Why I Like Obsidian
ddanieltan.com
ddanieltan.com
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.
I agree, just ignore all of that. Plain files and internal links, that's it.
I guess, it's now big enough, that having some pre-selection of high quality-plugins accessible from within the app, would make sense.
This is the way.
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.
Your goals are not the same as the person making a Youtube video. Nobody's going to put down "Highly Proficient with Obsidian" on their resume in hopes of it giving them an edge in the job search.
A cottage industry of people have thus sprung up around providing this content, and recommendation algorithms and search results wind up being dominated by this content.
For a new user who's just heard about something, the path is often straight to this content, which then leads some to bouncing off of it because it seems too daunting.
I use a semi-bullet journal method in my Obsidian notebook for work, but it’s even more basic than what Ryder Carroll outlined and I don’t care that much. Not caring is extremely helpful.
Now my system is geared towards minimal friction from "crap, I need to remember this" to actually storing it in Obsidian.
Currently I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that activates when I double tap the key on the left side of 1 on my keyboard, which then will activate Obsidian (or start it if needed) and brings it to the front with a QuickAdd dialog where I can write down whatever I was thinking about.
QuickAdd will then append it to an Inbox file with a timestamp. I might take a look at it later or maybe not, but at least it's written down _somewhere_ =)
On the Mac I was using Hammerspoon for this. On Windows it would have been something like AutoHotKey.
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.
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.
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.
That's a terrible excuse.
Your terminal is a separate process and should not affect how the editor itself feels. The language server exists out of process. The linters / type checkers exist out of process. (Or at least shouldn't block the main interaction/GUI thread) If those things make editing slow, either the design or the implementation is bad.
Sublime text runs the same stuff for me and works much faster than vscode. No excuses.
Okay but this discussion is about electron apps. Sublime isn't.
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.
I'd be curious to hear what the "highly productive" academics you know use.
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?
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.
This is my main worry about choosing Obsidian for the long run. The devs seem very opinionated about a system that is meant to be customizable to each user's workflow.
Their Vim implementation does not support setting hard line breaks, making modal editing a little funky (every paragraph is just one long line and any action working on a line will work on the entire paragraph, such as "dd").
Came from Vim-Wiki (and Org-mode and some other short-lived note-taking systems) and I think the plugin hell of Vim/Emacs (or VS Code) is much worse than Obsidian. You can get by without any addons in Obsidian as it's built to be a notetaking system first, not a general text editor. You can't do the same with Vim (hence needing "Vim-Wiki" plugin).
I 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.
#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.
I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say.
All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports.
Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed.
As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over.
But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.
But I think I can definitely see where some of the burden of sorting and cleaning things up (following bug templates, or avoiding duplicate feature requests, etc.) could be abstracted away from the users, so that even if they can't be guaranteed any followup, they at least don't get the experience of being instantly shot down, just because we're trying to organize a busy forum.
For example, I really like how Linear App takes feedback. They have a button in the app, with a simple text-field prompt, "What if...". All the sorting and prioritizing is invisible to the users, but then somehow they even send a courtesy email to users after a related change has been made. That might be a function of team size vs. userbase size. No idea.
Definitely some room to improve. I'll pass this conversation on to the team, thanks.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
We're all suckers for processes that promise to solve all your problems, aren't we?
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.
It doesn't have to be infinite canvas in practice, just allow enough width and length to let you put down your cursor anywhere and start writing/pasting images or whatever you wish.
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.
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.
There are other solutions via plugins too. E.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, or GitHub. There was a post earlier in HN which is a reimplementation of Obsidian Sync, but it seems their reversed engineering uncovered something not secure there and Obsidian soon made a patch breaking that. There might be workarounds to fix it, but I haven't closely follow it.
When I have the time to do the refactoring and cleaning, I will probably choose one of these alternatives (or even an alternative of Obsidian if there are better solutions for me.)
But the way you say it seems to mean it no longer work?
It's weird how there's even a large enough market for all of these in the first place.
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.
I've also never read a book so packed with redundancy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You certainly could create your own lock-in by making some unique workflow that requires a combination of plug-ins to function. The plugins are all third party, some of them are just annotating the existing markdown files, some are just visual.
Like having a template for my Daily Note that also automatically includes all files tagged #todo using Data View. Or a few global shortcuts via Keyboard Maestro that open specific notes on Obsidian.
I could maybe whip up a similar system in a day on top of any editor that can render Markdown and handle links, but now I don't need to.
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?
Evidently it requires not only transfer, but some kind of transformation that they do in their cloud, and I'm not interested in another cloud subscription, particularly one so specific. (Happy to pay for the software & updates, just not to maintain the subscription and maintain the concern about another connection in the loop)
This was a couple years ago. Perhaps this has changed, or there's now a plugin to make such a bidirectional transfer work?
TIA for any suggestions!
Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.
You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.
It reportedly causes problems if you edit the same file in two different places at the same time, it will generate a conflict when saving since the files won't match, doesn't affect me in my workflow (if I have access to my desktop I won't use it on my phone) but YMMV
Once you actually understand how sync works in details it does wonders.
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.
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"
Looks like it's still alive and kicking. I guess you're probably upset by a lack of updates or something - luckily upgrading to a paid plan would be a good way to incentivize whoever is developing it to continue working on it, at least at the margin.
What you missed is that the paid offer didn‘t stop the developers to lose interest and… start Obsidian!
Subscriptions do motivate ongoing development, but only if there's a threat to stop going or start incurring subscriber losses. Product software categories have different ratios of customers who buy subscriptions for the current utility vs the investment into future utility.
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.
Personally I haven’t considered it because of that. I have no use for a complex notes app in my private life, and there’s no way my employer would pay for the subscription.
I 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.
Pocket is about as close as it gets it seems...
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.
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.”
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.
Neither do the other apps I mentioned. They use folders of text files (sometimes with a proprietary database option). They are not general purpose editors meant to just open whatever random file you want on the drive.
Not true. I don't know about nvalt, but Notational Velocity Bear and Ulysses are all saving things in a local database and sync them to the cloud. And all have their own special view on the data too. There is no direct filesystem-access.
> They are not general purpose editors meant to just open whatever random file
I was talking about folders, not files. And not just any random file or folder, but obviously folders with files supported by Obsidian. Which BTW is also not limited to Markdown, thanks to the plugin-system.
And Obsidian is even supporting this, but only through the clunky Interface.
Case in point: one of my favorite productivity plugins is a full-fledged Kanban board. It has deep integration into Obsidian features:
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.
But I recently discussed my reasoning to go close-source[2]. I've been working night and day (every day) converting 4 cups of coffee into code for the last 4.5 months to create Plume. I don't want to risk not being rewarded sufficiently for it. But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.
Why withhold the remaining 1%? If you aren't so confident about your decision to open source, there's no need to commit to that decision now.
It's good that you are leaving the door open, but keep in mind that if some folks suddenly become successful with a service that can turn any GitHub repo into a nice looking SaaS, at the click of a button and for a super low fee, I'm pretty sure you'll be hesitant to open source all your hard work so it can harvested.
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!
You can also get your icloud drive and photos this way.
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.
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.
Obsidian's tabs along the top show open documents, whereas with OneNote it's more a placeholder for more data.
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".
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
Honestly I like everything about obsidian except the markdown, but I know for many people that is it's big selling point.
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.
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/
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.
I'm trialling both with syncthing across multiple machines and so far no data loss but I'll make sure backups are in place!
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.
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)
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).
Edit: found her: https://youtube.com/@nicolevdh
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.
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 :)
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).
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!
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.
Not really, markdown has tons of tiny implementation details. And I can not use PDF annotation plugin in Emacs...
> markdown has tons of tiny implementation details. And I can not use PDF annotation plugin in Emacs
The same can be said about any other open format, I guess. There's no free lunch, you're always locked in by the implementation/workflow details, and have to write actual code (or use the code written by someone else) to migrate off to a different tool. The point is to not be locked by the format obfuscation or the storage.
I need to be absolutely sure PDF annotation tool will be around in a year 2050! Obsidian may withdraw their subscription offer at any time! Or raise subscription to $10000 per year (someone here says much higher price would be a steal!). I will always be able to run Logseq PDF annotator! Maybe in virtual machine. Or I will patch it (I have source code!!!). I have control over it!
And I really really hate fiddling with plugins. I was never much of Vim/Emacs guy for this reasons (prefer integrated IDEs such Idea). Logseq just works without setting up dozens of plugins and scripts. I use vanilla version with two plugins (video timestamp annotations and extra theme).
Refactoring is perhaps strong word, more like mouse dragging and copy&paste. It just feels like refactoring code. I can move things around without worrying something disappears or gets forgotten. I can also leave things half finished, without negative effects on readability and discoverability.
I want my data checked into git, and directly accessible. I don't feel like custom schemas and database drivers, as a user, do anything but make the operational loop painful.
I can quickly use any mdast library/toolkits and some terrible shell scripts to make anything possible in moments.
But rather than having a self explanatory markdown & flat file, now I have to start learning about the schema & making specific tools (in my preferred language) for manipulating Joplin's schema.
Suddenly I'm digging through 20 different technic specs to decode what data is where, how it works, and what I can do to it. Want to edit history? This is the best help you'll get, pray it's adequately technical to expedite you to your purpose: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/dev/spec...
As I began with, I struggle to imagine anything that generates anywhere near as much user agency as flat files and markdown. Having boring common data & systems lets me apply portable skills I already have, rather than having to skill up in some particular product's own ecosystem.
On desktop: Nvim with some markdown plugins plus Goyo
On mobile: Obsidian
Syncthing for sync (though previously I've Dropbox as well for the same)
On desktop I find Obsidian's vim mode slightly uncanny valley-ish. Close enough to be able to emulate my vim flow. But not _quite_ right.
On mobile, I've found Obsidian to be just top class. Though admittedly most of my real note taking happens on desktop, on the few occassions I've had to jot down something quick on mobile, Obsidian app has been perfect.
I 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.
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.
For neovim markdown plugins my recommendations are SidOfc/mkdx and dbridges/vim-markdown-runner.
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/
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.
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!
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.
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.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/90sbrx0esggnsmbsva2hg/Video-J...
Did it progressively get worse over time? I only have a couple hundred notes.
Editing files is even slower since you have to pick a file from the android file search.
It's a well designed app otherwise.
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.
I prefer Obsidian since I like the UI and they offer a subscription for sync, which is very convenient.
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.
The incentives are aligned -> If a specific car model won't be safe, people won't buy it. Also, there is regulation in place.
I think we need exactly the right combo in software too. Obsidian is not open source, but you can gauge what they track in their privacy policy. You can try to confirm it using apps like Little Snitch. Also, all their notes are just plaintext so your data is portable.
The world is not this black and white. This assumes the customer actually knows all of the pros and cons of available options and is able to take the time to make a decision that best aligns with their values. In practice (at least in the US) we have and infrastructure that makes it practically impossible for many people to live their lives without a car, and purchasing decisions are based almost exclusively on marketing materials and social forces.
> Obsidian is not open source, but you can gauge what they track in their privacy policy
A privacy policy is a pinkie promise. Why depend on something so fragile for such an important function in your life, when there are much more trustworthy options? Logseq, Org Roam, and Joplin immediately come to mind.
> A privacy policy is a pinkie promise. Why depend on something so fragile for such an important function in your life, when there are much more trustworthy options? Logseq, Org Roam, and Joplin immediately come to mind.
Yep, I agree. This is why my own previous note-taking app is completely open source[1]. But this comes with many difficulties, and often times subpar experience compared to closed source apps. That's why I decided to close source my next note taking app[2].
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...
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.
So that's where I'm experimenting with this stance: it's either useful and I'm better off remembering it, or it's useless and I don't even need to write that down (see my first comment in this thread).
> It's good to have a single place for all of that with the ability to easily move stuff from one place to another.
Why aren't our brains better places for this, provided we can retain the information? With SRS such as Anki, the cost of remembering the information on top of writing it down is negligible, and once I remember it, why would I write it down in some other system?
No, that's obviously not how the universe and information work. Pareto principle here at play as well.
> Why aren't our brains better places for this
Because they aren't. That's a strange question. Reality is reality., Our brains are not made for remembering (rote memorization; a mere 3-7 items can be short-term remembered and juggled with at one time), but for thinking and making connections.
Computers are amazing at storing information, but can't think.
If one is smart, he utilizes the strengths of tools/opportunities that are available to him instead of using them inefficiently.
I guess I'd need to see somebody either solely using a Zettelkasten, or Zettelkasten and SRS, and see what's in the Zettelkasten that I couldn't put in an SRS just as conveniently. It must also be content-specific; maybe I'd see a benefit if I were a sociologist like Niklas Luhmann was, but I'm not.
Another thing that changed since Luhmann's time is just how cheap it has become to retrieve most information. His Zettelkasten probably allowed him to quickly fetch information he remembered vaguely, faster than it'd be to open his books and see where it is. This benefit is mostly gone now that there are even faster options.
I have a license for Working Copy, so I use that alone with shortcuts, but I’m always interested in a solution with fewer 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.
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.
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.
For Android, you can use trilium as a PWA currently, I do that and it's not bad at all, but offline isn't supported yet. I would say that the UX through the PWA isn't worse than that of Obsidian. If offline on your phone is a requirement, you should be able to run trilium server there (haven't tried): https://github.com/Nriver/awesome-trilium#-android
There is managed hosting too, at a very fair price I'd say (compared to the alternatives): https://trilium.cc/
Android Server+Hosted Cloud Server+PWA seems a bit hacky though. And it's hard to beat free when you're on a low budget.
Keep also has some fairly unmatched deep integrations with Assistant and Wear OS.
It looks really nice for people who already mostly take notes on the computer and don't use any Google spy features anyway.
I self-host, so for me the practical free, sustainable option with all features included is Trilium. I'm generally wary of the freemium core + (no so) optional paid features + early access plans paid towards companies which haven't turned a profit yet. After all, that's how many people are now discovering Obsidian, while escaping an ever enshitifying Evernote.
> Keep also has some fairly unmatched deep integrations with Assistant and Wear OS.
Absolutely, if I want reminders and things showing up in GMail, Google makes sure that I can't adventure very far away from its walled garden. The type of notes I take in Trilium are personal thoughts, family matters, logs of memorable activities (meetings, meals, outings, …), work notes, summaries, elements to later compose in deliverables or emails, that kind of stuff. And because this is all relational and "typed" in nature ("meetings" implies "places" and "persons", "deliverables" implies "projects" or even "milestones"), Obsidian just doesn't cut it.
Apparently, SiYuan, which is very much a competitor of Obsidian with an opensource core is in the process of implementing a basic version of Notion's "databases" [0]. It still falls short for my needs (no polymorphism to extend types, no cardinality to specify the type and directionality of relations), but it might be a big step forward for many people here having started on Obsidian and bumped into its limitations.
It has a couple of minor UI/UX issues, even with the plugins.
Anyone tried both? How does Obsidian compare against Joplin?
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.
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.
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
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!
Too bad the project has ended as there is no clear approach for the Dendron team to make it financially sustainable (with their cloud sync subscription, much like Obsidian Sync). But it's basically opensource now so hopefully can be forked and the lessons learnt from Obsidian be applied to it (e.g. Any folder of textfile should be openable under Dendron. Unfortunate at the moment you have to initialize a separate repo and then port it over)
I 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.
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.
Before I used Standard Notes, I was mostly satisfied with a private Github repo, containing Markdown files and NeoVim.
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...
There was a comment to a Notion related submission the other day that talked about something Notion like but self hosted, that's be fine too but I can't find it right now.
I 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...
The fact that everything is in plain text files on my computer is very important for me and future proofed.
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
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.
Also consider trying Emacs org mode.
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.
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.
I'll go ahead and do a shameless plug for an alternative built with similar philosophy around privacy & data ownership aimed at developers https://acreom.com
Do you support collecting individual checkbox items into a unified view as well?
Would you also consider adding an outline view/toc? Tysm!
> Would you also consider adding an outline view/toc? already supported!
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.
We use Git sync today and its very cumbersome.
- an iPhone - Google Workspace (+ Google Drive) - Multiple desktops/laptops - Dropbox
Is there a single solution that doesn't cost an arm and a leg?
It seems like they really want you to use iCloud
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.
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.
Another reason stopping me from using apple notes is that their search sucks (both within note and across all notes)
Huh. Having actually written that out, that should be easy. I know what I’m doing this morning.
Edit: That also turned into a new blog post at https://honeypot.net/post/making-notes-looks-like-markdown-e... . Thanks for the nudge! I've been trying to get into a cadence, but hadn't had anything to talk about recently.
source?
> allows structure to grow organically
> powerful feature ... Internal Links.
> plain text files
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).
# 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.
If you rewrite your comment with lists I think your question becomes self-explanatory.
<h1>My Title</h1>
<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
You can comfortably read plaintext that has a little structure, while HTML adds some ceremony that makes it a bit harder to glance at the material as the tags are much more in your face.
``` - [ ] Item 1 - [ ] Item 2 ```
``` <ul> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 1</label></li> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 2</label></li> </ul> ```
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.
I am in the camp if I like the idea of Obsidian but I have a bunch of other stuff I want to include and do stuff with like JSON-LD data for example.
But the idea of writing raw HTML is in fact a huge pain in the ass as everyone was all too eager to point out here.
We have had markdown to HTML converters and visual editing experiences for a long time now and I don’t know why the argument has to be “write in raw HTML” I barely even want to write Markdown when taking notes, I just want to write.
So in that spirit I think HTML and and in browser experience is in fact the right answer I just need to put an editor on top of it and a way to run code when I hit publish to update the graph visualisations and statistics that people seem to really like with Obsidian.
I actually think this might be a really good usecase for the built in IndexedDB API built into browsers so long as you can also back it up and sync across devices.
But I still don't know what Obsidian gives you besides letting you write in Markdown instead of HTML. And that is basically a Markdown to HTML converter, as you pointed out.
We could have that exact same workflow and user interface with HTML.
I (presumably along with the person you’re replying to) don’t understand what value Markdown as the storage format is providing here exactly but I can think of many limitations it imposes.
I’m not against markdown as an idea of file format, I’m just saying that it has some pretty clear limitations that I think are very much within the scope of what I want out of a tool like that and that weird MDX format they have as a substitute is a step backwards in my opinion.
Your answer was that that doesn't matter. If that's your view, you are welcome to it, but that's why /other/ people choose Markdown over HTML for notes.
I don't understand where all the feelings are coming from. :)
People do not find writing SGML-based formats ergonomic for focusing on the content of their writing. SGML-based formats are great for formats that need to be both human-readable, but also unambiguous and extensible for machine parsing, but awful when the task is purely just producing writing.
If I need HTML from my writings in Markdown, there are a plethora of tools to handle that; I don't need to waste vital brain bandwidth on writing perfect spec-complaint HTML when Markdown handles only the task of writing structured text and does it well.
Markdown does not handle layout, and barely handles tables. It is the technological equivalent of HTML 1.0, and does not contaminate itself with the task of presentation like how the evolution of HTML over the years has.
> I was just wondering if there's anything else that Obsidian offers besides Markdown syntax, since hyperlinking documents and application-agnostic data formats are also features of HTML.
Yet you reply asking if there is anything beyond Markdown. That's dismissing what a lot of people have reiterated: Markdown is the main thing.
You keep looking for a different killer feature because you are dismissing everyone else's killer feature.
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
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.