For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.
But don't install Obsidian and then spend hours adding addons. You'll get overwhelmed, confused and wondering why all the Influenzers are saying it's CHANGED THEIR LIFE. It hasn't.
I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134
https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manual
The cool thing about Howm is that it's note-taking and task management for lazy people. It predates org-mode (but it also works with it nowadays) and has a distinct way of linking notes by way of go-to and come-from links, think saved search and automatic backlink respectively. Also the way tasks are displayed and surfaced is pretty neat too, the guide/manual goes more in-depth but if you find stuff like org-agenda too complex you'll appreciate Howm's way of tracking and managing tasks.
It is a simple markdown editor yes but it's the addons that make it so different. There's tons and tons of markdown notetaking apps, but this one just hit the right balance for me. End to End encryption, self-hosted livesync (I can see myself typing from another client), good mobile support, fast searching. Self-hosting is a must-have for me, even with end to end encryption.
The one thing I miss is a bit more security on Android (it would be great if the app offered an option to hide its files from other apps by locating them in the app's private storage area). And for it to start quicker, it has to load a whole browser on every open because it's an electron app even on mobile.
But overall it's great for me. Not earth-shattering but it just offers the right combination of features for me.
I don't really see what the 'wankery' is.
> Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.
For me there are several third party addons that are invaluable. The livesync plugin first of all, it's really great sync and fully self-hosted. This is quite a complex thing to get working and one where so many other apps fall down.
ReadItLater for capturing websites is also pretty nice. And the copilot one for searching notes with RAG.
For what it's worth, you can do just that now. Not sure when it was introduced, but on the current Android version, you are prompted to select either "Device storage" or "App storage" when creating a new vault.
You can also change the location of existing vaults from app to device and vice-versa.
With that now available, the one thing missing for me is a biometric lock option. Or even any kind of locking at all. There's a community plugin for that, but it's quite unstable and no longer maintained.
But it does have a "secure folder" which is more or less what you mean by "spaces", I guess.
The downside of the secure folder against normal app locking is that the apps are no longer seamlessly integrated with the launcher and other apps. It's definitely more secure but is ultimately overkill for my needs.
And I also have a work profile as well through "Island" :)
The option is available to move a vault from the app to the device storage, but not the other way around. At least not from within Obsidian.
But if you use a PC or a file manager that has full device access, you can manually copy the vault folder to the `/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/md.obsidian/files` directory.
I just tried that and Obsidian recognised it.
nobody cares what you think people "should" do
I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing).
Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative links and weird plugins that break the premise of having universal markdown files. Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
wow okay, I kept thinking that there must be more to it, why does it only list my files that I can already see in my filetree on the left, like what's the point? I was expecting to see something like what Atlassian has in Confluence (which was also far more intuitive to create btw) https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a...
> Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my "<Project> Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).
A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch".
Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy.
Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two.
Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be.
Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear.
Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way?
I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile.
I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this.
Edit- To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.
The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik
I tried going down the road like you’re talking about one for managing past, present, and future trips. It technically worked, but it was so fiddly that I hated using it. I just made a few folders instead.
I suppose now, if I wanted all the metadata you’re talking about, using a base would make the most sense. But I’d still need to be realistic about how I’m going to use it. Do I care enough about future sorting abilities to turn adding a movie to a watch list into a multi-field form, where I need to consider all these potential futures to fill it out, creating a lot of friction to the action?
For a personal knowledge base I think the latter approach saves time in the long run. I have clusters of well organized information. Well tagged and linked. I can always find my movie ideas, projects, and deep thoughts when I want them. I like the idea of just curating the clusters I care about. Just enough organizing. I then have a few highly connected entry points to my clusters. Often I find people don’t link enough in their Obsidian. It’s free and puts things in a more graph oriented layout that the tool can show you.
Edit: oh, also remember, these are text files. Grep still works. Also, we have very powerful CLI LLMs to summarize and categorize text data rapidly. Like “suggest 3 tags for this document based on <prompt magic here>. :)
The hubs described are nice, but they don't always reflect larger changes. Updating a hub becomes a dependency that seems silly as I feel like that should be one of the easier things to keep up to date with a basic code overlay. It's one of the first things I wrote when messing with Obsidian, and part of why I really like dendron (easy refactoring, but it's got other issues).
I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!
Thanks for bringing this history up, and I think everyone should be careful when downloading a new version for this product, or better build by themselves after checking out the recents commits with some AI tools.
When I was looking for nv->then->simplenote replacement Joplin and Obsidian didn't even stay on the radar for more than a few mins.
Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.
For me it's a feature.
It can be fun to explore various features and extensions, but set limits and try to keep things simple rather than complex.
Similar to Obsidian, but offers good code syntax highlighting in markdown files.
I found it useful for reading code in markdown.
‘’’go {your code} ‘’’
I've seen this feature off and on in some online code editors. I didn't know this was a (universal?) Markdown feature. Is it supposed to work universally in all Markdown editors (e.g. VSCode's Markdown view)?
Based on the documentation and the screenshot next to it, I don't see how it differs from Obsidian on this point.
A Markdown code block in Obsidian is going to be highlighted as expected.
Actually it appears that they both relies on Prism to achieve this :
- https://help.obsidian.md/syntax#Code+blocks
- https://github.com/suchnsuch/Tangent/blob/main/apps/tangent-...
My other advice is that it’s fine to boot up new vaults for other things. I’ve got two main vaults - a sort of work KB and a journal. But then I’ve got a bunch of smaller ones - songs I’m writing, courses I’m making, writing. Don’t be told that you’ve got to get some kind of universal thing that does everything. This is also b/s and often pedalled by the productivity wonks.