I find Roam Research to be the the most zen note-taking app. The database takes a lot of mental overhead away and just allows me to write, and I know I won't have to deal with files and folders at all. You could mount a Logseq graph in a location where it isn't easily accessible to other programs and yourself, and restrict the permissions to read-only expect for the 'Logseq' user, so that you think about the plumbing less often. And the new sync that they're adding will make it all even more zen. Syncing with cloud services or using Syncthing gives me a bit of anxiety over data loss.
But their pricing is insane. Importantly, the reports of people losing everything is insane. Further, the guys just went and banned/blocked anyone making any complaint on Reddit or Twitter.
Their tech stack also sounds dumb. I stopped using their tool on principle on top of the insane pricing.
How is £$165/year not nutty? That is more than I pay per year for Amazon Prime, Spotify, Disney+, MLB or The Economist. All for basically being able to just write text in a browser and store it.
I do grant you that for some prolific (borderline pathological?) note takers who wouldn’t mind paying that money for an app they spend a lot of their time in. That’s why the price alone was not a dealbreaker for me.
In a vacuum, perhaps $165/yr would be OK for some people. But when compared to other options that are mostly as nice for a fraction of the price, it's a bit much for me.
I got lucky and snagged the sync product before they doubled the price, so I'm grandfathered into that. But even $50/yr is a fair bit given it's really just a storage mechanism. $50 isn't that bad, but I would give a hard no at the full price of $100/yr.
Worse, the publish feature... holy insanity this thing is. $192/yr to publish a single repository.
Yea, it's pretty bad. My vaults aren't even 3mb, so it's really expensive, regardless.
I just don't understand at all how they came up with the pricing. If they need to make money, make the app a paid product for like $10 or $15.
Everything they put a price tag on is astronomical.
* Catalyst (for early access) $25+
* Commercial $50 per year
* Sync $8/mo ($96/yr)
* Publish $16/mo ($192/yr)
The app remains free, so it's clear they're trying to subsidize the cost of the app by cranking up the dial on the extra services, but I'd rather they just charge a reasonable price for the app and make the addon services reasonably priced. I'd be happy to pay like $10/yr for the app, and if, presumably, enough others were it would probably make them MORE money than the add-on services because a larger portion of their user base would have to pay for the app, and probably wouldn't shit a brick at $10/yr or something reasonable.
> Further, the guys just went and banned/blocked anyone making any complaint on Reddit or Twitter.
It wasn't "the guys". It was the CEO. He believes the best use of his time is monitoring Reddit threads and banning people. He posted an official policy that any negative comment or any mention of a competing app is a permanent ban - even if you're a paying customer.
I gave Roam a comprehensive evaluation last year before deciding to go with Obsidian, and paying for Obsidian Sync. I posted a short comment in one of the threads listing the reasons I didn't go with Roam. He could have learned from my comment. He could have ignored it. He banned me. A few days later, he banned Ramses Oudt, the leading community advocate for Roam, for making a negative comment.
That's a little more drama than I'd like for a notetaking app I'm paying to use.
Logseq with Git is solid, very hard to loose data, and is the best option for ownership of data / GDPR compliance / privacy. But Git isn't for everyone. Looking forward to sync also.
Yup, I've been doing this for months. It seems like they recently removed the automatic commit feature from the app itself and instead moved it to this little script: https://github.com/logseq/git-auto
Well that's good to know. But I still say the OG logseq was the best of these apps: open source (mostly), plain markdown, visually clean, backlinks, browser accessible (so no issues jotting down a note from literally anything with an internet connection), almost zero friction for note-taking... It was just the best. Now the contortions we have to go through to synchronize notes is painful. A cynic would say it's a deliberate choice to make the paid sync more appealing, when previously it was unnecessary.
Athens is getting there as an alternative, but I wish they were markdown-based for portability.
idk what you're talking about, they have a pretty easy script. The only thing they've changed in this regard is removing the periodic auto-commit feature which wasn't very good in the first place and the github repo as a back-end, which was also half-baked and not very good. IMO they've only improved things and have not shied away from dropping features that do not work as they intended.
Moving from a simple, browser-based, git-backed model to something that requires bash scripts and git hooks and still has chronic sync errors and requires installing apps (that may not be available for a platform or installable for security reasons)? I mean, I respect that not every use case is the same and I'm glad many people find logseq useful (as I still do), but, from my perspective, they have significantly increased the friction of using what was an almost magical tool for capturing transient thoughts at high speed anywhere. I do like the features they are adding, which is why I continue to use it, but it's definitely not the magic tool it used to be.
Pretty much anything before they announced deprecation of github integration. You would have to self-host the legacy backend (which is doable, but it's not simple). I apologize for not knowing the version number, but it would've been, oh, maybe 2 years ago?
I'll call it; for an app in this space, anything other than FOSS or perhaps a one time deal like Obsidian's model is 100% a bad idea, and self-hosting must ALWAYS be a first-class citizen.
It's perhaps ironic that this reverses "you get what you pay for," but experience should teach all of us that these subscription type deals are strongly likely to screw you, usually through some change in the business model.
(Personally, tried org-mode in the past, have also played with Obsidian, but for me http://zim-wiki.org is the perfect combo of easy and extensible)
For those looking for an Obsidian like tool for commercial usage, check out Foam[0]. It covers most of the core Obsidian features and it's implemented as a VS Code extension with all of the advantages that entails. Of course, you won't have access to the Obsidian extensions and I do miss the live preview feature and the Android app but it's way more than serviceable.
Dendron's dot.namespaced.hierarchies were an instant "I want that" when I first run across it[^1] but yes, I've become wary of over opinionated tooling for my notes that require specific and idiosyncratic architecture/metadata to function. (and this one's VC backed no less). And this goes for Obsidian extensions as well: if it litters my vault with all kinds of metadata that's not easily accessible or useless when the tool and/or Obsidian finally becomes unusable, no thank you.
1: yes, you can implement this using #forward/slashes/and/tags but you lose some velocity when it's not the core organizational primitive.
Isn't Dendron basically the same thing? It's built on VSCode as well. Foam was literally mentioned in the article and didn't scratch the author's itch, but I'm not sure why it didn't but Dendron is.
Dendron is built around the dot.namespace.hierarchies which are a nifty way to organize your PKM and implement "Folder Notes" feature. Foam is more traditional, file system based. Very like Obsidian, like I said. I was able to _sense_ the extra man hours Dendron's had but yeah, otherwise basically the same.
The big difference, is FOAM notes are meant to be flat (or you can use folder I guess) and you explore just via the links whereas Dendrons have hierarchies of notes.
So "food" is a note about food in general, "food.chinese" is a note under food that's about chineses food, "food.chinese.tao-chicken" is a note about tao-chicken under chinese-food, etc.
You can also just skip notes in the hierarchy, so you could have just "food" and "food.chinese.tao-chicken" and a placeholder "food.chinese" would appear in the graph.
I personally really liked the note/subnote model used in Zim Wiki, but that program wasn't great for code snippets or to write graphs so I'm pretty excited about Dendron. In comparison, trying to connect my notes is just such a pain with a flat system like foam and Obsidian.
Your notes are not under other notes in Obsidian, just inside a folder. Also files in a same folder doesn't affect the graph in any way. The the graph it all looks flat and notes are linked only by the links you explicitly wrote. In comparison, Dendron graphs shows both explicit connections, but also the parents/children.
If you're giving Foam a look, also consider svsool's unfortunately named "Memo" (previously Markdown Memo): https://github.com/svsool/memo It's a VSCode plugin for groups of Markdown notes similar to Foam and Dendron and inspired by Roam. I prefer this to Foam. One of the unique features Memo has is that links inside folders/namespaces
don't have to be absolute if the name itself is unique, which is surprisingly convenient.
This article does address my main gripe with Obsidian:
> But for me, I don't use the mobile app much often. (...) The only thing I need is to capture a thought quickly.
I don't use the mobile app often _because_ the only thing I need to do is capture a quick thought, and it isn't very good at that. I'm still figuring out a setup with QuickAdd + Advanced URL + Tasker, but it'd be better if this was built into Obsidian's mobile app.
I’ve searched far and wide for the best quick mobile capture tool over the years. The best I’ve found is Braintoss, which lets you record a voice note, then sends the transcription and the recording (in case the transcription was wrong) to your inbox of choice (usually used with a task manager’s unique email address for your list). Pair this with the Apple Watch app and it’s incredible.
Second to that is google keep, which also has that style of capturing, but doesn’t work nearly as smoothly on iOS, and has no way to integrate with another app.
Third up is Drafts for iOS, which is by far the fastest on-the-go mobile note taking app if you’re typing. They have great integrations (but for automation you have to use Shortcuts). The only reason they’re ranked third for me is their voice note story is not good enough.
You can capitalize on the fact that you don't need to use Obsidian to add notes. It's just Markdown (plain text) files on the FS.
You can create a little script to catch your thought and put it in a file somewhere in the Obsidian vault. You can use iOS Shortcuts or (maybe) Tasker for Android to do that.
How does this beat my markdown + vim + git stack? Granted I don't have Zettelkasten or fancy referencing features with this but I can always do a simple grep.
Yes, Obsidian functions as a personal Wiki, which makes the above look sorta like "Why would I use Wikipedia instead of a 2.7 Gb directory of text files indexed by Bing?", which makes the value add more obvious, I think.
(In case it isn't: links, rendering, and stuff like the graph that gets constructed as you link are _very_ helpful to my workflow)
Obsidian, for example, has a built-in renderer and a whole lot of plugins that can extent it.
For instance, dataview plugin can query other notes and render result in place. So for example, you have a few notes with a tag "book-review". And in them you use YAML preamble to track rating you gave the book. Dataview can render you a list of books you reviewed and their ratings (even in star form), individual rows linking to the specific notes.
Another example, built-in TeX rendering support, which makes it much easier to read math formulas. Likewise, built-in Mermaid for diagrams.
A simple grep isn't always enough. Backlinks, built in dataviews, attachments, tagging and so on are useful features for heavier use cases. You may not need them - which is no less valid - but many of us do.
I recently dived more into obsidian (coming from Bear) and I must say I really like it so far.
I'm not using the personal knowledge management bit too much yet, but as a note taking app it's great.
Moreover, the plugin ecosystem (which I've just started exploring) is excellent!
I.e. there's a plugin for downloading highlights from your Kindle books, which also creates referencable refs for each highlight and lets you easily embed them in other notes. Cool stuff.
It's also impressive that most plugins work on the mobile app too.
My one gripe – and it's a big one – about Obsidian is that it just does not give one whit about trying to integrate with macOS. It feels like an Electron app that the developers just checked the "macOS" checkbox on; like I'm stepping into the captain's chair of a capable but ugly tugboat when I Cmd-Tab over. (Which is a shame, because it is a capable boat.)
Basic hotkeys are modal, somehow (Open Help from sidebar. Try to use Cmd-W to close). No interface tabbing support (this app is likely an a11y fire). No proxy icons. The menu bar is supremely basic – and they don't capitalize their own app's name ("About obsidian"). The command palette calls Finder the "system explorer." Somehow no print support, anywhere. Custom context menus abound.
Best one: close the main Obsidian window on macOS and try to figure out how to reopen it. (Reopening the app is one... there's one other way!)
>My one gripe – and it's a big one – about Obsidian is that it just does not give one whit about trying to integrate with macOS.
This might get better soon.
@kepano, the developer of Minimal, is working on a new "default theme" for Obsidian. He said it "will follow many of the same design principles as Minimal, particularly in making Obsidian feel native across platforms. It will differ in that it will prioritize accessibility and affordances more than Minimal does. In addition the new default theme will make customization and theme development easier than before."
I like Obsidian, but yea, there are some fundamental weirdnesses as a result of it basically being a web app. It'll never feel all that native.
For me though, much of the real issue is the iOS app. I feel like it needs some big modifications to how it operates in order to make quickly doing particular things a lot easier.
When I'm on my phone, the biggest thing for me is I need to take a quick note. I'd love to just open Obsidian, click a button to let me put a note in an inbox, then when I'm on my Mac I can sort the inbox like I would a task manager. I don't generally do deep work on my phone, I only really perform reference and quick notes type actions.
Apple makes it difficult to develop apps from another platform (unique low level libraries like Metal, requiring a Mac for publishing). I think one result of this is that cross-platform app authors who aren't ALSO primarily MacOS users just kind of throw their code over the fence and hope it works. I can't blame them.
Is there somewhere one can view that work? I have to admit I'm skeptical, because most of the parent comment's complaints are pretty fundamental to how the app is built.
But I share their gripes, and it's similarly important to me. And I'm currently trying to choose a tool in this category to adopt.
Release notes can be found on the Obsidian forum[0]. Roadmap is on Trello[1]. You can also learn more via the official Obsidian Discord group.
The app will continue to be developed with Electron, however Electron does provide APIs for things like native menus. Making Obsidian feel native is a high priority currently.
The latest public release (v0.15) contained several improvements towards that goal: multiple window support, native fonts, native scrollbars, native app menus.
Currently in progress is a new default theme I am working on. I previously made Minimal[2] as a community theme, which was designed around the goal of making Obsidian feel native on macOS.
Obsidian has really been a life changer for me, mostly due to Anki integration, and live mode with its support of mathjax which makes everything look so neat.
I've tried Dendron before: it's really cool, but the lack of live mode and the messiness of the notes (i.e. lack of clear hierarchy makes my head spin when navigating notes, though it's a feature not a bug for certain usecases) makes it so unappealing to me. But then again, I used it as a solely note taking app, as opposed to knowledge manager.
Also, forgot to mention, the excalidraw plugin is absolute magic, and works great with an iPad.
TLDR: You can embed excalidraw drawings/diagrams in your notes and edit them there. Moreover, inside of the excalidraw diagram you can use markdown and arbitrary obsidian references, so it composes both ways.
Funny enough, two years since making it, I'm still working on the one liner (creator of Dendron here).
The current one liner: dendron is an open source, developer focused note taking tool that lets you quickly find and organize your notes in vscode using flexible hierarchies.
Given a few more lines, I would add: what IDEs do for programming languages, we want to do for knowledge - that is to say, give you the tooling to manage large amounts of it using concepts like refactoring, lookup, and schemas (think of this as type definitions but for the structure of your notes)
+1 for Outline! Self-hosted server and web app, clean codebase, loads fast, mobile friendly, actively maintained. I had tried Obsidian, Trilium, TiddlyWiki, and all the rest (not to mention Notion, Bear, etc.). Outline is the first knowledge base I’ve tried that checks almost every box.
(The only unchecked box is that data is stored in a database instead of markdown files, but I decided to let go of that one.)
Edit: Funny, this thread is discussing two different Outlines. I’m talking about https://www.getoutline.com/.
It seems that you like using GDrive. I developed docjumper.com which is a better interface to GDrive. It runs entirely client-side in your browser so that there are no added security concerns. But I don't know how much that would help you since there isn't any extra usefulness with Google Keep.
I also switched between some of those apps for quite some time until i found Trilium Notes. https://github.com/zadam/trilium
It's open source and you can self host it to be available through web browser for the time you're at work and don't want the files to be local.
It's very stable so far and has all the features i need.
I tried trillium and found it interesting but a little difficult to use (I prefer markdown to their editor). Then I tried editing on mobile and it really was awful. It was mostly impossible to use the contextual menu. Some words got doubled when I typed them. Pasting did not work.
So I came back to a folder of markdown files synchronized with syncthing that I edit with markor on Android and vim or vscode on desktop.
I've moved from Evernote to Obsidian this year and like it so far. It reminds me of code editors, it was clearly inspired by them.
The markdown notes and attachments are just plain files on my disk, they can be backed up and synced across devices. On Windows and iOS the iCloud sync works well. The notes are available offline on my phone which is a must-have feature.
I don't use many plugins, but it's great that the app is extendable like that. I've written a small syllable counter plugin myself and it was pretty easy to find my way around. Unfortunately the official docs are... lacking, so poking around other people's code was the best way to see what's what.
Yes, I switched to TiddlyWiki a year ago, and haven't regretted it. I tried Evernote, Notion, Org-mode, Dynalist, Zettlr -- and looked at Dendron, Roam, Obsidian and so on.
I think what separates TiddlyWiki and Org-mode from the rest is that they are easily "hackable" and have more powerful syntax, but are also more demanding on the user.
You can modify the UI and add features inside TiddlyWiki itself, using only TiddlyWiki syntax and Javascript. Like if you want backlinks to be displayed at the bottom of every note in a certain way, you can do that.
Markdown is a very limited language when you think about it. (Most of these tools would be better off using AsciiDoc.) TiddlyWiki's WikiText has macros and widgets that let you do things Markdown never will, and your "notes" can become interactive and dynamic.
TiddlyWiki allows you to create a very sophisticated, tailored system for managing lots of different things. But when you begin, it's a pretty steep learning curve, and you'll need to put in more work than when starting with Obsidian, of course.
I’ve been hoping to be able to use multiple apps and sync between the ones that use text files. It seems like this may be wishful thinking. Obsidian and Logseq don’t appear compatible from the article based on Logseq adding things?
I have a link saved to sync Noteplan 3 (Apple ecosystem only) with Obsidian. I have my Noteplan folder indexed with DEVONthink (Apple ecosystem only) so that syncs up. Having Logseq sync up would be cool too.
Logseq, Athens and others uses outlines (Markdown unordered lists) at their core with files being more of the backing store. Obsidian uses plain markdown files. There are Obsidian plugins that provide similar support but it's still for the most part obvious that the notes were written on Logseq.
I've been using simply a private git repository to sync my raw notes and it's worked flawlessly. I do this on multiple machines and even my android phone. Would you be open to try that approach out?
These programs will not help you organize your thoughts; they work if you have already organized them. Some seem to think the causation goes otherwise.
Generally I agree. But I actually think tooling can matter. And in particular I had a very good experience with logseq in terms of importing source documents and then processing them down and integrating them. The main reason logseq works for that is because of the block references (I don't know if other systems have that, but that's what made logseq different and interesting as a tool for processing knowledge).
[Ultimately my problem with logseq is that as far as I know I can't run it through a browser self-hosted. Unfortunately that's what I need at work since I can't install anything and all the remote desktop things are blocked. I'm mostly an idiot about electron but I wish it functioned like X11 forwarding where you could install an app on a port and browse to it remotely.]
Yeah I agree about that. I actually didn't figure out what it can do and how it can be used until I watched a few youtube videos watching other people actually use it and then it clicked. The video that helped me get a vision of ways I can use it was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN6tjeQfxRc This is nitpicking but I wish there were more videos of people just using PKM systems without all the talking about philosophy of note taking etc. A lot of the video was "... wait, you can do that? I want to do that. How the hell did she do that?" which is a good way to learn the tool, but can be frustrating.
Of note: My mode of writing is to collect/generate messes of ideas and then clean them up and organize them iteratively to create structure and polish. I'm one of the people who used to write on index cards and then compose by rearranging them on my bed. I loved abusing Word's outline mode for rough drafts and restructuring and refactoring text and have been trying to explain the missing functionality to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice for over a decade ("we have outline mode you just click the thing" "no it's not about creating an outline of document structure" "hey we improved outline check it out see if it looks better" loops). So when I saw some of logseq in action it was an "omg this looks even better than Word's outline mode" sort of thing. The next thing I wish logseq would do is allow you to double click to explode paragraphs and temporarily separate sentences into bullets for processing and reorganizing.
I'm generally not looking to organize my thoughts. I'm looking to record my conclusions and ideally some way to see the history of that.
I too often feel like my brain is like Twitter/etc. I read an article, but summarize it heavily and forget the rest. I want to A: record the summary, so at least i don't forget that, and B: ideally record a few facts that lead to that summary-conlusion-thing. So if i have to rethink my conclusion i'll know what source material it came from.
I've followed a similar path to the author. Tried Notion, loved until it went down for 8 hours without offline support, and then moved to Obsidian with github sync without any plug in.
But time and time again I keep asking myself why. In the end, Sublime (or vim) actually is just enough for how I use Obsidian.
The only thing missing is a good reference management system; linking my own notes seems like trying to solve the wrong problem; all I really need is to keep track of what sparked those ideas/notes, and then I don't necessarily need to keep track of my thoughts;if they were meaningful I will deduce it from those references anyway.
So I just went back to Zotero for reference management. Quick notes can just go in to a big text file and then refactored later. (bonus for spaced repetition)
Obsidian is a nice app but it feels like it's a product solving the symptoms (wrong priorities in note taking) rather than a tool to support healthy habit
Since this touches more regular note taking apps such as Evernote and OneNote I would like to give a shout out to Joplin. After using Evernote for 10 years or so I figured out that this would be the year I switched.
First impression of Joplin is very good! Both desktop client and app seems fast, much much faster than Evernote. Setup of "self-hosting" against a S3 bucket was easy enough (had an issue with S3 URL needing region, something that was not mentioned in the docs).
It does not have all the fancy functions of Evernote (and rest of the apps mentioned in this thread), but for just keeping a collection of notes it seems to cover the basics I need (notebooks, good search, markdown support, easy synch across clients etc).
I'm also happy with Joplin. If I could change one thing I'd make it plaintext based, instead of SQLite. I don't use it for media/web clipping and I suspect it would speed up syncing (which takes around 5-15 seconds, even for incremental changes).
I also found this a bit strange at first, but my guess without diving into the code is that since all searching is done on the client and not through an server side API, SQLite is probably the best way to achieve this performant across all devices and platforms.
I've experienced similar frustrations with notetaking apps.
I'm now working on a tool similar to "Obsidian, Logseq and Dendron".
It came as a frustration of previous tools(I've used ALL of them). They're either not flexible enough, not light enough, not powerful enough, not portable enough etc.
It combines both studying/references. So it's a flashcard(I don't user Supermemo algo tho) + Notetaking. It's also built on a standard so you can develop commandline/mobile/toaster app that is compatible.
I use Dendron daily for work. The main value it provides for me is a shortcut to create a daily journal note, and a quick organizational structure. That’s it. I don’t do anything fancy with it, but just this simple functionality is enough for me. VSCode search works well enough to search daily notes.
I find the biggest benefit for me is that it’s low friction to record things that I otherwise wouldn’t.
I have started some organization, but things that I want others to know end up elsewhere like Confluence.
I’d love to use something like Dendron in my personal life as well but I would need it to work from my phone, and be easily shared with my wife.
Since this is one of those "well, I use [x]" type threads, I have finally settled upon https://www.inkdrop.app/ – it's sort of like the VS Code of notetaking, very extensible and tweak-able, but simple on the surface. The developer is pretty cool too and does some of the best screencasts I've seen. It's less optimized for the "linking" approach often used by second brain tools (which I don't seem to get along with anyway) but there are addons to do some of it.
I like dendron's dot.namespace.hierarchy, human browsable flat file system.
But even VSCode can be slow and buggy, loaded with plugins from being used for other things. It would crash on large notes.
So I implemented the file naming scheme in my own folder, and have it open in Atom. Shift-Ctrl-F can search through all notes. Done.
All this linking of notes, creating a "knowledge graph", having a schema... is extra. It requires more effort than benefit I've EVER practically received. It's a cool hobby, and I love to organize things. But I'm trying to spend less time fiddling with tools these days.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who has bounced around between note apps with varied success. I too have settled mostly on Obsidian, especially for work. The Markdown support is excellent and I am finding some useful plugins.
I do still use a mix of Apple Notes and Standard Notes for personal note taking. As the author mentioned, using Obsidian for both personal and work feels a bit cumbersome - especially in my case since I can't use the same Google Drive for both due to corporate policy.
Guys, if you want to do - "but my favourite is x", please spend some time going into why it works for you and why it can work for others in general. Also kindly mention their presentation stack on desktop and phone.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadTheir tech stack also sounds dumb. I stopped using their tool on principle on top of the insane pricing.
The pricing truly is nutty. $165 a year for foldable bullet points??!! Gtfo. I wouldn't pay that much to own the app outright.
I sincerely hope they lose their lunch, and I feel bad for having recommended them to people.
I believe the tech stack is clojure, which makes a ton of sense given that the data store is basically a graph database.
The other points were though.
I got lucky and snagged the sync product before they doubled the price, so I'm grandfathered into that. But even $50/yr is a fair bit given it's really just a storage mechanism. $50 isn't that bad, but I would give a hard no at the full price of $100/yr.
Worse, the publish feature... holy insanity this thing is. $192/yr to publish a single repository.
I just don't understand at all how they came up with the pricing. If they need to make money, make the app a paid product for like $10 or $15.
Everything they put a price tag on is astronomical.
* Catalyst (for early access) $25+
* Commercial $50 per year
* Sync $8/mo ($96/yr)
* Publish $16/mo ($192/yr)
The app remains free, so it's clear they're trying to subsidize the cost of the app by cranking up the dial on the extra services, but I'd rather they just charge a reasonable price for the app and make the addon services reasonably priced. I'd be happy to pay like $10/yr for the app, and if, presumably, enough others were it would probably make them MORE money than the add-on services because a larger portion of their user base would have to pay for the app, and probably wouldn't shit a brick at $10/yr or something reasonable.
It wasn't "the guys". It was the CEO. He believes the best use of his time is monitoring Reddit threads and banning people. He posted an official policy that any negative comment or any mention of a competing app is a permanent ban - even if you're a paying customer.
I gave Roam a comprehensive evaluation last year before deciding to go with Obsidian, and paying for Obsidian Sync. I posted a short comment in one of the threads listing the reasons I didn't go with Roam. He could have learned from my comment. He could have ignored it. He banned me. A few days later, he banned Ramses Oudt, the leading community advocate for Roam, for making a negative comment.
That's a little more drama than I'd like for a notetaking app I'm paying to use.
Athens is getting there as an alternative, but I wish they were markdown-based for portability.
It's perhaps ironic that this reverses "you get what you pay for," but experience should teach all of us that these subscription type deals are strongly likely to screw you, usually through some change in the business model.
(Personally, tried org-mode in the past, have also played with Obsidian, but for me http://zim-wiki.org is the perfect combo of easy and extensible)
[0]: https://github.com/foambubble/foam
1: yes, you can implement this using #forward/slashes/and/tags but you lose some velocity when it's not the core organizational primitive.
Both are free and open source
So "food" is a note about food in general, "food.chinese" is a note under food that's about chineses food, "food.chinese.tao-chicken" is a note about tao-chicken under chinese-food, etc.
You can also just skip notes in the hierarchy, so you could have just "food" and "food.chinese.tao-chicken" and a placeholder "food.chinese" would appear in the graph.
I personally really liked the note/subnote model used in Zim Wiki, but that program wasn't great for code snippets or to write graphs so I'm pretty excited about Dendron. In comparison, trying to connect my notes is just such a pain with a flat system like foam and Obsidian.
[0]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/search?term=mermaid&tar...
> But for me, I don't use the mobile app much often. (...) The only thing I need is to capture a thought quickly.
I don't use the mobile app often _because_ the only thing I need to do is capture a quick thought, and it isn't very good at that. I'm still figuring out a setup with QuickAdd + Advanced URL + Tasker, but it'd be better if this was built into Obsidian's mobile app.
It’s open url where the url in my case is -> obsidian://open?vault=GTD&file=Inbox
The shortcut lives on my Home Screen.
Not sure what the android equivalent is but given androids capabilities I assume it’s even more straightforward.
Hope that helps.
Second to that is google keep, which also has that style of capturing, but doesn’t work nearly as smoothly on iOS, and has no way to integrate with another app.
Third up is Drafts for iOS, which is by far the fastest on-the-go mobile note taking app if you’re typing. They have great integrations (but for automation you have to use Shortcuts). The only reason they’re ranked third for me is their voice note story is not good enough.
You can create a little script to catch your thought and put it in a file somewhere in the Obsidian vault. You can use iOS Shortcuts or (maybe) Tasker for Android to do that.
Presumably it beats your stack because it's all bundled together in a convenient package.
(In case it isn't: links, rendering, and stuff like the graph that gets constructed as you link are _very_ helpful to my workflow)
For instance, dataview plugin can query other notes and render result in place. So for example, you have a few notes with a tag "book-review". And in them you use YAML preamble to track rating you gave the book. Dataview can render you a list of books you reviewed and their ratings (even in star form), individual rows linking to the specific notes.
Another example, built-in TeX rendering support, which makes it much easier to read math formulas. Likewise, built-in Mermaid for diagrams.
I'm not using the personal knowledge management bit too much yet, but as a note taking app it's great.
Moreover, the plugin ecosystem (which I've just started exploring) is excellent!
I.e. there's a plugin for downloading highlights from your Kindle books, which also creates referencable refs for each highlight and lets you easily embed them in other notes. Cool stuff.
It's also impressive that most plugins work on the mobile app too.
Basic hotkeys are modal, somehow (Open Help from sidebar. Try to use Cmd-W to close). No interface tabbing support (this app is likely an a11y fire). No proxy icons. The menu bar is supremely basic – and they don't capitalize their own app's name ("About obsidian"). The command palette calls Finder the "system explorer." Somehow no print support, anywhere. Custom context menus abound.
Best one: close the main Obsidian window on macOS and try to figure out how to reopen it. (Reopening the app is one... there's one other way!)
This might get better soon.
@kepano, the developer of Minimal, is working on a new "default theme" for Obsidian. He said it "will follow many of the same design principles as Minimal, particularly in making Obsidian feel native across platforms. It will differ in that it will prioritize accessibility and affordances more than Minimal does. In addition the new default theme will make customization and theme development easier than before."
For me though, much of the real issue is the iOS app. I feel like it needs some big modifications to how it operates in order to make quickly doing particular things a lot easier.
When I'm on my phone, the biggest thing for me is I need to take a quick note. I'd love to just open Obsidian, click a button to let me put a note in an inbox, then when I'm on my Mac I can sort the inbox like I would a task manager. I don't generally do deep work on my phone, I only really perform reference and quick notes type actions.
https://minimal.guide/Guides/macOS+configuration
The OS style theme options really do wonders for making it feel more native on macOS. It’s especially nice with dark mode enabled
Light: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/damiankorcz/Prism-Theme/ma...
Dark: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/damiankorcz/Prism-Theme/ma...
Repo: https://github.com/damiankorcz/Prism-Theme
Feels pretty macOS-like to me.
But I share their gripes, and it's similarly important to me. And I'm currently trying to choose a tool in this category to adopt.
The app will continue to be developed with Electron, however Electron does provide APIs for things like native menus. Making Obsidian feel native is a high priority currently.
The latest public release (v0.15) contained several improvements towards that goal: multiple window support, native fonts, native scrollbars, native app menus.
Currently in progress is a new default theme I am working on. I previously made Minimal[2] as a community theme, which was designed around the goal of making Obsidian feel native on macOS.
[0] https://forum.obsidian.md/c/announcements/13
[1] https://trello.com/b/Psqfqp7I/obsidian-roadmap
[2] https://minimal.guide
Obsidian has really been a life changer for me, mostly due to Anki integration, and live mode with its support of mathjax which makes everything look so neat.
I've tried Dendron before: it's really cool, but the lack of live mode and the messiness of the notes (i.e. lack of clear hierarchy makes my head spin when navigating notes, though it's a feature not a bug for certain usecases) makes it so unappealing to me. But then again, I used it as a solely note taking app, as opposed to knowledge manager.
https://readwise.io/welcome/sync
TLDR: You can embed excalidraw drawings/diagrams in your notes and edit them there. Moreover, inside of the excalidraw diagram you can use markdown and arbitrary obsidian references, so it composes both ways.
The current one liner: dendron is an open source, developer focused note taking tool that lets you quickly find and organize your notes in vscode using flexible hierarchies.
Given a few more lines, I would add: what IDEs do for programming languages, we want to do for knowledge - that is to say, give you the tooling to manage large amounts of it using concepts like refactoring, lookup, and schemas (think of this as type definitions but for the structure of your notes)
[I found one OneNote -> Obsidian script a few years ago but it was very buggy.]
https://outline.app/
(The only unchecked box is that data is stored in a database instead of markdown files, but I decided to let go of that one.)
Edit: Funny, this thread is discussing two different Outlines. I’m talking about https://www.getoutline.com/.
I use Google Sheets and Keep. Sheets because I can dump photos, use formulas, paste links and Keep for jotting down some quick thoughts.
Can anyone recommend something similar? I would like to move everything to the same app where I could sync with my server of choice.
So I came back to a folder of markdown files synchronized with syncthing that I edit with markor on Android and vim or vscode on desktop.
The markdown notes and attachments are just plain files on my disk, they can be backed up and synced across devices. On Windows and iOS the iCloud sync works well. The notes are available offline on my phone which is a must-have feature.
I don't use many plugins, but it's great that the app is extendable like that. I've written a small syllable counter plugin myself and it was pretty easy to find my way around. Unfortunately the official docs are... lacking, so poking around other people's code was the best way to see what's what.
I think what separates TiddlyWiki and Org-mode from the rest is that they are easily "hackable" and have more powerful syntax, but are also more demanding on the user.
You can modify the UI and add features inside TiddlyWiki itself, using only TiddlyWiki syntax and Javascript. Like if you want backlinks to be displayed at the bottom of every note in a certain way, you can do that.
Markdown is a very limited language when you think about it. (Most of these tools would be better off using AsciiDoc.) TiddlyWiki's WikiText has macros and widgets that let you do things Markdown never will, and your "notes" can become interactive and dynamic.
See e.g. <https://groktiddlywiki.com/static/Macros.html> and <https://groktiddlywiki.com/static/Widgets.html>.
TiddlyWiki allows you to create a very sophisticated, tailored system for managing lots of different things. But when you begin, it's a pretty steep learning curve, and you'll need to put in more work than when starting with Obsidian, of course.
I have a link saved to sync Noteplan 3 (Apple ecosystem only) with Obsidian. I have my Noteplan folder indexed with DEVONthink (Apple ecosystem only) so that syncs up. Having Logseq sync up would be cool too.
[Ultimately my problem with logseq is that as far as I know I can't run it through a browser self-hosted. Unfortunately that's what I need at work since I can't install anything and all the remote desktop things are blocked. I'm mostly an idiot about electron but I wish it functioned like X11 forwarding where you could install an app on a port and browse to it remotely.]
Of note: My mode of writing is to collect/generate messes of ideas and then clean them up and organize them iteratively to create structure and polish. I'm one of the people who used to write on index cards and then compose by rearranging them on my bed. I loved abusing Word's outline mode for rough drafts and restructuring and refactoring text and have been trying to explain the missing functionality to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice for over a decade ("we have outline mode you just click the thing" "no it's not about creating an outline of document structure" "hey we improved outline check it out see if it looks better" loops). So when I saw some of logseq in action it was an "omg this looks even better than Word's outline mode" sort of thing. The next thing I wish logseq would do is allow you to double click to explode paragraphs and temporarily separate sentences into bullets for processing and reorganizing.
I too often feel like my brain is like Twitter/etc. I read an article, but summarize it heavily and forget the rest. I want to A: record the summary, so at least i don't forget that, and B: ideally record a few facts that lead to that summary-conlusion-thing. So if i have to rethink my conclusion i'll know what source material it came from.
Something like Building a Second Brain (with CODE and PARA) or Linking Your Thinking. The system helps, but the app enables the system.
Now I view taking notes as active learning. Highly recommend the book “how to take smart notes”
But time and time again I keep asking myself why. In the end, Sublime (or vim) actually is just enough for how I use Obsidian.
The only thing missing is a good reference management system; linking my own notes seems like trying to solve the wrong problem; all I really need is to keep track of what sparked those ideas/notes, and then I don't necessarily need to keep track of my thoughts;if they were meaningful I will deduce it from those references anyway.
So I just went back to Zotero for reference management. Quick notes can just go in to a big text file and then refactored later. (bonus for spaced repetition)
Obsidian is a nice app but it feels like it's a product solving the symptoms (wrong priorities in note taking) rather than a tool to support healthy habit
It does not have all the fancy functions of Evernote (and rest of the apps mentioned in this thread), but for just keeping a collection of notes it seems to cover the basics I need (notebooks, good search, markdown support, easy synch across clients etc).
I'm now working on a tool similar to "Obsidian, Logseq and Dendron".
It came as a frustration of previous tools(I've used ALL of them). They're either not flexible enough, not light enough, not powerful enough, not portable enough etc.
So I made: https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook/
It combines both studying/references. So it's a flashcard(I don't user Supermemo algo tho) + Notetaking. It's also built on a standard so you can develop commandline/mobile/toaster app that is compatible.
I think there might be a few hundred if not a few thousand of them now. I’m realized and gave up :/
As long as the tool you created is useful for yourself and that’s sufficient for you, you should be golden. Otherwise it’s a potential world of pain!
I understand your point and I kinda agree, but this is really a long-term project, particularly the standard.
This is based off the idea that browsers might die, but HTTP will live on.
The same principle applied here, this tool in particular might die out and rot, but the standard/protocol will live on!
I find the biggest benefit for me is that it’s low friction to record things that I otherwise wouldn’t.
I have started some organization, but things that I want others to know end up elsewhere like Confluence.
I’d love to use something like Dendron in my personal life as well but I would need it to work from my phone, and be easily shared with my wife.
But even VSCode can be slow and buggy, loaded with plugins from being used for other things. It would crash on large notes.
So I implemented the file naming scheme in my own folder, and have it open in Atom. Shift-Ctrl-F can search through all notes. Done.
All this linking of notes, creating a "knowledge graph", having a schema... is extra. It requires more effort than benefit I've EVER practically received. It's a cool hobby, and I love to organize things. But I'm trying to spend less time fiddling with tools these days.
I do still use a mix of Apple Notes and Standard Notes for personal note taking. As the author mentioned, using Obsidian for both personal and work feels a bit cumbersome - especially in my case since I can't use the same Google Drive for both due to corporate policy.