to Obsidian pretty much only because Obsidian has all the files as regular files.

Joplin has its own weird-ass database system.

It was also really janky 4 years ago when I used it, might've gotten better since.

PurpleRamen5• 3 years ago

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.

D13Fd3• 3 years ago

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.”

PurpleRamen5• 3 years ago

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.

borg16• 3 years ago

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

[1] https://heynote.com

keep3209095• 3 years ago

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!

hiAndrewQuinn5• 3 years ago

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.

orbital-decay2• 3 years ago

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.

keep3209095• 3 years ago

which can be used with absolutely anything

Not really, markdown has tons of tiny implementation details. And I can not use PDF annotation plugin in Emacs...

poulpy1235• 3 years ago

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

keep3209095• 3 years ago

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.

jauntywundrkind3• 3 years ago

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.

bongripper• 3 years ago

Knowledge is a mosaic crafted from interconnected ideas.

source?

geokon• 3 years ago

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...

rocky_raccoon• 3 years ago

What is the best option for cross-device syncing when you're using, e.g.

- an iPhone - Google Workspace (+ Google Drive) - Multiple desktops/laptops - Dropbox

Is there a single solution that doesn't cost an arm and a leg?

poulpy1235• 3 years ago

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

hiq4• 3 years ago

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.

MichaelNolan• 3 years ago

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.

senjin• 3 years ago

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.

https://github.com/st3v3nmw/obsidian-spaced-repetition/

machomaster5• 3 years ago

Why not combine both? Make notes in Obsidian, but add the information worth memorizing as Anki cards inside the Obsidian?

hiq4• 3 years ago

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?

CrypticShift• 3 years ago

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.

But I do like Obsidian :)

aaarrm2• 3 years ago

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).

subpixel• 3 years ago

I struggled with Obsidian especially b/c repeatedly creating files and futzing around in the UI to name and move them felt wrong.

I landed on Workflowy which has it's own quirks but has seen a lot of improvement since I last kicked the tires, including mirroring etc.

It does a great job of staying out of the way so I can just get notes done.

poulpy1235• 3 years ago

I cross my finger for someone to propose a similar tool based on typst (although the extensibility of the language may be counterproductive)

tamimio• 3 years ago

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.

nigamanth• 3 years ago

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.

joemccall86• 3 years ago

I used Obsidian for a while, but for some reason https://silverbullet.md ended up resonating more with me.

ska• 3 years ago

Anyone familiar with both have a comparison with org-roam mode?

NoMAD76• 3 years ago

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.

avgcorrection• 3 years ago

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.

crossroadsguy• 3 years ago

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 :)

justnotworthit• 3 years ago

I've been waiting for and nvAlt/Resophnotes with image file support for 10 years.

dist-epoch2• 3 years ago

I replaced Resophnotes with Obsidian, since I found Obsidian to be extremely similar.

sevagh• 3 years ago

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

dandy23• 3 years ago

I like easyorg for development and project tasks. Makes it easy to prioritize tasks etc but still in a text file. https://easyorgmode.com

tristor• 3 years ago

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.

pilgrim02• 3 years ago

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.

timetraveller26• 3 years ago

Not disagrreing with you but it's sorta funny that you say files pollute more than paper.

pilgrim02• 2 years ago

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.

mortallywounded• 3 years ago

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).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baKCC2uTbRc

rchaud7• 3 years ago

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.

barbazoo2• 3 years ago

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.

rchaud7• 3 years ago

Was it anytype.io?

barbazoo2• 3 years ago

It wasn't but it looks great!

abhinavk• 3 years ago

SiYuan?

https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan

n8henrie• 3 years ago

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.

[0] https://github.com/n8henrie/nv [1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/id680469088

DLion• 3 years ago

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.

https://domenicoluciani.com/2021/12/17/why-did-i-switch-from...

Otternonsenz2• 3 years ago

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).

BrandoElFollito2• 3 years ago

A lady that gives a lot of tutorials about Obsidian on YouTube users it as a DM as well. I think she posted a few videos about that usage.

Edit: found her: https://youtube.com/@nicolevdh

Otternonsenz2• 3 years ago

Nicole is great, and someone who is a fantastic resource for all the cool ways people use the software!

Her and a bunch of others are active on the Obsidian discord, and from the TTRPG specific Obsidian group, they released a fantastic resource in: https://obsidianttrpgtutorials.com/Obsidian+TTRPG+Tutorials/...

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.

diimdeep• 3 years ago

https://github.com/SublimeText-Markdown/MarkdownEditing is still a way to go for me.

adhamsalama• 3 years ago

While Obsidian is good, I prefer SiYuan Note, which is open source, and has more features. It's like a mix of Notion and Obsidian.

https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan

mtriassi• 3 years ago

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.

[^1]: https://github.com/m-triassi/obsidian-workvault-template - This is still a work in progress, but if anyone has suggestions or things they'd like to share i'd be open to feedback or even PRs!

ezst3• 3 years ago

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.

eternityforest3• 3 years ago

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.

ezst3• 3 years ago

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/

Lazare• 3 years ago

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.

Trilium Notes: https://github.com/zadam/trilium

And here's a nice writeup on ways to use Trilium (although much of it applies to Obsidian too): https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Patterns-of-personal-k...

Biganon• 3 years ago

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?

Maybe I'm just an idiot

COMMENT___• 3 years ago

My first thought was that this article is about Obsidian Entertainment (videogame development company).

Lord_Zero• 3 years ago

My biggest Obsidian gripe is I want the sync service for easy collab with my coworkers, but I want to self-host it for free on a VM somewhere.

We use Git sync today and its very cumbersome.

some_guy_in_ca• 3 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.

https://noteplan.co

The fact that everything is in plain text files on my computer is very important for me and future proofed.

Why I Like Obsidian

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