Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app (obsidian.md)
Obsidian 1.0 introduces two big changes: a UI overhaul and an new tabbed interface. We've put a lot of care into making the app more approachable and more accessible. We've also prioritized using more native OS features for menus, windows, and many details.
We got our first private beta users from a comment under a HN thread about org-roam [1], and our waiting list was an innocent Google Form. Good times!
Our initial launch on HN was over two years ago [2], when terms like "second brain" and "tools for thought" were still in their infancy. Since then, the landscape has continued to evolve and new ideas are sprouting in the space every day. Obsidian has always embraced its "hacker" nature and thrives off its community of tinkerers. We now have over 670 plugins that push the envelope of what's possible in the app.
We want to continue to foster that same hacker spirit, but at the same time, we want to provide a polished product that can stand on its own. In the last several months, we've expanded the team and refocused ourselves on providing a product that's polished and easy to use.
We have big plans to continue making Obsidian the best and most refined thought-processing app for decades to come. Obsidian 1.0 is just the start!
Special credits go to Stephan Ango (@kepano) for the redesign and Liam Cain for tirelessly polishing this release.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767658 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598
577 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 313 ms ] threadIn terms of your journey, what do you think the main challenges were? I'm sure a big one is adoption and another performance but curious to hear what the team's thoughts are.
For me personally, the community has been absolutely stellar. Lots of folks always willing to help out. Just a year and a half ago, I found dataview and after avoiding frontend for nearly a decade, I've finally begun my journey with React. The entire experience was kickstarted by my finding Obsidian and trying to contribute to plugins that I loved. A special thanks to everyone from the community: shabegom, joethei, koala, blacksmithgu, pseudometa, Eleanor, Fevol, aquaman, metruzan, and many many others whose name I'm blanking on right now but I promise I'm grateful!
Specifically this CSS snippet stopped working:
https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-to-stop-the-blinking-cursor-...
Logseq allows me to embed the PDFs inside the app and annotate them with all the bells and whistles enabled by markdown. Area highlights, math notation, all these things are not possible with classical PDF readers, and I think Obsidian would fit well here.
I can mix a bit of Zettelkasten here, some daily notes there, and some 'old-fashioned' folder structures for projects to my heart's content.
Obsidian is less opinionated on the txt file format and folders too, so I consider it more future-proof.
I started with logseq and now obsidian doesn't work for me anymore. Tried to switch but I am into this small self containing bits now. Plus journal with timestamps
The great things about Logseq are his weakness for me. Everything is so interconnected (you can say: "here put the paragraph of this other note") that I sometimes lose confidence in the system. It becomes too complex. With Obsidian I know that a note is a file. Less convenient but simple and reliable.
Logseq really excels with his outlining mode, I miss it (but I don't like the way it saves states in the markdown file). It has some problems with the code blocks too.
[1] https://www.mobiussync.com/
- No export to PDF. There's a community plugin, but it's not great. The workaround is to export to HTML and print to PDF, but there's no real iOS option there.
- Managing images and other attachments are a mess. Using the "upload an asset" method gives it a random filename that if the app fails to save the page correctly, you either dig through the folder structure to find the random file name to link manually or you re-"upload an asset" creating a duplicate with a new random name. This could be alleviated if it was more stable or with a file picker with thumbnails to find previously "uploaded" files
- Pages fail to save correctly more than I'd like. I have no idea what the cause is, but it happens frequently on every platform I've tried.
- Page title changes don't propagate correctly sometimes, causing orphaned pages where it's a coin flip whether the page with the older title holds the content or the new one, leaving the other empty.
- Each page needs a unique title. I like how Notion allows multiple pages with the same title and are organized based on which parent page they're embedded or created in. I imagine Notion randomizes the actual file name similar to how Logseq already does for "uploaded" assets, so this could be alleviated if Logseq did the same. It could potentially alleviate the previously mentioned issue and it seems to me like the most logical method of handling this particular type of non-directory organizational structure.
- Their E2EE sync service is not yet ready, so no real mobile sync outside of iCloud (I use DropBox).
- Their documentation is terrible. There's tons of undocumented features, like admonitions, and the existing documentation is horribly structured, which is ironic since the documentation uses Logseq itself and the whole point of the app is to structure content.
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Side note, since we're on the topic of personal knowledge bases and note taking, my personal dream app is Obsidian with Asciidoc support instead of Markdown. A lot of the extra features they add to markdown are part of the Asciidoc standard, like admonitions and document-to-document cross-references, it would potentially make the backend easier and the content more portable with page attributes like specifying an attachment directory, and some features are simply more flexible/powerful like tables.
I still use AsciiDoc to create PDF documents that require more flexibility, like table spans and nested ordered lists (Obsidian's markdown uses just 1,2,... instead of changing to e.g., a,b,... for a nested level). My current workflow is typing it up in VS Code, converting to DocBook with asciidoctor, then converting that to a LaTeX PDF using pandoc. The result is a professional, academic-like PDF, but the workflow is a bit of a hassle and I'd prefer to do all of my document typing in Obsidian since it's so nice to use.
If I had more free time outside of my CS master's program and thesis work, I'd learn JS/TS to attempt to create a community extension that added AsciiDoc support to it and support for exporting to HTML and DocBook (and basic PDF since I'm pretty sure Obsidian uses an HTML-based PDF export anyway because CSS themes affect the look of the export), even if I still needed to use pandoc to convert to a more professional LaTeX PDF. I'm sure the VS Code AsciiDoc extension as reference and asciidoctor.js could get one pretty far.
Sorry for the rant. I've just been itching for a AsciiDoc-based note-taking/PKB for a long time.
- Includes/embeds (reference your source code by line range(s)
- Complex table support + the ability to embed CSV (automatic headers)
- Frontmatter as a first class citizen
- Macros (Variables) that can be referenced across documents
- Numerous Diagram parsing libraries (embed pretty much any diagram-as-code language)
I've had the same thoughts on building a Dendron type extension for AsciiDoc (AsciiDoc vscode plugin is fairly robust). Really would just need to hammer out some front matter parsing to get basic functionality.
It's also natively supported in VSCode (unlike AsciiDoc).
AsciiDoc includes are very powerful though, being able to populate your tables/code blocks from external data sources (filtering for certain lines/ranges). Also Tables can have complex structures (merged cells etc).
I feel like AsciiDoc was designed around writing technical papers than code documentation. It's essentially an opinionated wrapper around LaTex but less complexity. reST looks like it can produce great code documentation. AsciiDoc lets me cover both code documentation and customer facing documentation/reports with one code base. But I'll definitely continue to take a peek at reST. Although I think it's use case is more for embedding documentation directly in code. It's probably just my "I know the AsciiDoc toolchain well" bias though.
Obsidian has completely changed my notes workflow over the past year. It's so lightweight, and has just the right amount of structure for me. Thank you for building it! The new interface looks fantastic.
Does this include an update to the iOS app?
(I have a fair amount of content already in plain Markdown, as you can see here: https://taoofmac.com/static/graph)
The default file per folder is not built-in, but there is a handy community plugin[1] which does it.
[1]: https://github.com/xpgo/obsidian-folder-note-plugin
- Vault folder - A specified folder in your vault - In the same folder as the current file - In subfolder under the current folder
But again, that's just the default location; you can put it anywhere and reference it wherever it is using relative paths.
(Also the rest of Obsidian seems to not be aware the plugin is there, the notes graph is still referencing the wrong things...)
[1]: https://github.com/victorb/obsidian-wielder
Anyone can check out my public Obsidian vault here: https://notes.recursion.is
And I made an introduction video for it here: https://youtu.be/tTFK-V3hdAw
It’s also been good enough to replace Sublime + directory for my day to day development note taking. Its fast and just gets out of the way for writing and organizing - which is exactly what I want in a note taking app.
Honestly the beta version was already stable and feature rich enough to consider it it a v1 :)
If one of the key features is a new UI, can I advise to put a couple screenshots in the announcement?
Will this be retrocompatible with plugins on v.15?
They've marked them all as legacy and are removing the legacy label as theme developers are updating them.
There is afaik no such thing as an org-agenda in Obsidian, which is a deal breaker for me. Also to do list handling is shoddy at best (it would probably be a perfect app if that got integrated, e.g. via a todo.txt format with a calendar) but alas.
If I weren't an org-mode user, Obsidian would probably be my pick. It is very nice in everything it does, but it just doesn't have that "edge" of creating a setup that is ugly, complicated an unrecognizable from its default. It may be ugly, but at least it's _your_ ugly.
Would this be a set-up that creates an agenda that works (by using 2 extensions)?
https://medium.com/geekculture/how-i-track-my-tasks-in-obsid...
Dataview is such a great extension.
Source: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases
If I were to need to start writing a book this week, this is probably where I'd organize the research and composition.
Do you mean using a third-party sync application (Syncthing for example)? All I could find is a feature request: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/self-hosted-sync-server/20975/13
You can use it as a journal, personal wiki, knowledge base, task management, or just a Markdown text editor. There are hundreds of plugins that make it easy to tailor the app to your needs.
It's also focused on privacy and future-proofing your notes. All your data is stored locally in a folder of plain text files.
My usage of Reflect has made me very curious about other apps that do similar things (e.g. Obsidian)
Has anyone here tried Obsidian _and_ Reflect?
[^1]: https://reflect.app/
Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "second brain." Previous note taking applications I've tried in the past (e.g. Zettlr, Bear) lacked the vibrant developer community that Obsidian has cultivated.
Hats off to the founder and the Obsidian team!
[0] - https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com/p/stop-zettelkas...
If that's what it takes to make someones system effective so be it.
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well and all that.
What's a better alternative in your opinion?
I keep hearing praise about this being a simple app, but I found it to be very fiddly if you want more than just markdown rendered in your editor. Lots and lots of time to get things working/configured.
Sync has been a massive PITA for me with Obsidian. Unless you are willing to pay, there is going to be pain there eventually. I had similar problems with OneNote, but those sync problems have mostly disappeared. Further, OneNote's handwriting experience is really good. It is very easy to export all notes from OneNote to Markdown with Pandoc, so while I may be "locked" in, I can "get out" if I want.
Edit: So thank you Obsidian for helping me convert my notes in OneNote to markdown to try you out! I now have a verified escape hatch if I should ever need it. However, I am not sticking around. Too much trouble for little stuff and OneNote is just a really good all arounder.
"Time taken after creation to search for and open this note again"
This can show how useful your notes are and which are most useful.
While I think it's an interesting metric, it wouldn't capture the utility of my notes for me (emphasis on "for me", since everyone's probably different when it comes to notes).
Often, the act of writing the note helps better commit what I'm writing to memory. At a super rough estimate I'd say that 80% of the utility of note-taking is the act of producing the note itself, and only 20% of the utility is being able to refer back to specific facts.
I just, again, for me personally, gain a lot of value from writing the notes even that I never go back to revisit.
So for me personally, the metric is interesting, like I said, but doesn't capture "how useful" a note is, because I have most of my utility outside of that use case.
1. I have it committed to memory. 2. I never needed it.
I have no way to discern whether either (1) or (2) will happen as far into the future as you care to specify; so it's mostly a moot point. In any case, I will sometimes just do random walks through my notes, wikipedia style, and find a lot of value in it.
I'm not quite sure how I'd use the metric or if I'd use it to purge notes.
Searchability or recall can be a problem sometimes though, so "searches where I had no results or didn't visit anything" could be interesting.
Especially if I try searching later and find a note answering my question with bad "SEO".
Another idea I had was to make a Firefox extension that searches my notes and displays results before search engines since I reflexively search things in browser sometimes.
I found it very useful to organize research papers like this.
I wanted to use logseq (I felt good about "Obsidian, but open source") but when I tried to find some text in a page I was writing it didn't work. I'm a total logseq noob but as far as I could tell I needed to install an extension/plugin to search through the page, which was weird. Plus, the plugin didn't work for me (I typed in the thing to search for, clicked "go find it" and nothing happened, I think - it's been a while and I didn't use it much).
I kinda boggled my mind that logseq wouldn't have a 'Find' feature for finding text in the page I'm editing.
Please tell me that I missed something obvious so that I can feel dumb for missing that obvious thing but happy that I can take another look at logseq :)
The UX is extremely lacking, but it's open source, gaining steam, and they recently closed $4mil in funding so I expect it to massively improve over the next two years. Notably, page search should function without needing a dialog+overlay, and should support highlighting/navigating every match.
I'm excited to hear that there's support for expanding it.
And I'll definitely go back and take another look at it! :)
I think I tried Control+F, and maybe looking through menu items (it's probably there & I just missed it).
First note taking tools where I actually *read my notes*
Enter Logseq, and after a 20 minute learning curve, ideas just fly off of my fingertips. I reach for it daily. Can't recommend Logseq enough.
While waiting for Logseq to come to Android, I've been using Zettel Notes by Dev Rohit. It's been great so far!
Nits aside, I use both and sometimes folder structure came in quite handy (like having separate notes for course modules and having 15 topics). I wouldn't remember even the names of these topics to come by when I need to.
But I agree also that the magic in Logseq happens more often than in Obsi (rediscovery). I think what contributes to it is the atomic nature of blocks as opposed to pages and daily scroll of all topics encountered recently.
what? why... also emacs is really good for reproducible terminal logging of experiments/commands/output.
org mode has been too time-consuming in the past to adapt into my workflow. Logseq is a fantastic compromise.
[1]: https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases
When you open Logseq, you start with bullet points. Is that the only thing that pushes you to create more? In Obsidian, you can just start bullet points on your own.
That said Obsidian and Logseq are interoperable since they both run on a local folder of plain text files. Meaning you can switch over to Logseq for your outlining needs and use Obsidian for everything else.
(slightly biased since I helped on Obsidian 1.0, but I am a lover of all plain text tools)
Often when I write down my thoughts this way, it is more like following associative threads. I focus on a particular thought and relate something to it, which now becomes my new focus. Then I defocus and focus on something completely different. Kind-of like these threads here on HN. I wouldn’t call this outlining, it is more like spawning local contexts, nested textual environments to think in.
This is something that I miss the most when working with linear text structures as in Obsidian. I know you can indent and fold indentations in/out, but for me it doesn’t feel natural the way it does in notebook apps that organize text in block-trees. I also cannot reorganize or reference those indentations easily. I feel liberated (in thinking) with those bullets rather than constrained, but of course it is a matter of personal preference and habits.
So I think while outliner might be misplaced for emacs it is not for logseq.
However, I think Org-mode’s headings (*, **, …) have great nesting and folding capabilities that are more similar to the structure Logseq or Roam provide, but I don’t like having to create a heading hierarchy for my thoughts, so its not really the same.
My critique was more that the term “Outliner” does not really describe how I work with tools like Logseq and Roam, since I don’t really outline my notes/thoughts but use nested bullets more like a focus hierarchy that helps me to “anchor” them in the context of a previous note/thought (I hope this makes sense).*
I’ve used dozens of outlining and mind mapping tools from FreeMind to Logseq to OmniOutliner and more… But for me Obsidian, still wins because of the plugins. Check out the selection of outlining, link management (in particular link graphing) and crucially the refactoring plugins.
At the basic level the outlining plugins give you shortcuts keys to rapidly realign, reindent, fold and navigate a large tree of indented text, and when you combine that with the ability to take an entire level of that tree and just slice it out into its own document, leaning a link to the new document in its place (which other plugins can use to display an inline preview of that document) … it’s just amazing.
- For fans of "outline workflows" Outliner is excellent. A whole bunch of outline/indented text movement and manipulation commands: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner
- For easily refactoring notes that are getting too large you want to have Note Refactor. It gives you tools to easily take blocks of text and quickly cut them out into new notes. Its not magic out of the box, but its a powerful tool you can use when building workflows with other plugins. https://github.com/lynchjames/note-refactor-obsidian
- Local images is another good one, working with online content can get messy when you copy notes and then want to be able to work any where you have Obsidian synched. I've got it on my Laptop, two desktops, phone and tablet... I want to carry as much of my related content with me so having an easy way to convert remote images to local copies is a big productivity boost when making notes about content from the internet. https://github.com/aleksey-rezvov/obsidian-local-images
- For analysing the content for some useful stats there's: https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis but this is for a relatively specific sort of analysis.
- More general and flexible analysis and graph visualisations are available from the combination of https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain , https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview and https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin ... in short query your notes and note metadata like its a database, build reports and data visualisations, and then excalibrain is a whole thing built on top of that power.
- Dynamic embeds of outside content are available from https://github.com/dhamaniasad/obsidian-rich-links and https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed depending on the style and use you like. While there is a built in functionality to preview the links to other notes when you hover over them https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Page+preview which has a demo here https://youtu.be/dmnVml_jbsQ?t=222
- And a real force multiplier is adding https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands to your setup. It lets you run scripts and prompt for information and really invest time in procedural automation without having to build your own javascript plugins. So you can setup your system so that when yo...
All I can see is that it's been updated, but WTF is it?
edit: ahh, it wasn't the frontpage...
Edit: Found md-graph that also has the same neat graph: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ianjsike...
Editing in a somewhat rendered markdown - it's not quite full wysiwyg, but e.g, your heading blocks are sized right, your lists are rendered as bullets until you're editing that line, etc.
Notes first UI: Stuff like the rendered view toggle, links, inline image previews are more acccessible than in vs code due to their higher relative importance.
Two example of easy of use:
- You can type "[[" anywhere and start entering the title of a new or existing note (and follow that link). If the note already exists it will fuzzy match inline as you write.
- While on a note, you can change the title and all the references get updated.
There are also plugins with extra feature like note of the day, which creates and opens a file in the format 2022-10-13 so you can easily have a file for each day. Vim node also works very well.
And plugins! I can put a search query right within Markdown and it works. I have a unified interface over Markdown's to-do syntaxes I've left in various files. I can put a button that triggers some internal Obsidian command. I can have templates that pull from APIs and auto-populate some fields. I have variables I can easily query over. There's a git plugin you can use to auto-push/pull. There's a fully-featured mobile app (nearly feature compatible with the desktop app, plugin support and all). I have some subfolders that automatically get published on multiple websites that use a different CMS/SSG.
It's nothing you can't achieve with some custom bash/python scripts, but I don't like to spend my free time maintaining custom scripts, and Obsidian is truly a remarkably extensible product that allows me not to do that. It's easily in top 3 software products I use the most (next to a browser and a terminal emulator), I can't praise it enough.
> I guess the target is not directly developers when looking at their paid sync addon, because I would simply put this into a free closed gitlab repo.
You could, and people do, but there's a bit less friction with the built-in sync.
https://github.com/search?q=obsidian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_base
Sorry I don't want to sound disrespectul but I didn't found an quick and easy parsable description. If I would show this my parents, I wouldn't be sure if they could guess. :/
"Obsidian is a powerful and extensible knowledge base" ?????
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Vester#Networked_Thin...
This google trends graph confirms my suspicion that it was a more common term back then: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=K...
Out of curiosity I tried to find older references. There are references using this definition back to at least 1995. Beyond that it's trickier because apparently "knowledge base" was used to describe the knowledge available to an AI system during the expert systems era, which is a somewhat different definition. e.g. Lehnert 1977: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED150955.pdf
You can build much more complicated systems with it (I also have it as my todo app and have it pulling out todos from all my notes and prioritising them), or you can use it as a slightly nicer version of using vs code with a folder of markdown files, which was my precious system (there's also Dendron, which is the same idea but as a vs code plugin).
So I'm thinking that this is a _ME_ problem and not necessarily a 'Product Description' problem.
After installing it, and typing in a few things I notice that it's similar to ZIM (another desktop wiki app) on the surface.
I also appreciate that you corrected my misuse of "markup" when I should have said markdown without making me feel like an idiot.
Also yes Obsidian is pretty much a wiki.
It's essentially an app for taking notes and jotting down ideas, and you write them in markdown. You can link references to other notes within a note to link up ideas.
Here's a 12 minute demo that should give you an idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbLb6QCK88
I'm not that quite in-depth with my usage of it. I essentially use it as a scratchpad for a few notes for work. But it does the job
Again, don't want to sound disrespectful and I will definitely try the tool.
The main difference is that your notes are stored in a readable plain text format.
But if you are interested in an open format, you may as well go the full route and use the similar open-source app logseq instead.
[1] https://logseq.com/
My obsidian has turned into a personal Wikipedia and it's crazy how much it's improved my efficiency.
> Obsidian 1.0, the all-new Obsidian.
> A brand new look. A fresh way to browse. An exciting new start.
You could also be misled into thinking this is the home page.
The actual home page does a better job of getting to the point of what Obsidian is:
https://obsidian.md
(And BTW, I recommend Obsidian, it's excellent)
Or some subset(s) sure, fine. It's flexible. But the huge value is more readily apparent when it is all the documents (for some meaningul value of "all").
A similar app, Roam Research, is the same story as Obsidian, only a few chapters ahead. Roam's marketing campaign actually referred to itself and its users as a literal cult.
Ultimately, like self help, it's all just more of the same - cashgrabs that make people feel like they're improving or achieving, with every self help quip they consoom, with every "second brain" note they take.
Ultimately, they're just games for wasting time - "tool games" [1].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135227
- blanket admonishment of others' efforts towards creativity and developing insights
which you already have and that can come only from inside your great mind.
Please fluoresce and share your brilliant illuminating light of self-made intelligence and inspiration upon us, the sheep-like, turf-sprawled, vibrating masses.
These tools are technologically great, but they are not 10x better than notepad.exe
The marketing and hype around these tools are self perpetuating. Some twitter guru will post about these tools and get kickback or an increase in followers. People who pay for tools post about their experience online so they can signal to other people who have paid for this tool that yes, they now belong to the cool kids club too.
And there are content creators who's income depends on these tools. They will 'review' these tools, post a review online and unknown to most people, they will be getting some money for this review under the table.
I've also seen that this is all mostly limited to tech folks who consume too much of their info from Twitter and Youtube. None of my offline friends know about Obsidian, Roam, or the zillion productivity tools that are being produced.
That's cap. Obsidian is many, many times more powerful and useful than notepad.exe. It's a completely different class of product. It's virtually an operating system unto itself.
On the personal side, I dislike aesthetics and wouldn't ever use it 'cause of Electron, tho. I'm spoiled by native note-taking apps like Bear and Noteplan on macOS which have much nicer UX and UI, especially on mobile.
Huge milestone. Congratulations! I will be trying out the flatpak on my Linux build and keeping an eye out for your progress. Well done!
Obsidian has been a core part of how I go about my day to day ever since I installed it a few months ago. Using it in conjunction with my Dropbox account has been a smooth operation too.
I tell everybody about it at this point. Keep up the good work.
Quick note, on the website the download button for MacOS is delegating to "https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/dow..." despite the button saying "Version 1.0.0", I believe it should be "https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/dow..." instead?
My only dream is blocked by Apple. Would to have the ability to switch the default notes client in iOS, similar to how you can with browsers and email.