Show HN: A highly opinionated, fully functional Obsidian vault (github.com)
A few months ago I noticed that I was quickly approaching my 10GB sync limit for my daily driver vault. I considered deprecating some of the heavier files and images, but I was worried how it would affect the integrity of my vault. Instead, I took the opportunity to think to myself -- what would the perfect vault look like?
I began to write down some of the key philosophies and strategies I use in my driver vault which led to indispensable plugins, which led to more indispensable philosophies and on and on it went.
I've chronicled these results into a fully working vault template that includes templates, dataviews, macros, scripts, and powerful but simple and intuitive structural elements.
This vault is truly a condensation of all of my knowledge pertaining to Obsidian (the README is very long), so please do give it a go! I promise you'll like what you see!
118 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadI feel like there's a huge amount I don't know about Obsidian after reading just a few files in this repo.
Disclaimer: I use obsidian myself
1: There's a good chance this is already a term with a different meaning. If that's the case I don't mean to rip it off, it's just what sounded good at the time.
On the other side, as we are already using computers, we might sometimes want to explore and get lost in this forest of problems and possible solutions and have some fun.
After all, as Douglas Adams put it:
“(..) a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.”
[0] https://gameweld.medium.com/fractal-tasks-and-the-journey-th...
If you go straight into OPs system you'll spend way more time trying to figure out how it works (and it might not even work for you) rather than getting actual work done
Start simple. Write a few notes. Maybe you need to draw things: add Excalidraw. Maybe some note structures are similar: consider Templater.
This. I'm a hardcore Obsidian user both at work and at home, and I started both vaults from absolutely nothing - no user scripts, no organisation, literally no plan at all. Since then, they've evolved and optimized in radically different ways. Taking someone else's "system" is just a way to fool yourself into thinking you can be more productive than you are; you have to find that for yourself and what works specifically for you.
My personal vault is geared much more toward organizing creativity, with a little bit of task-oriented stuff and technical documentation, while my corporate vault is heavily schedule based and contains mostly tactical information, meeting notes and thoughts, etc. For it to be a "second brain", you need it to model your brain - and I work very modally. I have a "work mode" and a "non-work mode" that order things pretty differently, and it shows in the hierarchies and organization of both vaults.
Looks like I am not the only one who would like that: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/custom-default-vault-settings/66...
I like it when people feel good about what they do, spend a few minutes each weekend and then in months or even years, they publish it. Or just publish as you go on. I also like "work-in-progress" in the wild.
All people is far too strong of a claim I think, though if you'd said (or in fact mean) many I might agree.
Is systems attract people who feel they need a better system surprising though? Or is it surprising we hear most from those who go on to spend much of their time talking about systems?
I think there are many who have and use a second brain effectively, but perhaps most don't know that term.
Thoughts that were dissipating into the ether now increasingly get written down there, which frees up mental bandwidth for other things, which has translated in increased motivation to actually do the things I'm writing about.
I'd tried doing similar things with Apple Notes and Bear in the past, but it never stuck very well and I didn't find myself revisiting notes too often. Something about Obsidian has worked better so for though and I'm not sure what it is.
That said, I could see easily getting lost in the weeds and "overmanaging".
I hate that I needed to install flatpack for it but that is literally my only complaint. Sadly, it can't replace a text/code editor lime sublime which is where I dumped a lot of non-note knowledge. If only sublimetext copied some of this stuff for markdown.
In school,I never, ever took notes unless threatened. I mention that to show you how even someone like me liked Obsidian.
Hypothesis: people who've obsessed over "knowledge gardens" tend to be great at sustaining documentation
People who use these things are fooling themselves. I used to fool myself. We're not really achieving or producing and we're certainly not "assimilating knowledge." What we're doing is procrastinating. We're wasting time. We're struggling at our current, real endeavors, and we turn to a scapegoat: "oh darn, it's my knowledge management system that needs work; oh, it's just my productivity system that's just not efficient enough". So we find a nice game, a tool game [1], to: (1) distract ourselves (2) give us the feeling of accomplishment - "I'm taking second brain notes in a fun new app - I'm learning!".
For me, the first step to actually getting things done wasn't to optimize my productivity workflow, it wasn't to find the perfect knowledge management app/system, it was to...get things done. When I became dissatisfied with my work, when I hit a difficult obstacle with my projects, I felt pain, and procrastinated to avoid that pain. There was no secret cure. I just needed to realize that playing with these tools and systems is not getting things done - it's just procrastination.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135227
I agree. A lot of personal systems like this are indeed unconsciously used to (1) and (2). This is especially the case when you try to implement a very complex+generic one like this vault. I can guarantee 90-99% failure, albeit you may learn something along the way !
Also, it is not a "BRAIN". It is worth stressing that because It is a bad and misleading name (almost as bad as PKM)
But you are generalizing too much. The problem is the "just" in your "it's just procrastination."
The thread is pointing to many benefits. For ME, it is not even about productivity anymore. It is about "healthier" work environment (in research-intensive activities).
More than that, It is not even about "ME" anymore. It about creating better tools and systems in the long term. Obsession and Fooling-ourselves (at the "MICRO" level) is exactly what feeds that larger MACRO evolutionary dynamics.
> We're not really achieving or producing
Speaking of fooling-ourselves, I feel that getting things done itself (at any cost) is also sometimes just a way to distract ourselves and give us the feeling of accomplishment, and also to "avoid that pain" (all three you cited). We may also be fooling ourselves at occasions here too in our rush to “producing” and "“producing” stuff. just saying…
a page from Lao Tzu comes to mind
> Those who think to win the world > by doing something to it, > I see them come to grief. >For the world is a sacred object. >Nothing is to be done to it. >To do anything to it is to damage it. > To seize it is to lose it.
Honestly, this is probably a good description of your situation, but certainly not everyone's. I use Obsidian every day and nothing you've written resonates with me. I dump things into the tool. I find those things when I need them. I'm much, much more productive as a result. Plus the sync is the best I've ever used. Works flawlessly every time on my Linux desktop, my Surface running Windows, my Chromebook, and my Android phone.
Maybe your work doesn't require these tools?
If there’s any productivity gain to be had here, it’s because you chose to write things down in a system you can search. Maybe the hyperlinking works, maybe it doesn’t. I’ve met a decent number of productive smart people and have seen zero correlation between note taking styles (or even note taking at all) and their outputs.
> If there’s any productivity gain to be had here, it’s because you chose to write things down in a system you can search. Maybe the hyperlinking works, maybe it doesn’t.
I realized that my system was useless if it didn't do 100% of what I needed. Sure, search usually works, but sometimes I need linking. If I'm taking notes on a paper, search doesn't help - I need a link to the paper and convenient storage.
> I’ve met a decent number of productive smart people and have seen zero correlation between note taking styles (or even note taking at all) and their outputs.
That's because needs vary widely. My father ran a business doing things like installing water and power lines. He didn't have an elaborate notes system, but he had one that was elaborate enough. Some things had to be captured and had to be retrievable with certainty. It had to be something he could do from the inside of the backhoe.
I'm an academic. My needs are vastly different. His system would not have helped me at all.
I'm not denying that some people waste time on these things. I don't see that as an argument that all of these apps and systems are useless though.
> Except maybe when they’re writing a book or something.
This may be part of the difference; Luhmann wrote like 70 books or something.
Some years I use filing cabinets. Some years I use OneNote. Some years I use Markdown. It all depends on the collection of tasks I expect to be doing.
At the end of the year, I make everything (worth saving) a PDF, no matter what system I used - because they're very utilitarian. Then I decide if I'm going to keep using the same system. For the last three years, I've used self-hosted GitLab exclusively, even for non-code stuff.
I doubt I'll adopt Obsidian next year, but if you don't already have a system, it's probably as good as any.
I built my own "digital notebook" and use it literally every single day for almost everything I do. When I'm in the middle of a project, I use it to take notes, write down questions, organize my thoughts, and save useful web links. It's hard for me to overstate how critical this to is to my day-to-day life. My notes ARE the thing I need most in order to "just get shit done."
Yes, there are "tool fetishists" in this space, just like you'll find in any career or hobby. They get their enjoyment out of tinkering with these apps and cataloging the hell out of their notes. I'm not one of those which is why my app has practically no curation abilities. But I also think it's in extremely bad taste to shame those who apparently enjoy it.
The "fooling themselves" element is in thinking adding sophistication beyond two those things improves the usefulness of the notes themselves. And there's some personal flexibility here too sure; if you truly can't ever find a note when you need it and adding a tagging system gets you there then that's useful additional sophistication.
I think the point they were trying to make, definitely the one I'm making, is that the line between useful system and hobbyist tinkering is a lot lower than people want to think, because they want to ascribe purpose or benefits to their tinkering. Which is where the productivity porn comes in, a framework that only values things if they are or contribute to "productivity" demands everything be productive, demands that you justify it.
But truly and honestly if you have a flat folder of text files and grep you have what you need and beyond that is tinkering. That's what people are fooling themselves about.
Same with, say, ring binders: Having some is probably better than none, but if you have one hundred you have other problems.
Same for hammers, pans,.... Buying them won't magically teach you skills, but if you want to learn skills tools will help you.
- Look at the endless threads in /r/fitness discussing the 0.01% gain of getting the exact rep range right vs likely just going to the gym.
- you can browse /r/language for days and prepare yourself fully for the day you actually begin ... learning a language
It's a type of productivity illusion, I think there is just a greater overlap of this community with HN.
That being said, I highly recommend obsidian to anyone, it's a great place to journal, and capture ideas. But just start typing, and don't worry too much about organization (ironically this is the biggest benefit of the tool).
I probably spend 15 minutes total writing in Obsidian each week. I'm not writing down things that I don't have difficulty remembering or things that are very easy to search for online. Obsidian is a place for me to store info that I might want later but would have difficulty finding/remembering again.
I'm obviously still going to try because this looks amazing. Great work!
[1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1...
Source, please? To my knowledge, while this has been mentioned, they have not actually made such a pledge.
The entire reason you use Obsidian or Notion or Anytype or Capacities.io or Logseq, or anything more powerful than a set of markdown files in the first place, is that you care about the relationships between the notes and the rich functionality that comes with them - sorting, search, linking, reminders, etc. None of this is easily exportable into another app. The series of markdown files that make up Obsidian is not a substitute for the Obsidian software, nor are the relationships easily rebuilt in another app.
For instance, with Notion, I have to be able to export that and figure out how I fit in to the next Awesome Note App.
What I like about Obsidian is -- I don't have to. The day I want to walk out, I just walk out and use the next tool that can look at my content and do its magic.
The caveat is, I make it my discipline not to use tool-specific features. For instance, Obsidian has a really nice Plugin called "Dataview", I use it at times but don't depend on it. I can walk out and nothing gets lost.
Own the content, then use whatever tool you like on top of your content.
Without the tool, a Kanban board that remains as a bunch of scattered markdown files is worthless for its intended purpose, and not easily recreated in another app.
It's like, a Microsoft Word document is perfectly portable if you never use any of its formatting features and always save it as plaintext, but at that point is it really using Microsoft Word?
"But my workflow is portable!" is really not a good response, when a workflow like OP's, or even one that depends on a few key plugins, becomes very much not portable. The more you buy into the ecosystem, the less portable your workflow will be. "Don't buy into the ecosystem" is not a reasonable take at all because that's the entire point of Obsidian over competition, the (mostly open-source) ecosystem that they have with the first-mover advantage.
What will you do if they stop developing? Start maintaining the code yourself? Wait for others? Very few open source projects thrived after original author lost interest.
The most basic type of links, links to other notes, will generally work fine yes. But what about links to headings? Links to blocks? Links to attachments? Embedded blocks? Embedded files? The more you've used Obsidian's features, the more stuff will break.
Searching by tags is trivial. What about searching by properties? By done/undone status? By note attributes, by tasks, by attachments, by block-level searches? What about filters?
The simplest use-case being, if I simply want to view the list of all undone tasks across a set of notes on a separate app, sorted by priority, as I can now on Obsidian? Not trivially possible, as far as I know.
Reminders and any calendar-like functionality are definitely not carried over across apps, either.
Like I keep saying, if you limit your functionality to just markdown basics, it'll work fine. Start using the exclusive features of the app or even just the tasks plugin and it's no longer so simple. Something like the Kanban plugin is just impossible.
Nobody owes you an open source text file-based note-taking app with advanced backlinking features, etc. Perhaps you’d like to set up an open source project yourself supporting Obsidian-like advanced functionality?
But primarily, my intention is to to advocate support for and investment in ecosystems/features around open-source alternatives like logseq and AppFlowy, and to discourage investment in the Obsidian ecosystem of plugins, primarily because of lock-in risk.
A ha, found it on another website:
> Obsidian is a Markdown-based note-taking and knowledge base app.
https://help.obsidian.md/How+to/Format+your+notes
https://youtube.com/@kiwami-japan
(not all at once)
While TiddlyWiki is both a Wiki and a personal knowledge database, I am also using it as a basis for my personal website about ADHD[2].
[1]https://tiddlywiki.com/
[2]https://romankogan.net/adhd/
Otherwise, how would one edit it?
Aside from the HTML quine saving mechanism, there's a Node.JS auto saving version, Tiddly Desktop, and multiple other versions tailored to specific needs
well done.
may an audience manifest around your knowledge of knowledge.
I like that. Is that a quote or original?
Let's help and propagate more of this idea -- share your personal obsessions -- I might just get inspired.
having spent a decent amount of time looking at this stuff, my biggest recommendation is to try things out for a bit, and find habits that stick. I found a way to make note taking addicting, and other people i’ve got on the band wagon have found it addicting as well so I think logseq is a worthwhile thing to try out. I haven’t put it together yet, but I would like to put together the workflow (more like a mindset, less workflow) that I follow.
Good luck to those looking for a way that works for them for taking notes! I would love to hear about what people have tried, I have a lot of ideas to share.
- Vault (Home / Personal) is about everything for our family, and I. This is a folder inside Dropbox. So, we have everything there. Suddenly at a hospital, and the wife said, bring out the first list of vaccinations when our kid was born -- bam, I got it. :-)
- Vault (Work) is the Google Drive Folder that I have everything about our Company. These days, most of my work is just writing, and more writing. They are good archives and I don't have to re-say or say a little with the writings as a backup for async reference for anyone.
- Vault (dev folder) is usually shared by Sublime Text and Obsidian. These days, I'm left with just writing more and more in MarkDown either as content, documentation, or more contents that gets converted to other outputs.
To maintain sanity, I have very few must-have plugins and the current vaults are all on "Minimal" themes with different color schemes making it easy for me to just toggle my Vaults. I once tried to maintain a common ".obsidian" folder and symlink to it but that was a bad idea - the vaults are better off mostly being unique with shared preferences.
For the notes management I have PARA[0] at the root and everything inside them, with few rules broken to make it easier for sharing, especially with the work content.
0. PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive) - here is an article with details - https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
My solution to maintaining seperate vaults for personal/work notes has been to make a sandbox vault where I can test/configure plugins and if I'm happy with the result I run a little script that I can point at a "real" vault that:
* backs up the current config of the target vault incase I screw up
* `rsync`s the sandbox .obsidian and meta folders (containing templater templates etc.) to the target vault
This leaves me free to experiment with plugins without getting in the way of my day-to-day notetaking.
One thing I’d note is that language models like Chat GPT really do seem to me to be the next frontier in productivity apps. The author mentions using it to simplify search, but you could also imagine a model that recommends related notes in your Zettelkasten or automatically creates links to relevant Wikipedia pages, etc. It’s an exciting area and I hope the author shares what they uncover next year!!
Disclaimer: after 10+ years of vim and too much time customizing it, I ended up with LunarVim an I'm very happy with it.
I use and like Obsidian but do not have enough substance to make it big.
One thing that I really, really miss in Obsidian is the ability to tag blocks. Not only lines, but whole blocks. This would be a fantastic solution for my 2/3/4 lines of notes - I would just go for daily notes and tag the blocks, and automatically merge them in a single page (per tag). I so much would like that that I am considering trying to write a plugin myself.
I use org mode as my format and this has the added advantage of allowing all my source code blocks in my notes to be directly executable from emacs.
All my notes now also double as a Jupyter-like note books, but for any major language. I can even mix and match languages in a single note file.
EDIT: OK, it seems that tagging a bullet point also encompasses sub-bullets. I will look at how to create a page that gather blocks tagged with a particular tag.
Thank you for the pointer!
It is oriented towards bullet points (that from blocks) and match much closer my note taking style.
The problem is that my notes, over say a day, are blocks of unrelated information (personal, work, technical, dev, ...) which in that case would go into a page I would need to look for.
What I saw in Logseq (sibling suggestion) is that it works in blocks and sub-blocks that I can tag. I will end with a daily note made of blocks I would have tagged that I would find in an "dynamic" page under the name of the tag.
I have always relied a lot on memory and on documentation. My approach was that I need to know where to find things rather that always have the information handy.
This means that I look-up a lot (I started before the Google era and the relief digital search brings is insane) and end up remembering the really important things.
I sometimes find on Stack Overflow my own questions I forgot I asked and now have the same problem :) This is also why I like to follow-up on such questions, enhance answers etc.
What good is a thought garden if visitors cannot offer feedback? There should be an ActivityPub interface to collect feedback and links to other gardens. Thoughts should be able to grow on their own. Otherwise, it's not a garden but a sculpture park.
[1] https://publish.obsidian.md/bram
here's one of the last surviving screenshots of living documents version 1.
https://github.com/samsquire/interface-experiments/blob/mast...
The system accepted RDF N3 triples and it queried Jena Fuseki database to render graphs with d3. You could introduce facts into the system with the three boxes at the top. if you changed them, they would autocomplete and change the graph view. You could insert references or links into the document by typing them. (not shown in the screenshot)
I have the code trapped in a JSBIN SQLite file. It's somewhere in here https://github.com/samsquire/jsbin It uses KnockoutJS.
Living documents v2 has a screen cast of it here https://github.com/samsquire/live-interface/blob/master/scre... I believe the shareable and transcluding features of Notion or Obsidian are similar. The screencast shows transclusion and programming language syntax detection with a beyesian classifier - the arbitrary insertion of documents into other documents and they all update in real time. It uses Pouch (and CouchDB) to synchronize data between tabs. It's written in AngularJs 1 so it's legacy and I couldn't get it working when I tried to get the code working.
Similar to this long README.md, my note keeping strategy is similarly to create GitHub repositories and edit README.md. In the top right of a GitHub README.md is a table of contents button which is only displayed as an icon. You can even search the headings. When I get to 100-500 entries I create a new repository and add a number to the repository name. This means I can share my journal whenever I get to a milestone and people can check for updates since my last journal by going to the next numbered journal. (For example, I shared "ideas" on HN in 2013 but shares of ideas2 ideas3 and ideas4 are yet to be shared around properly. The titles are all pretty similar.)
I keep my notes and journal in the open and public. My old wikidpad based wiki (samsquire/idea-wiki) is publically accessible on GitHub and my journal of 700 entries is available on GitHub.
I write in the open to add value. I am deeply interested in the mechanism of doing things and when it comes to code I am more interested in the structure of the code than the types. I write about futuristic software, architecture and desktop features, multithreading, parallelism, asynchrony and concurrency. I am currently working on a multithreaded programming language which has its own compiler that targets my switch based interpreter. It is a toy at this time but that's what my journal is filled with inspiration from.
I write about what I'm doing and what I plan to do and any thoughts I have along the way.
Zettelkasten "Unique Note Creator"
- Is this note atomic?
- What will I link it to?
Stopping to ask yourself where to file things is likely to cause half of users to not capture them at all.
- - -
INTERRUPT-based WORKFLOW
The philosophy overview examples suggest this is using ISO8601 as the unique filename, which can be great, as then the notes are connected by time which will tend to group things with things worked on at the same time.
But the default workflow suggests author is using Luhman plugin for Zettelkasten Luhman IDs (effectively a `1a2b3c` nested outline numbering scheme) which require a conscious organization at capture time:
https://github.com/Dyldog/luhman-obsidian-plugin
This delights one class of filer, while breaking train of thought during capture for another class of filer.
I have not tested this vault myself, as I have my own "highly opininated workflow". The main thing I do is try to make capture and self-organization frictionless, then rely on a minimal structure (auto topic categories + time) to find or "garden" them later.
- - -
FRICTIONLESS WORKFLOW
Very roughly, I capture any manual notes of interest using Daily Notes, while capturing any web reading of interest using Markdownload extension that slurps the original page into Obsidian as a stripped down Markdown `.md` file, where filename is ISO8601 + URL Title.
I classify those using Google topic classifier v2, and recently am working on adding summaries with GPT-3 text-davinci-003, but recursively, where for articles more than 3500 tokens I'll summarize each subsection then summarize the summaries for an overall summary.