I've migrated from Roam to Obsidian and it's really awesome. I have ownership of my files, there are constant updates with newer features and bug fixes and the community is really nice :)
I've never been involved in any software testing until I stumbled upon Obsidian a couple weeks ago, been testing it with a bunch of other PKM nerds and #Roamcult refugees ever since, it's been a quite exiting and rewarding experience. Really looking forward to the plugin ecosystem, no doubt it is going to become one of the most promising PKM solutions in the future.
This app has changed the way I take notes - markdown, local files, wiki-style [[backlinking]], and Latex support has made it fun to build a personal knowledge base.
I never liked the hierarchical structure of most note taking systems, and backlinking just lets you write - you navigate the network structure later (you can also still use a hierarchy on top of the network structure if that's your thing).
I've had a lot of success with even less organization -- writing one giant append-only markdown file per project. Search for the thing you want and it usually comes up. Notes have a timestamp and they're in order, so it's not hard to determine whether they're still relevant.
Maker here, excited to be on Hacker News. Obsidian is going into public beta today! (We're also on Product Hunt, come check us out!)
We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services.
We believe you second brain should work similarly to your own brain and connections are crucial in thinking. Obsidian supports [[internal links]] between your notes out of the box, and provide a powerful graph view and backlink pane to help you understand your knowledge.
We also noticed how personal note-taking and knowledge management is, so we built Obsidian to be very extensible from the start, and let you put together your own workflow with plugins like daily notes and page preview as building blocks.
This leads to our three fundamental values of Obsidian:
1. Local-first, Markdown plain text based;
2. Link as first-citizen.
3. As extensible as possible.
Obsidian is a powerful front-end for your knowledge, like an IDE for your notes.
Are you going to add some features for more structured data? I'm thinking about tables like in Notion where you can sort by any column. Working with Markdown tables is very clunky.
The closest thing in Markdown is probably front-matters. You're right in that Obsidian is not great for structured data right now, and for that purpose Notion or Airtable is much better.
If you need to edit tables then you could just use TableFlip, gives you a spreadsheet style interface to edit tables, automatically updates your markdown file without the need to copy paste https://tableflipapp.com
can you do a quick and dirty screenshare demo of how you use it and post that to youtube? e.g. setting up some notes after a fake brainstorming session or micro LSD dose etc..
Have you any good resources for getting started with this graph-type note-taking? Currently I just used notable.md in a NextCloud folder and it works pretty slickly.
Not aware of many good resources since it's pretty new, but you can probably look into the Zettelkasten method.
The gist is to make your notes atomic and link them together whenever possible. [[ links provides auto-complete, and the backlink plugin tells you what notes links to this note, and what notes mention it but don't explicit link it.
The graph view is for discovery and navigation mostly. It lets you discover clusters, and identify "orphan" nodes that aren't connected anything. That might inspire you to think of connections and strength your knowledge network.
What do you think about CMS usecases like blogging? Where you'd write locally and maybe define some notes or a folder for static site generation, maybe triggering rebuilds from within Obsidian?
We still want to give you the option to export internal links to standard [Markdown](link) links so that static site generators or sites like GitBooks can understand them out of the box.
Obsidian looks great! And I think it will be greater if I can write `[](another_markdown)` as internal links too, it will be easier to generate HTML files to host, using Hugo or something. If people save all markdown files in one folder then it's the same word count as [[another_markdown]].
I would just like to point out John Gruber disavowed the []() syntax on Twitter. He even said he would like to accept reverse brackets, since it's such a common problem.
I have been using personal wikis for about a decade, and 99% of the time I make an internal link, I want the caption to be the same as the page name.
I wish that the Markdown standard would just specify to render [[Page]] as [Page](Page).
To be fair, John Gruber has disavowed a lot of modern Markdown features and syntaces, so it's not exactly an authority statement anymore for today's Markdown. It's why CommonMark exists.
this is awesome! i see the 'zettelkasten link fixer' in the markdown format importer ("Fixes [[UID]] links to full [[UID File Name]].") - any plans/thoughts on just supporting [[UID]]? this seems less brittle to me in that you won't break all of your backlinks if you change the (non-ID) part of the filename.
+1 for this request, which would allow better interoperability with "The Archive" (from zettelkasten.de). I built my Zettelkasten links in "The Archive" using [[UID]]. Obsidian looks fantastic and I'd love to give it a try but my existing links do not work. As a side note, the other feature from "The Archive" I miss is the ability to create buttons for custom searches in the left sidebar.
Where can I read more about this? My current personal wiki is powered by TiddlyWiki and while I don't necessarily love the performance, I do LOVE the link structure of TiddlyWiki (I can create a "table of contents" page a random tag, and then every page using that tag gets rendered on said page). I have similar plugins for VSCode to collect all of my todo comments all into one document, linking back to their respective files.
Curious if Obsidian has a similar feature beyond the mind-map view shown on the features page?
Backlinks, thank you. That was the word I was trying to think of and describe exactly this, missed it by THAT much, heh-drinks more coffee. Cheers, I'll definitely be taking this for a spin
Dang, my optical nerve retracted and disconnected from the retina, and is now sitting in some dark corner of some bar in the adrenal cortex drinking whisky in pure protest to your H1 styling.
Kids? I'm probably old enough to vehemently request that you kindly get off my greensward.
But let us not get bogged down with ageism, the real question is what kind of monster uses both cyan and magenta text-shadow diagonally offset against each other???? !!! .... ?
The anaglyph effect is what I tweaked. It's not too unreadable with simpler fonts--I 100% acknowledge readability takes a massive hit with both the fraktur and the anaglyph. Ultimately, though, my goal with that blog is mostly to have fun, so the expressive aspect is important to me. I may play around later with doing an animated effect (a la https://codepen.io/anatravas/pen/mOyNWR ) so the glitchy vibe remains strong but there are more readable keyframes. (Would a proper designer use animated text like this? Certainly not. Am I a proper designer? Certainly certainly not.)
I'm all for artistic freedom.
Just letting you know in a jestful way that the design (and I am certainly not a proper, nor any other kind, designer either) that the design detracted/distracted from the message for this reader, to the point where I just hit back.
Then I went back in again, and started poking around with the element inspector. Then we had this discussion, and I am still not sure what the page content was actually about, but I have a sense that I might have found it interesting if I had stuck with it.
Fair enough; that artistic aspect means that for me, the design is part of the message so it's worth keeping. I think I do a similar thing with unstyled websites a la https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ ; the content has to look very interesting to me to be worth copying and pasting in CSS a la http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ to actually read the thing. It's interesting to think about the wide range of tolerances out there for different kinds of visual presentation.
Looks pretty great to me. I have a great book called Fraktur Mon Amour. Unfortunately it is out of print but if you can still get it somewhere I wholeheartedly recommend it.
Yup! The cool thing about Tiddlywiki is that because it's one massive blob that executes clientside, and because it's designed to be extensible, you can yank the plugin Stroll uses right out of Stroll. If you go to https://giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html and click plugins on the sidebar, you can see a list of installed plugins; Stories is what he's using to get the second column, and it shows up with this link: https://giffmex.org/stroll/stroll.html#%24%3A%2Fplugins%2Fsq...
Click and drag that to the tab with your own TW open, and you're good to go!
I haven't used that plugin so I don't know if it's good or whatnot, but there you are.
What's the concern for? A lot of great jobs still have penny-pinching managers. I've worked somewhere notoriously Frugal that was good and paid well but had no problem denying requests like this.
Is it worth the time to deny a (well intentioned) $150 request made by a software developer who costs a company (for example) $150K total (salary, benefits, and fixed costs)? $150 is 0.1% of $150K.
What are the benefits and costs? Some questions to ask include:
- How much time did the company spend in the process of denying this request? By the time you include emails, research, context switching, etc, I think it is fair to say this might consume 15 minutes of the engineer's time and 15 minutes of the denier's time. That would be 0.5 hours; assuming $80/hr, that is $40.
- What is the likely effect? Will it discourage an employee from trying a new tool? Might it encourage a culture of "build it here" rather than pay to use something that already exists? Might it encourage an employee to abuse the license? Might this increase the legal risk of the company? In the case of, say, online learning, it might encourage employees to browse dozens of crappy web resources rather than simply paying for a high quality learning resource. My point: being stingy has real effects on human behavior.
- Does the company pay the same level of detail to other areas that could easily save more money? Three examples: (1) Does a company need to spend $200/year/person on junk food or bottled water? (2) Does a company look carefully at ways to improve energy efficiency? (3) Does a company have a smart, regularly practiced, data-recovery plan in place? I could go on; I think you see my point: it is wiser to allocate effort and oversight in proportion to impact.
- To what degree does the company have issues with trust and accountability? What is the effect on morale are discouraged from trying and paying for useful software and tooling?
I think my overarching point is, again, illustrated by questions: What does a company truly value? Are they mindful and realistic about their costs and benefits?
P.S. This may be obvious to some (but not all): paying for software is not necessarily a bad thing. Open source has many advantages, but without ongoing contributions and/or a funding strategy, open source software is not necessarily a "safer" bet than closed-source software. A better litmus test is "can I export my data in a useful way if I decide to leave or switch?"
This seems like an argument for buying SDEs needed software. It doesn't seem like an argument against the idea that you can work somewhere where they refuse to buy things like this, and still have it be a good job.
If your job pays well, work is interesting, good commute, good benefits, good manager, good coworkers, important mission, or a net positive combination of these things, that seems way more important than whether or not they'll buy you arbitrary software.
> This seems like an argument for buying SDEs needed software.
It depends on what the company values. This is what I meant when I wrote: "What does a company truly value? Are they mindful and realistic about their costs and benefits?"
> ALittleLight: It doesn't seem like an argument against the idea that you can work somewhere where they refuse to buy things like this, and still have it be a good job.
Correct, I made no such argument. You are free to make that value judgment.
It depends where you sit. Maybe you want to dig into ways an organization can improve? If so, that gets into questions about organizational values as well as costs and benefits of various options.
> ALittleLight: If your job pays well, work is interesting, good commute, good benefits, good manager, good coworkers, important mission, or a net positive combination of these things, that seems way more important than whether or not they'll buy you arbitrary software.
Again, feel free to make such a value judgement.
However, I would not use the word 'arbitrary' here, since in employment situations, there will be some understanding around expenses, often set out in policies and conversations. Even in organizations that are more flexible with expenses, employees are expected to use good judgment for business expenses.
I'm curious: were you expecting that my comment offer "an argument against the idea that you can work somewhere where they refuse to buy things like this, and still have it be a good job."?
Because it seems like you are talking to a dev, not a manager. Assume the dev is already onboard with the idea of being compensated; the original comment was "I'd be more concerned if you had a hard time getting reimbursed" i.e from the POV of the employee.
Yes, I saw you aren't using the same account name. That's why I asked.
At the risk of saying something we already know, HN discussion isn't limited to one person's definition of what a "hacker" or "developer" is:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find
> interesting. That includes more than hacking and
> startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence,
> the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
> intellectual curiosity.
I think it is easy to forget, so I just want to write this here... People here may work on building technology (hardware, software, biotech), running companies, leading teams, thinking about problems to solve, how to be effective, how to deal with stress and mental issues, and lots more. So, talking about organizational culture is on-topic.
You may prefer to discuss something from the point of view of a software developer. You may have desire to keep threads organized and on-topic.
Personally, I think your assessment of the "context of the thread" is both overly narrow and off target. But my goal is not to convince you my interpretation is correct...
...My goal is to show that your interpretation of the context of the thread is subjective. Again, subjective is fine; we don't need to agree. I want to emphasize that reasonable people can see it differently from you. I hope that you (and everyone on HN) can recognize this and think it through before they say a comment is "irrelevant".
So, forgive me for asking, but I can't help but wonder how you approached this thread. With curiosity? With a goal of understanding? With some other driving factors?
I would like to highlight a few important points from the HN guidelines that think we can all learn from (myself included) ...
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of
> other people's work. A good critical comment teaches
> us something.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible
> interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
> that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation;
> don't cross-examine. Comments should get more
> thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets
> more divisive.
On a personal note, I put considerable thought into my comment -- phrasing it with open-ended questions where I implied some arguments in play. I offered food for thought. I was hoping for substantive responses, not claims that the comment was off topic. In addition, I found some of the resulting comments to be unconstructive. I think we owe it to each other to help each other and make the most of our precious time here on the planet.
One motivation for reading this comment, frankly, is a plea for people to re-examine their communication tendencies and the resulting effects on (a) your ability to learn (e.g. a growth mindset); (b) this community; (c) all communities.
Can be a bit more specific? Your words imply accusations without explicitly making them, and it comes across as two-faced to me.
* why are you highlighting those HN guidelines?
* who are the "people" you want to "re-examine their communication tendencies", and what motivates this plea?
* why are you curious about how I "approached this thread"?
That aside,
I answered your question: replying to a thread in an ambiguous or open-ended manner will cause people to fill in the gaps (infer your meaning) from the context of the thread. If your meaning does not follow from the context (i.e. is a non-sequitur) it's likely you will be misunderstood; In this case that you were offering "an argument against the idea that you can work somewhere where they refuse to buy things like this, and still have it be a good job."
Re: 1 & 2: I would like HN participants to consider the HN guidelines, because I often see what appears to be a lack of awareness. Following the guidelines (many of which are about self-reflection and tone) helps shape the community discussion constructively.
Re 3: I asked because I want to understand your motivations here.
Yes, I understand the general idea of non-sequiturs.
In summary, I think an accurate and charitable reading of my comment will realize that it was not a non sequitur nor off-topic.
Above your comment said:
> Im telling you the context of the thread implied it, otherwise your comments arent relevant to the POV of a dev.
My comments are relevant to the point of view of a developer. Moreover, HN discussion is about more than the POV of a developer.
Why did you to cite those particular guideline in this specific thread? Why ask about my motivations.
It seems like you are dodging the question(s) i.e If you have some generality about HN participants, why put it in this thread (and not others). Since you don't put it in your profile, or copy-paste it in every comment you make, it seems to me there's a reason.
> In summary, I think an accurate and charitable reading of my comment will realize that it was not a non sequitur nor off-topic.
Another back-handed response, as it implies my own comments (which made the opposite conclusion) is therefore either/or not accurate, or not charitable. If you believe this, then why not explicitly say so - and then defend that position? you say "In summary", but I can't see what part of this post you are summarising.
> My comments are relevant to the point of view of a developer. Moreover, HN discussion is about more than the POV of a developer.
They might relevant, if there is enough context to understand them. And we are not talking about what is relevant to "HN discussion" - we are talking about this thread in particular.
I don’t know you or anything about your life experiences. I asked about your motivations because I was curious.
My goal here is to use a calm, measured language. I was hoping this would help the conversation, but perhaps it upset you. You called my comments ‘back-handed’ and ‘two-faced’. I didn’t intend them that way.
You could have chosen different words. You may realize the words you chose were harsher than necessary. Even if you were correct in your assessment, which I don’t think you were, those choice of words will likely have a negative effect in a conversation. Especially online, particularly with someone you don’t know.
BTW, I am genuinely sorry if you think I’m trying to insult you in an obscure or sneaky way. I’m not. Doing that would be unkind.
Speaking of your claims that my comments were ‘two-faced’ or ‘back-handed’, there is another explanation. (Skip two paragraphs down for that)
If there’s one thing I could get across to you, it is: please open your mind to other explanations. Be charitable towards others. Don’t assume malice.
If you think you are already as charitable as you can be, then I don’t expect this advice to bother you. If you feel bothered by it, perhaps you should take a closer look at yourself. (I’m not claiming that I am perfect in this regard. It is a process.)
You might have reached the point in life when you realize and respect that people have different communication styles. Many people may not be as direct as you would like.
You say I ‘dodged’ your question. I hope you realize there are other ways to say the same thing with nicer connotations.
You also may realize you didn’t answer my questions, which I asked first. I don’t mind if you don’t want to answer.
I’ll try to phrase my thinking over the last few messages in a different way. My take is that many of your claims are overconfident, possibly because you aren’t actively asking yourself ‘how might other people see this’.
I think a big reason I’ve been replying is out of some (misplaced, perhaps) desire to help you. I think you would benefit by finding more ways to understand other people’s points of view.
I will admit, you seem capable of arguing just fine. So, I don’t see intelligence being a limiter. I would guess (with about 75% probability) that a lack of empathy is a limiter for you.
This is not meant to be harsh even though it may be direct. If true, you certainly aren’t alone and you definitely aren’t alone in a community of technical people. There’s plenty of rationality and technical knowledge but too little empathy.
Example in point: You did a nice job of criticizing my use of ‘in summary’. I’m both joking and not. My usage could be improved, but I think the intent was clear.
Based on what I’ve seen in your behavior, I predict you will reply. However, I don’t expect it to be much different in tone. Feel free to surprise me!
In any case, maybe you will check back in a few years and re-read this thread. Maybe you will see it with new eyes. Maybe it will be some value to you.
Just so you know, if you reply, I don’t expect to reply in timely manner (or ever). So, feel free to have the last word here.
The thread, as I understand it, goes something like:
1. The company should buy you this.
2. They may not.
3. If they didn't, that would be a concern.
4. Why?
5. Argument that the company should buy extra software.
Point 5 is off topic. There might be a good job that wouldn't buy you extra software and that wouldn't really be a concern.
It's like if someone said "Your job is bad if they don't offer free lunch". I might say "My job doesn't offer it, but it's not a concern because I like my job for other reasons" and your reply would be advocating for the benefits of free lunch. Free lunch might be great, but the topic is whether it's a concern that the company doesn't offer it, not whether it's great or not.
Ah, this appears to be the core of it: according to your interpretation of the thread, my comments are off-topic.
After re-reading the thread, it is clear that your 'understanding' (as written above) of the thread is inaccurate.
I'll annotate the first five comments in the thread, with your 'understandings' and my responses:
Original post:
> allenleein: "Early user here. Obsidian is literally the best
> app in 2020 so far IMO. -Blazingly fast -Clean UI -Free -Sync
> [...] -Great community"
Your 'understanding':
> 1. The company should buy you this.
Your understanding is inaccurate: allenleein does not say a company should buy Obsidian.
Follow-up comment:
> usr1106: "[it is] Not really [free]. The license says you are
> not allowed to take notes about work you get compensated for.
> So free only for 100% hobby projects.
>
> Working in a start-up I don't have big 100% hobby projects
> that would require a lot of note keeping. YMMV
Your 'understanding':
> 2. They may not [buy you this]
Your understanding is inaccurate: usr1106 says nothing about what an organization should or should not buy. A better summary would be: usr1106 disagrees about what 'free' means, explains the license, and does have hobby projects that would qualify as free.
> codezero: I'd be more concerned if you had a hard time getting
> reimbursed for this kind of software at your job.
Your 'understanding':
> 3. If they didn't, that would be a concern.
Fair enough.
Follow-up comment:
> libria: "What's the concern for? A lot of great jobs still
> have penny-pinching managers. I've worked somewhere notoriously
> Frugal that was good and paid well but had no problem denying
> requests like this.""
Your 'understanding':
> Why?
Your understanding is incomplete. In addition to asking why, libria also offers a framing and makes a value judgment about what constitutes a good job.
Some of your other comments in this thread refer to this framing and value judgment. That's fine, but other comments are in no way obligated to agree or buy-in to that framing.
Follow-up comment:
> xpe: I'll respond with a connected set of questions...
>
> Is it worth the time to deny a (well intentioned) $150 request
> made by a software developer who costs a company (for example)
> $150K total (salary, benefits, and fixed costs)? $150 is 0.1%
> of $150K.
>
> What are the benefits and costs? Some questions to ask include:
>
> [... time spent? likely effects? consistency in other areas? ...]
>
> I think my overarching point is, again, illustrated by questions:
> What does a company truly value? Are they mindful and realistic
> about their costs and benefits? [... P.S. ... snip]
Your 'understanding':
5. Argument that the company should buy extra software.
Your understanding is inaccurate. I asked many questions that don't give one particular universal answer about purchasing; the questions, I hope, suggest an approach to finding an answer that works for you.
A charitable reading (see the HN Guidelines) of my comment would see that I was responding to this part of libria's comment: "What's the concern for?" To put it very simply, I would be concerned by a company that was not mindful and realistic about their costs and benefits. Why? It is simple: I value working for mindful and realistic companies.
Another response: your argument style reminds me a little bit of a straw man:
> A straw man (or strawman) is a form of argument
> and an informal fallacy based on giving the
> impression of refuting an opponent's argument,
> while actually refuting an argument that was not
> presented by that opponent. - Wikipedia
... with the twist: instead of engaging with anything I said, you mischaracterize it and large parts of the preceding discussion. Then you use that as a way to dismiss what I wrote as "off topic".
I'm going to have some fun looking up what others call that kind of rhetoric.
It's sometimes not just about money. Any organisation that alows individuals and teams to freely pick and choose tools will end up with a huge pile of semi-forgotten systems and organisational knowledge spread over multiple wikis, sharepoint sites, trello boards, monday projects and word docs on shared drives and dropboxes. Seen it happen multiple times. Corparate use of "personal/hobbyist" free tiers of popular tools is not just a legal liability, it's also a security nightmare apart from the already mentioned infromation spread problems.
Very few licenses are easily enforced, but that does not entitle folks to violate them. Most desktop software can easily be found with the copy protection removed, but that doesn’t make it free - there’s no moral difference between warez, GPL violations, and violating a free-for-non-commercial-use license.
The app would need to be open source for this to be possible.
It's still possible to make money with an open-source product. When you're targeting a developer audience, it might even be more profitable to be open-source.
proprietary software can totally be extensible, that's what plugin APIs are for. foss is cool and all, but i don't buy the implication that it's some sort of civic duty for developers to release under a foss license.
Is an open-source piece of software more extensible than closed-source? If so, then if the goal is to maximize extensibility, then open-source is required.
Open source software is readily and legally user modifiable. It is often (but not always) readily extensible - it can actually be quite difficult to extend in some cases. (There's plenty of difficult to work with spaghetti on GitHub.)
Source available proprietary software is readily inspectable, but often not legal to modify (at least not for free). It might still be extensible (ex plugins) though!
Closed source proprietary software is difficult to inspect, difficult to modify, and generally illegal to modify (for most use cases, in most jurisdictions). As above, it could easily be extensible though.
setting that aside, though, the best way to make software (open- or closed-source) extensible is via a plugin API. without it, the only way for end users to extend open-source software is to fork and maintain the fork forever, or attempt to merge upstream. so one might argue that the quality of the plugin API (and its documentation) is the primary measure of a software's "extensibility".
Hardly. Extending a piece of software requires generally extensive familiarization with the codebase, possibly ranging into millions of lines.
On the other hand, a well documented plugin or scripting system, which sits on top of the existing domain logic and is well documented and full of examples, generally is an excellent way to allow extending the base app.
The base app can be open or closed source. Without scripting or plugin system it's still a black box for most intents (as the time needed to study and change it would likely be too much).
someone created something that they'd like to make a little money off of, while still taking very extensive steps to make it available, extensible, and prevent lock in. they chose a path to profit with all of these goals in mind. you're demanding an awful lot for something that "improves extensibility by even 0.0000001%". in the spectrum between "i want to extract money from the users of this product" and "i want this product to be used as the users see fit", i would say this product's goals lean towards the latter.
please don't say the wording is the problem. "as extensible as possible" is fine. "as possible" is a qualifier, it clearly means "as extensible as possible without undermining other goals". you're pretending that they've promised to make it extensible at the expense of _everything_ else, and that assumption in context in unfounded.
it's true that paths to monetization exist for open source software, but they usually aren't accessible to an individual developer who is building a small bootstrapped side-project to generate small amounts of passive income.
Hah, is it not opensource? If it really is closed then it's useless, not worth discussing. Then it's funny they maket it as being better than clouds, that clouds shuts down, change owners or policies. With closed source software they will be able to do the same. Yes, markdown is plain text but as more and more additional features would be used, one would get more vendor locked-in to this software. And then what - write an opensource alternative with all the features from scratch again. Clouds at least give online sync...
I currently use Andy Matuschak's [1] system, using his note-link-janitor script [2] to generate backlinks and Typora to edit. The only thing Obsidian adds is the graph view for me, but it seems that Obsidian generates backlinks using file name, not title. I prefer linking by title. Perhaps this can be an option? The editor also seems to be lacking a little... for instance I can't seem to render math. Hopefully some of my feedback will be useful to you.
Overall really cool idea, but probably not going to use for now. Will keep tabs, and wish you the best of luck!
I'm imagining a version that runs as a daemon, watching the folder containing all the notes. It then looks for files that have been modified, and are not currently edited (.swp files for vim, for example), and runs an update.
I think I'd prefer something running in the browser, though that is of course not ideal for several reasons...
I discovered andy's notes in the past and has been trying to determined what he uses to publish those clean yet powerfull notes. The janitor is only one part. do you also publish your notes as HTML? How to you make use of the backlinks generated by janitor?
I don't. I share my notes with some friends as a private GitHub repo. The backlinks I just use as click-throughs to help me navigate my own notes. I too admire his notes site. Making my own is too much effort for me right now, but it is something I really want...
Linking by title is an anti-pattern. Titles change and titles are not unique. Link-rot should always be prevented. Best solution is to use a uuid and hide it from the user.
This is what Quiver does underneath the covers. Every note has an unique id, same as attachments (photos, files, pdfs, etc).
My only problem with Quiver is that it seems that development has stopped, so the chances of adding new bits (like link autocomplete, for example), are thin. Other than that it's a pretty useful tool.
You'd need some snap store to be able to install it without using --dangerous flag. Snapcraft.io is Ubuntu's (and most popular one), though that might not work for you if you want the download to be available exclusively from your own website.
But then again, if it's on Snapcraft, you don't need to worry about distributing updates to your users.
Might I suggest distributing your app as an AppImage? snaps require the snap package manager (snapd) to be installed on your system. AppImages, on the other hand, run out of the box after a chmod +x.
Wow, based on your history of submissions you've really been obsessing over this problem for quite a while. Kudos on continuing to improve your products/positioning.
I've been looking for something like this for... so long. It's like tiddlywiki but with first class & local markdown! Thank you!!!
Add a separate GUI for a workflow-y like list-editing (that saves as a markdown list format) and you've got a serious competitor to Roam as well as beating out more traditional competitors like Notion, Boostnote, etc.
e: ah, no inline LaTex.. I knew there was a catch!
> Add a separate GUI for a workflow-y like list-editing (that saves as a markdown list format) and you've got a serious competitor to Roam as well as beating out more traditional competitors like Notion, Boostnote, etc.
I just installed it, and it looks pretty slick, congratulations on the launch!
One piece of feedback, I couldn't discover in the app itself how to make references to other documents. I finally figured it out by looking at your web page and seeing the [[connections]] bit.
I downloaded Obsidian and it looks really nice. I use markdown already to make notes on my side project, but in my brain my thoughts are more diffuse as it's an MVP stage thing with so many ways to extend, so many things to think about. I think this would, at firs glance, help me alot.
One small thing I'd recommend would be when you first open it, could it create a default folder like (on Windows for example) Documents\Obsidian. And pre fill that as the folder (and I can change if I like). Then when I first use it there is less friction.
The other thing is to UX test that first screen where you are made to choose between new document and reading docs. I felt that made me think too much, and it might be the wording. I'd sort of prefer something like:
New User? Do you want to read help on getting started? Yes/No.
However I might not be typical, so watch over some shoulders as people first use the app and ask them what they are thinking.
Downloaded this a few hours ago, and ported all my notes about my novel over to it, and I have to say: this is a really great piece of software. The interface is intelligent, ergonomic and fast, and it does a lot of things automatically which I really like. It cuts down on the boring book keeping.
I was also able to move my plot outline into this, which was a godsend for me because previously it was in a word document, meaning I couldn't check things off. Now I have an interactive task list for it! And everything is all in one place!
One small suggestion: I would really like some place where it lists all the key commands (for instance, are there key commands for making headings? what about the key command for Replace, which I couldn't find?). Also, it would be nice if tags weren't necessarily represented inside the document from a viewing perspective. Maybe as a bar along the bottom, which is then copied into the markdown document transparently?
This looks really cool! I can't wait to check it out.
I've been using various personal wikis for years, and this hits most of what I am looking for.
But, I'd like to offer some suggestions.
- It would be cool if you would consider some tweaks for how the text is rendered. It can still be Markdown compatible, but for example allow linebreaks to be interpreted as linebreaks. Text used for reference often has different needs than what is being exported to HTML.
- Git integration. I just use git for syncing my knowledge bases. It makes the most sense for my multiple devices, and it is very rare that I even have conflicts and can't automatically merge differences.
I actually have a script that lets me use Dropbox or another syncing provider to sync my working tree, separate from the repo itself, so that my history isn't polluted with excessive automated commits, but it is still tracked relative to where it was checked out, and resolved automatically. That way you can have the strengths of git without the drawbacks.
You may also want to check out git-annex/datalad. I combine it with my home grown Markdown wikis for embedding references to files in my wikis, keeping my git history just pure text. One of my goals is to bridge file management with text management.
I'd be happy to share any of this if you're interested. I've had plenty of free time recently to further develop it.
Obsidian seems very cool. One thing I noticed on install as someone with a Windows device is that the install location cannot be specified. It would be great if your team supported this as it's pretty standard for many Windows apps and aids in system organization. I was able to move Obsidian and the obsidian-installer and things seem okay but I have no idea if this will break the updater at a later point in time.
Could you add the releases on Arch Linux's AUR? Downloading a binary from a website is not something Linux users often do. I couldn't find Obsidian on the snap store[0] either.
Unless you follow the semantic wiki model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_wiki) rather than the plain wiki model what the user is building is neither a knowledge base nor a second brain. Nearly all software in this area makes this mistake so it's not your fault. Links in human brains are typed (not untyped) and the regular wiki model (and web, and Obsidian) only support untyped links. If you are truly aiming to deliver software that allows users to create a personal knowledge base then please consider spending some time researching semantic web technology.
This looks incredible, I’m going to try it out today.
One suggestion - would you consider adding videos/gifs of your product on the features page? I feel like that would demonstrate your product much better, especially the linking part.
I know I'm a day late, but I wanted to pass on that I am in love with this product, so cool! I have used it nonstop since I downloaded it. Can't wait to see how this evolves
Awesome work guys! Judging by such an active and enthusiastic community, I could see this having a very sizable market share of knowledge bases like roam / bear / notion in the future. So far I haven't found a good filesystem based note taking app that fit my needs. Quiver came the closest but has not been active in development recently, so I'm switching to this and I'm excited where it goes.
You and Shida have some serious product & programming chops ~ UWaterloo represent!
Obsidian is one of the best apps I discovered recently and almost immediately become a core part of my workflow despite its early stage.
It's a personal knowledge system built to last: proprietary formats provide advantages but end up locking you in it – especially when it's about a monthly subscription.
Obsidian is built on plain Markdown files that can be accessed by any app and are unlikely to become obsolete. The files are local, though you can put them in any cloud (in the future Obsidian will provide an additional paid sync option).
The devs are great and have been great at receiving feedback and adding the right features.
The best way for me to take notes was to have a leather note taking portfolio with a steno pad inside it. I would take fast notes on the right, and index on the left. Here I would rip out pages if I had to and throw them away.
Then in the pocket would be a college ruled journal. I would take that out and summarize everything each day. This one I kept on my bookshelf.
If I had to do it today, I would use a guillotine cutter to a page feed to a scanner to an OCR system.
It's not exactly Roam, but the thing looks promising still. I like that it is offline-first and Markdown based, really feels like the crew has got some ideas in what direction to lead this project to. The bi-directional links in themselves are quite a killer feature that makes many note-taking apps like Evernote feel obsolete.
Curious what it's missing that Roam has?
I liked the Roam concept, but didn't use it for long before moving to Obsidian because of the privacy model, so I never really got a good feel for it.
I still feel like I'm not getting the most out of the bi-directional link functionality everyone loves so much because I keep forgetting to create them.
I think Roam's graph is flawed, but it's much better that Obsidian's, which you can't even zoom out of. Also Conaw experiments with some neat things like to-do lists that double as backlinks, Kanban boards, Pomodoro timer (ok that's overkill but it was added recently anyway). Daily note-taking is also pretty streamlined in Roam with new notes created every day that can be referred to in a neat fashion, and perhaps also allow for SRS.
Idk, Roam feels too familiar to me as well, so I doubt that I'll drop it anytime soon (we'll see how will I handle the future $15 price tag).
As of the latest release our graph view can be zoomed in and out, and we've rewritten it to generate the graph with WebGL rather than SVG, so it's a lot more performant for 1,000+ notes.
Roam is essentially an outliner: every bullet-point has a unique ID and you can't link directly to it. That way you can
a) reference specific blocks of texts (Obsidian only allows to link to headings)
b) display the entire block in the backlinks section (Obsidian only renders a set number of words around that mention)
This is a great product if you want to take advantage of all the latest (and more) features in note taking + personal knowledge management software. Bi-directional linking, graph view, plugins, community themes. But the kicker is you own all your own note files in plain text (.md files) in a folder of your choosing on your computer (and can also sync your database with something like Dropbox, iCloud, etc.).
I did a first look run-through of Obsidian on YouTube if anyone would find it helpful. It's a top-of-the-list recommendation for personal knowledge management software in my book. Kind, helpful community around the software too.
For me the biggest benefit of Obsidian over several other PKM tools is that it uses local Markdown files rather than outlines/blocks. It still has bi-directional linking, and bubbles up unlinked resources like Roam. The pace and responsiveness of the developers is remarkable, and the community has been so friendly and helpful. No egos!
[editing to add that I'm using iCloud for my vaults which allows for very fast syncing and the ability to edit on iOS]
You can create Obsidian vaults wherever you would like. I created my vaults in iCloud Drive on my Mac. As these are just Markdown files, you can use any Markdown capable iOS app (that has access to the Files chooser which includes iCloud Drive) and make any edits or modifications to those files. It doesn't automatically make link suggestions while editing it in an iOS app, but once you are back on your Mac you can easily update those links or just use the suggested unlinked references tool in the side panel. Does that make sense?
It looks like this isn't open source. If this is supposed to be one's second brain, please at least consider using a time-bomb FOSS license. Something like: you're permitted to use Obsidian under Apache/MIT/GPL license either 7 years after a given release, or effective immediately in the event that Obsidian shuts down.
I guess we all have an incentive to make you go out of business then ;-)
On a more serious note: I see no issue with software being a service and costing money if it's built on a standard that leaves the data in the owners hands and in the owners own structures. I.e. Markdown files synced using infrastructure like OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever with some nice features on top of it and a nice UI can cost whatever and no one should complain. Because if that software goes away the data is in the owners hands and in a standardized format supported by many other tools.
That should be the preferred way we build software btw. And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and standardized) database tools that are user friendly, treat them in similar fashion as files by syncing with user owned Infrastructure and we might just get to the point where more rigid data structures can be used in a similar manner as what I described above for files. That future would be great.
I too see no problem in a closed-source application so long as the data files are open. I like the IDE analogy here -- you can edit source code with a bunch of different tools. Some open, some closed. But the important thing is that the source code is readable by all of them.
Thanks for raising this. I couldn't imagine using anything like this without a serious guarantee that if development ever bogs down I'd still have some way to keep it working and up-to-date. Even if the founders honestly intend this to be the case, who is to say that the firm that buys them up feels similarly?
The graph view seems cool but I don't feel it is much useful in the long term.
It has a wow factor in the initial use but it is just a mingled web of links. It is like creating a graph of the www but I don't see how that could be useful.
If the links between node could be directed and annotated, then it'd become much more powerful, though. Similar to how TheBrain works [1]
I see that the public plugin interface is a long term goal at this point [2] but it'd be amazing if plugins could expose ways to mark up graph relationships!
Well, I don't really mean mind map; I don't think those are very useful at least not in the traditional sense.
But yes, I think directed graphs would help me. Take the use case of modeling social relationships: each node is a person or company with a short bio, links can include "funded-by", "worked-with". Suddenly you have a tool that you can use to traverse professional relationships to find a connection to an investor funding a certain type of company. You can sort of do this with LinkedIn and Crunchbase, and it's possible with TheBrain although its UX is very tedious.
I agree. I think in it's current state, the graph is just a neat toy but even with just the help page, it already looks like a jumbled mess. It would be nice to be able to customize the graph or at least have it present the information in a cleaner way. For instance, have the ability to separate intra/inter document links. It would also be nice to be able to view a link hierarchy by treating a single file as a root.
Can't comment on the merits of the product itself.
That in the first five minutes of this post being online, several users more or less claim that this has changed their lives in their first-ever comment on HN strikes me as a little odd however.
(Yes I'm aware that this is also my first-ever comment on HN.)
We have been in private beta for a few months already, with 5000+ beta testers and a community. We did let them know that we're doing a "Show HN" today.
This got shared on their discord, but I s2g that it really is the case, given that I use a similar tool called Roam, which recently had such a big spike of attention (in part due to Thomas Frank's video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxOffM_tVHI) and somewhat popularized what Obsidian is kind of aiming for here (so much that Roam had to close registrations due to massive traffic influx). Plenty of ppl just swear by Roam at this point, including its creator who has big vision for a thing. Here is his white paper on a thing: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help/page/Vu1MmjinS.
I can attest to that as well, and given that Roam is unavailable, would suggest to try out this alternative that is pretty decent for what it does (even though Conaw (Roam's creator) does think it doesn't exactly align with what Roam really seeks to do, yk the thing)
Edit: to elaborate, I am not raving about either Roam or Obsidian, I am raving about they approaches they provide, and after nearly a month of using Roam it honestly feels like a game changer to me. Solved my art block a bit as well.
I've been using Obsidian for a short while after seeing a comment here on HN. I've used a lot of desktop notetaking apps, and this one really is different. It's the app HN commenters would write themselves. I expect it to be very successful in the next few years. It hasn't changed my life, because I'm not going to trust it with anything important right now, but they do have an ethusiastic community.
There's a new video out today if you want an overview:
It does seem suspicious but personally the only reason I jumped in was because I’m genuinely so happy with this software and I believe that it should be tried out by as many people as possible!
I've been using Obsidian for about a week, and it may be the first time I've ever felt compelled to comment in an app's user forum. I even installed Discord so that I could subscribe to the Obsidian channel and watch its (rapid) progress. I am quite excited by this tool.
I want to like this application, and the little time I was able to spend in it certainly displayed a lot of promise. But it only worked for one day. Since then, it will not display any of the files. I know it is still connected since I can make new files and folders and see them appear in my directories, and before I tried to refresh the vault I could still see my tags. But Obsidian refuses to show anything in the file explorer, and unfortunately, that renders the product useless.
The comments here are so positive, I had to try this out. After reading through all the built-in notes and customizing some shortcuts, I have to say this is some very slick software.
I tried Roam before but didn't get into it, but the similarity between this and VSCode makes the barrier to entry very low. The formatting is very nice, the linking is fantastic. I am going to attempt to make this my daily driver for notes.
I will never again build any kind of workflow for my knowledge on top of anything that isn’t open source. 5y is a long time and 10y is an eternity for these sorts of products but its just a fraction of my working life.
My own personal setup is a bunch of markdown files and it’s great, so I like that approach, but I’m very cautious about investing time for something so important in a product i don’t control.
You may want to look into the Gitlab [1] model of open source monetization, as it has strong resemblance of what you are trying to achieve with Obsidian.
That’s pretty cool and it’s good of you to think about the scenario.
The problem is the bankruptcy court/buyer/ex-spouse/whatever may have a different preference. So you may want to set up something legally binding now when everyone is the same agreement.
Could you also solve this by GPL+Commercial license for those that pay?
"Open source" is both a license and a development model. You're talking about a license, but someone interested in workflow longevity will probably not be satisfied with a source dump from a dead company. They're looking for a community which knows how to maintain it.
As JWZ once said: "You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of 'open source,' and have everything magically work out." Has there ever been a case where a company as its last act released their software as open-source, and a community formed and picked it up?
I can recall a few on the top of my head, but those are the exception rather than the norm: Blender & Mozilla, though that last one wasn't really a last act. I think I saw a few others, but can't recall which ones, I'd be interested in such a list.
Now, there are interesting communities that form around games, that tend to be a "dead product" after release, and for which there was a source dump (or not, actually): doom, openMW, openRA, etc.
By definition, that's what happens when its developer community dies off down to size n=0. A source dump without a community is essentially fast-forwarding a (potential) developer community to its death. It should be clear why this is strictly worse.
I'm in agreement with you on this. I've been playing with a package for Atom that would simplify a bunch of stuff in my process, but in general I don't like the risk of proprietary software/stack for my workflow.
I was actually using Joplin for the past year after migrating to evernote. I really liked it but am now migrating to something with a little more flexibility around structuring.
Joplin isn't like your typical web app, and you need to either carry a copy of your notes around on every device, or you need to sync them using a cloud service. For that reason, I went with other note-taking and wiki software.
As the other commenter noted Joplin is a desktop application that syncs (over E2EE) if you like to other machines via gdrive/dropbox/nextcloud etc.
I was using it via nextcloud and it worked perfectly for what it was. The web clipper also did a great job of snatching simplified versions of web pages.
What killed it for me was just my expanding desires. I want to things like
- view my knowledge base from my work machine without downloading the whole knowledge base to it.
- Be able to search my notes AND all the books i've read. I tried using pandoc to go epub to md but it was too clunky and the searchability within notes wasn't great.
If I was still using it as a drop in replacement for evernote I think it would be great, but to go beyond that starts to stretch the seams a bit.
I also second looking at github's awesome-selfhosted.
> I will never again build any kind of workflow for my knowledge on top of anything that isn’t open source.
100% this. The peace of mind I get knowing that all of my data is under my control is worth it, after scrambling to archive content from failed or pivoting services, removing my data from businesses that try to exploit it or trying to migrate my data from one old app to a different newer app.
There are many different open-source and self-hosted wikis, note taking apps and mind-mapping tools. Some of them are listed here[1], just Ctrl-F for "wiki", "notes" and "knowledge"
Just a quick notw, I think everythink (need to archive content, ease of migrating data etc) is solved simply by Obsidian being offline-first and markdown-only. I.e. you don’t need the app to be open-source in the end.
I don’t follow. This app would work on top of your existing markdown files, and if they go out of business there is nothing preventing you from either keep using the app, or take your markdown files and take them elsewhere.
That's really a nice thing, to be honest, and probably the only reason I'm somewhat interested, even though I mostly run open-source software on my computers, except when such software is a one-off comodity, like videogames.
But for something I'm going to invest some time learning, and will rely on, that's a very difficult pill to swallow. I don't want to depend on proprietary software for important parts of my workflow. What if I want to switch to a pinebook, for instance? No ARM build seems to be available yet. And that's just a single example... (a WASM/LLVM IR build could sidestep that issue).
That said, I like the idea. Is there any open-source equivalent?
Joplin is the state of the art in terms of open source note taking in my opinion. It too uses Markdown, and supports a whole heap of other features on top of it. But it's been around for a long time, has mobile apps, cloud backups, the lot - and is all open source on Github.
I actually get a lot of value from cloud hosted solutions, I bounce between 2-3 machines daily and multiple OS installations several times a week, and would like for my notes taken on one machine to just be there when I write notes on another machine.
Another thing I need to do often is type up design docs collaboratively, we use google docs for this currently but it sucks for our use cases.
And finally, I read and write a lot of GH wiki pages and various markdown notes in git repos for open source collaboration, which isn't really helpful for cross referencing information.
Is there any way to do this with obsidian? I'm all for owning my data but tbh, a lot of the powerful features you demonstrate only make sense for me if I can throw my data up on a server and make it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
Definitely can use across computers using a cloud sync provider (dropbox, etc).
You can also have multiple vaults, and if you want to collaborate, you can share that vault with someone.
Realtime collaboration may be a bit dangerous with syncing over a cloud provider. They are also planning a subscription with note hosting - perhaps that will include some form of collaboration.
If you put all of your GH wiki pages into a single vault, that may be a solution (though I don't think it's possible to create a solution to your setup in the most general setting - you'd have to be able to link to any file on your OS).
But you can throw your data up on a server and make it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection
there's always the option of syncthing + a vps (or network drive or raspberry pi if you have one). i use it with a synology network drive myself and would find it hard going back a cloud storage due to the slow speeds you get when files have to go across the country and back again
It sounds like you want either something backed by a cloud drive with local installs of the software, or something more like a traditional wiki server with a markdown plugin.
- this does not seem to be open source or free-as-in-speech. That worries me - especially when it comes to longevity. It's the reason I wouldn't use this product if it was by Google.
- i don't see an easy way to export my data in case I would like to migrate to a different service.
That being said I am definitely going to try it out and see what it does for me! There is definitely a gap in knowlege-mapping software in my life
You don't need to export your data. Your data is stored in plaintext markdown files on your machine. So if it does shut down, you still have all of your content in a format that can be readily read by many, many editors
What convinced me to give Obsidian a twirl is that there's essentially no danger of sunk costs: I already store my notes as markdown files in a local folder synced via cloud service between browsers and mobile, and accessed via IDEs/plaintext editors. Obsidian merely replaces the IDE as an access/manipulation point.
The only 'cost', so to speak, is adding bidirectional link syntax, which I suspect is soon to become a common standard. I am curious to see what happens when they open up their developer API, as the Obsidian PKM community is quite active.
500 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadPrivacy is great, but for collaborative research, Obsidian's model seems to be at a disadvantage.
I never liked the hierarchical structure of most note taking systems, and backlinking just lets you write - you navigate the network structure later (you can also still use a hierarchy on top of the network structure if that's your thing).
Highly recommend checking it out!
We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services.
We believe you second brain should work similarly to your own brain and connections are crucial in thinking. Obsidian supports [[internal links]] between your notes out of the box, and provide a powerful graph view and backlink pane to help you understand your knowledge.
We also noticed how personal note-taking and knowledge management is, so we built Obsidian to be very extensible from the start, and let you put together your own workflow with plugins like daily notes and page preview as building blocks.
This leads to our three fundamental values of Obsidian:
1. Local-first, Markdown plain text based; 2. Link as first-citizen. 3. As extensible as possible.
Obsidian is a powerful front-end for your knowledge, like an IDE for your notes.
Learn more about Obsidian's features: https://obsidian.md/features
Read the story of the project and the team: https://obsidian.md/about
Some videos that might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFYaWC_86W0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAkJMHg-dGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh2ysYig8Wo
The gist is to make your notes atomic and link them together whenever possible. [[ links provides auto-complete, and the backlink plugin tells you what notes links to this note, and what notes mention it but don't explicit link it.
The graph view is for discovery and navigation mostly. It lets you discover clusters, and identify "orphan" nodes that aren't connected anything. That might inspire you to think of connections and strength your knowledge network.
Hope that makes sense!
https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook...
https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/
https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...
We still want to give you the option to export internal links to standard [Markdown](link) links so that static site generators or sites like GitBooks can understand them out of the box.
I have been using personal wikis for about a decade, and 99% of the time I make an internal link, I want the caption to be the same as the page name.
I wish that the Markdown standard would just specify to render [[Page]] as [Page](Page).
Essentially, we think wikilinks should identify the destination exactly and should not perform a search instead.
Thankfully it's all just plain text at the end of the day, and it's not hard to do some text processing to convert both ways.
sits up in chair, attention captured
Where can I read more about this? My current personal wiki is powered by TiddlyWiki and while I don't necessarily love the performance, I do LOVE the link structure of TiddlyWiki (I can create a "table of contents" page a random tag, and then every page using that tag gets rendered on said page). I have similar plugins for VSCode to collect all of my todo comments all into one document, linking back to their respective files.
Curious if Obsidian has a similar feature beyond the mind-map view shown on the features page?
I have how to do that here: https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-to-t... :)
But let us not get bogged down with ageism, the real question is what kind of monster uses both cyan and magenta text-shadow diagonally offset against each other???? !!! .... ?
:-)
The answer is Google, sort of: https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/getting_started#ena...
The anaglyph effect is what I tweaked. It's not too unreadable with simpler fonts--I 100% acknowledge readability takes a massive hit with both the fraktur and the anaglyph. Ultimately, though, my goal with that blog is mostly to have fun, so the expressive aspect is important to me. I may play around later with doing an animated effect (a la https://codepen.io/anatravas/pen/mOyNWR ) so the glitchy vibe remains strong but there are more readable keyframes. (Would a proper designer use animated text like this? Certainly not. Am I a proper designer? Certainly certainly not.)
Then I went back in again, and started poking around with the element inspector. Then we had this discussion, and I am still not sure what the page content was actually about, but I have a sense that I might have found it interesting if I had stuck with it.
Click and drag that to the tab with your own TW open, and you're good to go!
I haven't used that plugin so I don't know if it's good or whatnot, but there you are.
I did not think of grabbing it out of stroll. Tried searching for plugins but never encountered the "Stories" plugin.
https://obsidian.md/features
- Blazingly fast
- Clean UI
- Free
- Sync with Dropbox, Github, iCloud...
- Great community
I have never looked back to Notion and Bear since I found it.
Btw, the Obs team is moving so fast.
2. Each page in Roam is an outline (as in outliner), whereas each file in Obsidian is a Markdown file.
3. #tag is not the same as [[tag]] in Obsidian.
4. Rather than a built-in feature, "daily notes" is available as a plugin in Obsidian.
Not really. The license says you are not allowed to take notes about work you get compensated for. So free only for 100% hobby projects.
Working in a start-up I don't have big 100% hobby projects that would require a lot of note keeping. YMMV
Is it worth the time to deny a (well intentioned) $150 request made by a software developer who costs a company (for example) $150K total (salary, benefits, and fixed costs)? $150 is 0.1% of $150K.
What are the benefits and costs? Some questions to ask include:
- How much time did the company spend in the process of denying this request? By the time you include emails, research, context switching, etc, I think it is fair to say this might consume 15 minutes of the engineer's time and 15 minutes of the denier's time. That would be 0.5 hours; assuming $80/hr, that is $40.
- What is the likely effect? Will it discourage an employee from trying a new tool? Might it encourage a culture of "build it here" rather than pay to use something that already exists? Might it encourage an employee to abuse the license? Might this increase the legal risk of the company? In the case of, say, online learning, it might encourage employees to browse dozens of crappy web resources rather than simply paying for a high quality learning resource. My point: being stingy has real effects on human behavior.
- Does the company pay the same level of detail to other areas that could easily save more money? Three examples: (1) Does a company need to spend $200/year/person on junk food or bottled water? (2) Does a company look carefully at ways to improve energy efficiency? (3) Does a company have a smart, regularly practiced, data-recovery plan in place? I could go on; I think you see my point: it is wiser to allocate effort and oversight in proportion to impact.
- To what degree does the company have issues with trust and accountability? What is the effect on morale are discouraged from trying and paying for useful software and tooling?
I think my overarching point is, again, illustrated by questions: What does a company truly value? Are they mindful and realistic about their costs and benefits?
P.S. This may be obvious to some (but not all): paying for software is not necessarily a bad thing. Open source has many advantages, but without ongoing contributions and/or a funding strategy, open source software is not necessarily a "safer" bet than closed-source software. A better litmus test is "can I export my data in a useful way if I decide to leave or switch?"
If your job pays well, work is interesting, good commute, good benefits, good manager, good coworkers, important mission, or a net positive combination of these things, that seems way more important than whether or not they'll buy you arbitrary software.
It depends on what the company values. This is what I meant when I wrote: "What does a company truly value? Are they mindful and realistic about their costs and benefits?"
> ALittleLight: It doesn't seem like an argument against the idea that you can work somewhere where they refuse to buy things like this, and still have it be a good job.
Correct, I made no such argument. You are free to make that value judgment.
It depends where you sit. Maybe you want to dig into ways an organization can improve? If so, that gets into questions about organizational values as well as costs and benefits of various options.
> ALittleLight: If your job pays well, work is interesting, good commute, good benefits, good manager, good coworkers, important mission, or a net positive combination of these things, that seems way more important than whether or not they'll buy you arbitrary software.
Again, feel free to make such a value judgement.
However, I would not use the word 'arbitrary' here, since in employment situations, there will be some understanding around expenses, often set out in policies and conversations. Even in organizations that are more flexible with expenses, employees are expected to use good judgment for business expenses.
If so, why?
Chris2048: are you the same person?
Is it fair to say you (Chris2048) have some expectation around how the thread evolved based on your assumptions of what is relevant?
I see the best conversations here as trying to understand each other.
I am not the same person, but I'm not sure that matters unless you know of OP specifically, you are asking: "how was my intention interpreted as X".
Im telling you the context of the thread implied it, otherwise your comments arent relevant to the POV of a dev.
At the risk of saying something we already know, HN discussion isn't limited to one person's definition of what a "hacker" or "developer" is:
I think it is easy to forget, so I just want to write this here... People here may work on building technology (hardware, software, biotech), running companies, leading teams, thinking about problems to solve, how to be effective, how to deal with stress and mental issues, and lots more. So, talking about organizational culture is on-topic.You may prefer to discuss something from the point of view of a software developer. You may have desire to keep threads organized and on-topic.
Personally, I think your assessment of the "context of the thread" is both overly narrow and off target. But my goal is not to convince you my interpretation is correct...
...My goal is to show that your interpretation of the context of the thread is subjective. Again, subjective is fine; we don't need to agree. I want to emphasize that reasonable people can see it differently from you. I hope that you (and everyone on HN) can recognize this and think it through before they say a comment is "irrelevant".
So, forgive me for asking, but I can't help but wonder how you approached this thread. With curiosity? With a goal of understanding? With some other driving factors?
I would like to highlight a few important points from the HN guidelines that think we can all learn from (myself included) ...
On a personal note, I put considerable thought into my comment -- phrasing it with open-ended questions where I implied some arguments in play. I offered food for thought. I was hoping for substantive responses, not claims that the comment was off topic. In addition, I found some of the resulting comments to be unconstructive. I think we owe it to each other to help each other and make the most of our precious time here on the planet.One motivation for reading this comment, frankly, is a plea for people to re-examine their communication tendencies and the resulting effects on (a) your ability to learn (e.g. a growth mindset); (b) this community; (c) all communities.
* why are you highlighting those HN guidelines?
* who are the "people" you want to "re-examine their communication tendencies", and what motivates this plea?
* why are you curious about how I "approached this thread"?
That aside,
I answered your question: replying to a thread in an ambiguous or open-ended manner will cause people to fill in the gaps (infer your meaning) from the context of the thread. If your meaning does not follow from the context (i.e. is a non-sequitur) it's likely you will be misunderstood; In this case that you were offering "an argument against the idea that you can work somewhere where they refuse to buy things like this, and still have it be a good job."
Re: 1 & 2: I would like HN participants to consider the HN guidelines, because I often see what appears to be a lack of awareness. Following the guidelines (many of which are about self-reflection and tone) helps shape the community discussion constructively.
Re 3: I asked because I want to understand your motivations here.
Yes, I understand the general idea of non-sequiturs.
In summary, I think an accurate and charitable reading of my comment will realize that it was not a non sequitur nor off-topic.
Above your comment said:
> Im telling you the context of the thread implied it, otherwise your comments arent relevant to the POV of a dev.
My comments are relevant to the point of view of a developer. Moreover, HN discussion is about more than the POV of a developer.
It seems like you are dodging the question(s) i.e If you have some generality about HN participants, why put it in this thread (and not others). Since you don't put it in your profile, or copy-paste it in every comment you make, it seems to me there's a reason.
> In summary, I think an accurate and charitable reading of my comment will realize that it was not a non sequitur nor off-topic.
Another back-handed response, as it implies my own comments (which made the opposite conclusion) is therefore either/or not accurate, or not charitable. If you believe this, then why not explicitly say so - and then defend that position? you say "In summary", but I can't see what part of this post you are summarising.
> My comments are relevant to the point of view of a developer. Moreover, HN discussion is about more than the POV of a developer.
They might relevant, if there is enough context to understand them. And we are not talking about what is relevant to "HN discussion" - we are talking about this thread in particular.
My goal here is to use a calm, measured language. I was hoping this would help the conversation, but perhaps it upset you. You called my comments ‘back-handed’ and ‘two-faced’. I didn’t intend them that way.
You could have chosen different words. You may realize the words you chose were harsher than necessary. Even if you were correct in your assessment, which I don’t think you were, those choice of words will likely have a negative effect in a conversation. Especially online, particularly with someone you don’t know.
BTW, I am genuinely sorry if you think I’m trying to insult you in an obscure or sneaky way. I’m not. Doing that would be unkind.
Speaking of your claims that my comments were ‘two-faced’ or ‘back-handed’, there is another explanation. (Skip two paragraphs down for that)
If there’s one thing I could get across to you, it is: please open your mind to other explanations. Be charitable towards others. Don’t assume malice.
If you think you are already as charitable as you can be, then I don’t expect this advice to bother you. If you feel bothered by it, perhaps you should take a closer look at yourself. (I’m not claiming that I am perfect in this regard. It is a process.)
You might have reached the point in life when you realize and respect that people have different communication styles. Many people may not be as direct as you would like.
You say I ‘dodged’ your question. I hope you realize there are other ways to say the same thing with nicer connotations.
You also may realize you didn’t answer my questions, which I asked first. I don’t mind if you don’t want to answer.
I’ll try to phrase my thinking over the last few messages in a different way. My take is that many of your claims are overconfident, possibly because you aren’t actively asking yourself ‘how might other people see this’.
I think a big reason I’ve been replying is out of some (misplaced, perhaps) desire to help you. I think you would benefit by finding more ways to understand other people’s points of view.
I will admit, you seem capable of arguing just fine. So, I don’t see intelligence being a limiter. I would guess (with about 75% probability) that a lack of empathy is a limiter for you.
This is not meant to be harsh even though it may be direct. If true, you certainly aren’t alone and you definitely aren’t alone in a community of technical people. There’s plenty of rationality and technical knowledge but too little empathy.
Example in point: You did a nice job of criticizing my use of ‘in summary’. I’m both joking and not. My usage could be improved, but I think the intent was clear.
Based on what I’ve seen in your behavior, I predict you will reply. However, I don’t expect it to be much different in tone. Feel free to surprise me!
In any case, maybe you will check back in a few years and re-read this thread. Maybe you will see it with new eyes. Maybe it will be some value to you.
Just so you know, if you reply, I don’t expect to reply in timely manner (or ever). So, feel free to have the last word here.
1. The company should buy you this.
2. They may not.
3. If they didn't, that would be a concern.
4. Why?
5. Argument that the company should buy extra software.
Point 5 is off topic. There might be a good job that wouldn't buy you extra software and that wouldn't really be a concern.
It's like if someone said "Your job is bad if they don't offer free lunch". I might say "My job doesn't offer it, but it's not a concern because I like my job for other reasons" and your reply would be advocating for the benefits of free lunch. Free lunch might be great, but the topic is whether it's a concern that the company doesn't offer it, not whether it's great or not.
After re-reading the thread, it is clear that your 'understanding' (as written above) of the thread is inaccurate.
I'll annotate the first five comments in the thread, with your 'understandings' and my responses:
Your understanding is inaccurate: allenleein does not say a company should buy Obsidian. Your understanding is inaccurate: usr1106 says nothing about what an organization should or should not buy. A better summary would be: usr1106 disagrees about what 'free' means, explains the license, and does have hobby projects that would qualify as free. Fair enough. Your understanding is incomplete. In addition to asking why, libria also offers a framing and makes a value judgment about what constitutes a good job.Some of your other comments in this thread refer to this framing and value judgment. That's fine, but other comments are in no way obligated to agree or buy-in to that framing.
Your understanding is inaccurate. I asked many questions that don't give one particular universal answer about purchasing; the questions, I hope, suggest an approach to finding an answer that works for you.A charitable reading (see the HN Guidelines) of my comment would see that I was responding to this part of libria's comment: "What's the concern for?" To put it very simply, I would be concerned by a company that was not mindful and realistic about their costs and benefits. Why? It is simple: I value working for mindful and realistic companies.
In summary, your understanding is inaccurate.
I'm going to have some fun looking up what others call that kind of rhetoric.
Edit: typo
Very interested in the graph and multiplexer features...
A Trello integration would be nice.
The app would need to be open source for this to be possible.
It's still possible to make money with an open-source product. When you're targeting a developer audience, it might even be more profitable to be open-source.
Source available proprietary software is readily inspectable, but often not legal to modify (at least not for free). It might still be extensible (ex plugins) though!
Closed source proprietary software is difficult to inspect, difficult to modify, and generally illegal to modify (for most use cases, in most jurisdictions). As above, it could easily be extensible though.
setting that aside, though, the best way to make software (open- or closed-source) extensible is via a plugin API. without it, the only way for end users to extend open-source software is to fork and maintain the fork forever, or attempt to merge upstream. so one might argue that the quality of the plugin API (and its documentation) is the primary measure of a software's "extensibility".
On the other hand, a well documented plugin or scripting system, which sits on top of the existing domain logic and is well documented and full of examples, generally is an excellent way to allow extending the base app.
The base app can be open or closed source. Without scripting or plugin system it's still a black box for most intents (as the time needed to study and change it would likely be too much).
As someone who writes plugins, being able to see "behind the curtain" is very helpful, especially for taking advantage of un-documented features.
please don't say the wording is the problem. "as extensible as possible" is fine. "as possible" is a qualifier, it clearly means "as extensible as possible without undermining other goals". you're pretending that they've promised to make it extensible at the expense of _everything_ else, and that assumption in context in unfounded.
it's true that paths to monetization exist for open source software, but they usually aren't accessible to an individual developer who is building a small bootstrapped side-project to generate small amounts of passive income.
I currently use Andy Matuschak's [1] system, using his note-link-janitor script [2] to generate backlinks and Typora to edit. The only thing Obsidian adds is the graph view for me, but it seems that Obsidian generates backlinks using file name, not title. I prefer linking by title. Perhaps this can be an option? The editor also seems to be lacking a little... for instance I can't seem to render math. Hopefully some of my feedback will be useful to you.
Overall really cool idea, but probably not going to use for now. Will keep tabs, and wish you the best of luck!
[1] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes [2] https://github.com/andymatuschak/note-link-janitor
I'm imagining a version that runs as a daemon, watching the folder containing all the notes. It then looks for files that have been modified, and are not currently edited (.swp files for vim, for example), and runs an update.
I think I'd prefer something running in the browser, though that is of course not ideal for several reasons...
https://twitter.com/Learn_Awesome/status/1265574525342793730...
My only problem with Quiver is that it seems that development has stopped, so the chances of adding new bits (like link autocomplete, for example), are thin. Other than that it's a pretty useful tool.
---
title: Something
---
and the title will be reflected in the file navigator, instead of 20200528171636.md.
But then again, if it's on Snapcraft, you don't need to worry about distributing updates to your users.
Add a separate GUI for a workflow-y like list-editing (that saves as a markdown list format) and you've got a serious competitor to Roam as well as beating out more traditional competitors like Notion, Boostnote, etc.
e: ah, no inline LaTex.. I knew there was a catch!
FYI, they're the ones behind Dynalist.
Sadly, this makes it completely useless for me.
One piece of feedback, I couldn't discover in the app itself how to make references to other documents. I finally figured it out by looking at your web page and seeing the [[connections]] bit.
I downloaded Obsidian and it looks really nice. I use markdown already to make notes on my side project, but in my brain my thoughts are more diffuse as it's an MVP stage thing with so many ways to extend, so many things to think about. I think this would, at firs glance, help me alot.
One small thing I'd recommend would be when you first open it, could it create a default folder like (on Windows for example) Documents\Obsidian. And pre fill that as the folder (and I can change if I like). Then when I first use it there is less friction.
The other thing is to UX test that first screen where you are made to choose between new document and reading docs. I felt that made me think too much, and it might be the wording. I'd sort of prefer something like:
New User? Do you want to read help on getting started? Yes/No.
However I might not be typical, so watch over some shoulders as people first use the app and ask them what they are thinking.
Good luck!
I was also able to move my plot outline into this, which was a godsend for me because previously it was in a word document, meaning I couldn't check things off. Now I have an interactive task list for it! And everything is all in one place!
One small suggestion: I would really like some place where it lists all the key commands (for instance, are there key commands for making headings? what about the key command for Replace, which I couldn't find?). Also, it would be nice if tags weren't necessarily represented inside the document from a viewing perspective. Maybe as a bar along the bottom, which is then copied into the markdown document transparently?
Thanks for making this!
I've been using various personal wikis for years, and this hits most of what I am looking for.
But, I'd like to offer some suggestions.
- It would be cool if you would consider some tweaks for how the text is rendered. It can still be Markdown compatible, but for example allow linebreaks to be interpreted as linebreaks. Text used for reference often has different needs than what is being exported to HTML.
- Git integration. I just use git for syncing my knowledge bases. It makes the most sense for my multiple devices, and it is very rare that I even have conflicts and can't automatically merge differences.
I actually have a script that lets me use Dropbox or another syncing provider to sync my working tree, separate from the repo itself, so that my history isn't polluted with excessive automated commits, but it is still tracked relative to where it was checked out, and resolved automatically. That way you can have the strengths of git without the drawbacks.
You may also want to check out git-annex/datalad. I combine it with my home grown Markdown wikis for embedding references to files in my wikis, keeping my git history just pure text. One of my goals is to bridge file management with text management.
I'd be happy to share any of this if you're interested. I've had plenty of free time recently to further develop it.
I'm pretty much ready to abandon org-mode for this, but the git/git-annex combo is harder to leave behind.
Would love to hear more about your setup!
[0]: https://snapcraft.io/search?q=obsidian
One suggestion - would you consider adding videos/gifs of your product on the features page? I feel like that would demonstrate your product much better, especially the linking part.
Could you describe Obsidian's pros'n'cons in comparison to VNote[0] + Viki[1]?
[0] https://github.com/tamlok/vnote
[1] https://github.com/tamlok/viki
You and Shida have some serious product & programming chops ~ UWaterloo represent!
It's a personal knowledge system built to last: proprietary formats provide advantages but end up locking you in it – especially when it's about a monthly subscription.
Obsidian is built on plain Markdown files that can be accessed by any app and are unlikely to become obsolete. The files are local, though you can put them in any cloud (in the future Obsidian will provide an additional paid sync option).
The devs are great and have been great at receiving feedback and adding the right features.
Then in the pocket would be a college ruled journal. I would take that out and summarize everything each day. This one I kept on my bookshelf.
If I had to do it today, I would use a guillotine cutter to a page feed to a scanner to an OCR system.
Idk, Roam feels too familiar to me as well, so I doubt that I'll drop it anytime soon (we'll see how will I handle the future $15 price tag).
As of the latest release our graph view can be zoomed in and out, and we've rewritten it to generate the graph with WebGL rather than SVG, so it's a lot more performant for 1,000+ notes.
Video: https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0
[editing to add that I'm using iCloud for my vaults which allows for very fast syncing and the ability to edit on iOS]
We plan to stay in business in the long run, but if things do go wrong and we shut down, we do intend to open source the app.
On a more serious note: I see no issue with software being a service and costing money if it's built on a standard that leaves the data in the owners hands and in the owners own structures. I.e. Markdown files synced using infrastructure like OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever with some nice features on top of it and a nice UI can cost whatever and no one should complain. Because if that software goes away the data is in the owners hands and in a standardized format supported by many other tools.
That should be the preferred way we build software btw. And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and standardized) database tools that are user friendly, treat them in similar fashion as files by syncing with user owned Infrastructure and we might just get to the point where more rigid data structures can be used in a similar manner as what I described above for files. That future would be great.
Come to think of it, IDEs are exactly that: a powerful front-end for your code files. That means us programmers are not locked into any one IDE.
> And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and standardized) database tools that are user friendly
Yep, but I wonder how we can get there. Hope someone figures it out! It's always hard to set standards.
I'm definitely going to give Obsidian a try.
It has a wow factor in the initial use but it is just a mingled web of links. It is like creating a graph of the www but I don't see how that could be useful.
I see that the public plugin interface is a long term goal at this point [2] but it'd be amazing if plugins could expose ways to mark up graph relationships!
[1] https://www.thebrain.com [2] https://trello.com/c/Z7qqKVXd/19-public-plugin-interface-v10
But yes, I think directed graphs would help me. Take the use case of modeling social relationships: each node is a person or company with a short bio, links can include "funded-by", "worked-with". Suddenly you have a tool that you can use to traverse professional relationships to find a connection to an investor funding a certain type of company. You can sort of do this with LinkedIn and Crunchbase, and it's possible with TheBrain although its UX is very tedious.
That in the first five minutes of this post being online, several users more or less claim that this has changed their lives in their first-ever comment on HN strikes me as a little odd however.
(Yes I'm aware that this is also my first-ever comment on HN.)
Hope that explains things!
Best of luck with the product, also +1 to the suggestion of an open source client from a sibling thread!
I can attest to that as well, and given that Roam is unavailable, would suggest to try out this alternative that is pretty decent for what it does (even though Conaw (Roam's creator) does think it doesn't exactly align with what Roam really seeks to do, yk the thing)
Edit: to elaborate, I am not raving about either Roam or Obsidian, I am raving about they approaches they provide, and after nearly a month of using Roam it honestly feels like a game changer to me. Solved my art block a bit as well.
There's a new video out today if you want an overview:
https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0
[1] https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
Link to forum and Discord: https://obsidian.md/community
I tried Roam before but didn't get into it, but the similarity between this and VSCode makes the barrier to entry very low. The formatting is very nice, the linking is fantastic. I am going to attempt to make this my daily driver for notes.
Great work Obsidian team!
My own personal setup is a bunch of markdown files and it’s great, so I like that approach, but I’m very cautious about investing time for something so important in a product i don’t control.
Not saying such examples aren't out there. I just am unaware of any.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed
The problem is the bankruptcy court/buyer/ex-spouse/whatever may have a different preference. So you may want to set up something legally binding now when everyone is the same agreement.
Could you also solve this by GPL+Commercial license for those that pay?
It also allows people to read, audit, and trust the crypto code, which your model does not. For people like me, that’s a hard pass.
As JWZ once said: "You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of 'open source,' and have everything magically work out." Has there ever been a case where a company as its last act released their software as open-source, and a community formed and picked it up?
Now, there are interesting communities that form around games, that tend to be a "dead product" after release, and for which there was a source dump (or not, actually): doom, openMW, openRA, etc.
I don't see any restrictions regarding corporate usage.
Thinking to structure it around hugo.
I was using it via nextcloud and it worked perfectly for what it was. The web clipper also did a great job of snatching simplified versions of web pages.
What killed it for me was just my expanding desires. I want to things like
- view my knowledge base from my work machine without downloading the whole knowledge base to it. - Be able to search my notes AND all the books i've read. I tried using pandoc to go epub to md but it was too clunky and the searchability within notes wasn't great.
If I was still using it as a drop in replacement for evernote I think it would be great, but to go beyond that starts to stretch the seams a bit.
I also second looking at github's awesome-selfhosted.
100% this. The peace of mind I get knowing that all of my data is under my control is worth it, after scrambling to archive content from failed or pivoting services, removing my data from businesses that try to exploit it or trying to migrate my data from one old app to a different newer app.
There are many different open-source and self-hosted wikis, note taking apps and mind-mapping tools. Some of them are listed here[1], just Ctrl-F for "wiki", "notes" and "knowledge"
[1] https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
But for something I'm going to invest some time learning, and will rely on, that's a very difficult pill to swallow. I don't want to depend on proprietary software for important parts of my workflow. What if I want to switch to a pinebook, for instance? No ARM build seems to be available yet. And that's just a single example... (a WASM/LLVM IR build could sidestep that issue).
That said, I like the idea. Is there any open-source equivalent?
Another thing I need to do often is type up design docs collaboratively, we use google docs for this currently but it sucks for our use cases.
And finally, I read and write a lot of GH wiki pages and various markdown notes in git repos for open source collaboration, which isn't really helpful for cross referencing information.
Is there any way to do this with obsidian? I'm all for owning my data but tbh, a lot of the powerful features you demonstrate only make sense for me if I can throw my data up on a server and make it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
You can also have multiple vaults, and if you want to collaborate, you can share that vault with someone.
Realtime collaboration may be a bit dangerous with syncing over a cloud provider. They are also planning a subscription with note hosting - perhaps that will include some form of collaboration.
If you put all of your GH wiki pages into a single vault, that may be a solution (though I don't think it's possible to create a solution to your setup in the most general setting - you'd have to be able to link to any file on your OS).
But you can throw your data up on a server and make it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection
- this does not seem to be open source or free-as-in-speech. That worries me - especially when it comes to longevity. It's the reason I wouldn't use this product if it was by Google.
- i don't see an easy way to export my data in case I would like to migrate to a different service.
That being said I am definitely going to try it out and see what it does for me! There is definitely a gap in knowlege-mapping software in my life
The only 'cost', so to speak, is adding bidirectional link syntax, which I suspect is soon to become a common standard. I am curious to see what happens when they open up their developer API, as the Obsidian PKM community is quite active.