> allows structure to grow organically
> powerful feature ... Internal Links.
> plain text files
Well, they're not _plain_ text - there is some markup. So that invites the question - why not HyperText Markup Language?
Doesn't HTML have all of these features - hyperlinks, folder structures, "plain" text? Isn't HTML also future proof? It's been around long enough. And doesn't it also work offline? There's a bunch of different apps out there that support viewing these both on and offline.
So, do people just use Obsidian/Markdown because they like dislike "<em>HTML</em>"?
edit: I'm not saying it's "wrong" to dislike HTML. I'm 50% trolling and 50% saying none of these are features of Obsidian. They're features of HTML (and Markdown is its shorthand).
The main benefit is that markdown is really readable _without_ rendering. You don't need to edit and then open in a browser.
You can comfortably read plaintext that has a little structure, while HTML adds some ceremony that makes it a bit harder to glance at the material as the tags are much more in your face.
Do you write your documentation and notes using HTML? Serious question because if not not, why even ask the question? Why does this invite the question? One can easily see that markdown requires less characters and is a quicker flow for jotting down notes. You can open up a markdown file in any file viewer and easily read it without any view processing...not the same for HTML. Silly question.
You’re getting smashed for no particularly good reason in my opinion.
I am in the camp if I like the idea of Obsidian but I have a bunch of other stuff I want to include and do stuff with like JSON-LD data for example.
But the idea of writing raw HTML is in fact a huge pain in the ass as everyone was all too eager to point out here.
We have had markdown to HTML converters and visual editing experiences for a long time now and I don’t know why the argument has to be “write in raw HTML” I barely even want to write Markdown when taking notes, I just want to write.
So in that spirit I think HTML and and in browser experience is in fact the right answer I just need to put an editor on top of it and a way to run code when I hit publish to update the graph visualisations and statistics that people seem to really like with Obsidian.
I actually think this might be a really good usecase for the built in IndexedDB API built into browsers so long as you can also back it up and sync across devices.
But I still don't know what Obsidian gives you besides letting you write in Markdown instead of HTML. And that is basically a Markdown to HTML converter, as you pointed out.
It's hard to overstate the flowstate Obsidian enables with live / wysiwyg editor view -- enjoy the clean look of rendered HTML while typing simple markdown and kbd shortcuts -- "the whole is greater than the sum
of its parts". There are many other reasons I love Obsidian, but most of all it's the core function -- the editor interface, atop my local, private markdown files.
We could have that exact same workflow and user interface with HTML.
I (presumably along with the person you’re replying to) don’t understand what value Markdown as the storage format is providing here exactly but I can think of many limitations it imposes.
Right, but the scenario we are describing explicitly makes the “in the raw” part not particularly relevant.
I’m not against markdown as an idea of file format, I’m just saying that it has some pretty clear limitations that I think are very much within the scope of what I want out of a tool like that and that weird MDX format they have as a substitute is a step backwards in my opinion.
You are dismissing what people are telling you. Several have pointed out that Markdown is easier to read and write when taking notes. For example, lists where each item has an additional ~14 keystrokes per item, links which have an additional ~20 keystrokes.
Your answer was that that doesn't matter. If that's your view, you are welcome to it, but that's why /other/ people choose Markdown over HTML for notes.
Not dismissing it at all. My original comment asks that very question. I was just wondering if there's anything else that Obsidian offers besides Markdown syntax, since hyperlinking documents and application-agnostic data formats are also features of HTML.
I don't understand where all the feelings are coming from. :)
Because you're not actually caring to listen to what people are saying.
People do not find writing SGML-based formats ergonomic for focusing on the content of their writing. SGML-based formats are great for formats that need to be both human-readable, but also unambiguous and extensible for machine parsing, but awful when the task is purely just producing writing.
If I need HTML from my writings in Markdown, there are a plethora of tools to handle that; I don't need to waste vital brain bandwidth on writing perfect spec-complaint HTML when Markdown handles only the task of writing structured text and does it well.
Markdown does not handle layout, and barely handles tables. It is the technological equivalent of HTML 1.0, and does not contaminate itself with the task of presentation like how the evolution of HTML over the years has.
You just dismissed what I said. One primary draw of Obsidian is the ability to write in Markdown.
> I was just wondering if there's anything else that Obsidian offers besides Markdown syntax, since hyperlinking documents and application-agnostic data formats are also features of HTML.
Yet you reply asking if there is anything beyond Markdown. That's dismissing what a lot of people have reiterated: Markdown is the main thing.
You keep looking for a different killer feature because you are dismissing everyone else's killer feature.
Well, markdown is a lot easier to read "unrendered". It's a lot more accessible to non-technical people as well, since with html sometimes you need to put the content between two matching tags (h1), sometimes it needs to go between a tag and inside a tag (a), and sometimes there isn't even a matching tag! (img)
I disagree that markdown is a shorthand for HTML. It's a plain text doc with standardized ASCII stylistic features, that is basically exactly the way you would want to write a plain text document most of the time. It's not really markup. It's markdown.
I agree the noted features aren't really special to obsidian, but they might feel special when you consider markdown first and foremost as a plaintext format, and only second as a style convention
I love Obsidian for being a dead simple UI for managing my markdown files. I’ve found that the cloud features are not for me. What I need is to wire it more organically up to a GitHub repo.
I use this setup. My notes folder is a git repo, I have a private repo on GitHub as backup. Then two moving parts.
a backup.sh script, which boils down to: `cd ${obfolder}; git add .; git commit -m "auto backup $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S)"; git push`. Give it a `chmod +x` and it's ready.
a crontab entry: `1 17 * * * ${obfolder}/backup.sh`, which is "at 5:01pm every day, run the backup script.
${obfolder} is the actual path of the vault directory and I haven't had to think about it in years.
I'll go ahead and do a shameless plug for an alternative built with similar philosophy around privacy & data ownership aimed at developers https://acreom.com
> Do you support collecting individual checkbox items into a unified view as well?
yes, acreom is pretty flexible when it comes to creating views over your pages, you can create views with pages with tasks and save it with all tasks surfaced.
> Would you also consider adding an outline view/toc?
already supported!
But the notes are maintained as plain markdown files?
I don’t find it weird they would want to keep the source for their commercial application closed when there are so many copy-cat apps in the same space.
The incentives are aligned -> If a specific car model won't be safe, people won't buy it. Also, there is regulation in place.
I think we need exactly the right combo in software too. Obsidian is not open source, but you can gauge what they track in their privacy policy. You can try to confirm it using apps like Little Snitch. Also, all their notes are just plaintext so your data is portable.
> If a specific car model won't be safe, people won't buy it.
The world is not this black and white. This assumes the customer actually knows all of the pros and cons of available options and is able to take the time to make a decision that best aligns with their values. In practice (at least in the US) we have and infrastructure that makes it practically impossible for many people to live their lives without a car, and purchasing decisions are based almost exclusively on marketing materials and social forces.
> Obsidian is not open source, but you can gauge what they track in their privacy policy
A privacy policy is a pinkie promise. Why depend on something so fragile for such an important function in your life, when there are much more trustworthy options? Logseq, Org Roam, and Joplin immediately come to mind.
Safety-wise, the chance of choosing a non-safe new car today is very low since they're not on the market (a lot due to current regulation).
> A privacy policy is a pinkie promise. Why depend on something so fragile for such an important function in your life, when there are much more trustworthy options? Logseq, Org Roam, and Joplin immediately come to mind.
Yep, I agree. This is why my own previous note-taking app is completely open source[1]. But this comes with many difficulties, and often times subpar experience compared to closed source apps. That's why I decided to close source my next note taking app[2].
Perhaps, perhaps, this is something for you to look at. I use Obsidian on the Desktop but I don't do much work/editing on the Mobile, so I just use iA Editor (you an choose any editor of your choice). As the files are that -- files, I just browse and open the file I want to edit. I get to the files with Obsidian on the Desktop and iA Editor on the mobile to edit/read it.
The killer feature for me is how extensible the software is made to be.
It truly lets you operate how you know best, making very few assumptions on how you use it.
Case in point: one of my favorite productivity plugins is a full-fledged Kanban board. It has deep integration into Obsidian features:
You might like my own note-taking app, Plume[1] that's built with Qt C++ and QML. You can integrate a Kanban board (with underlying Markdown text) right within your document[2]. It's still a work-in-progress, so this is why it's not featured yet on the website. But I'll finish implementing it very soon.
Unlike Obsidian, Plume's editor is a block-editor. That gives it the flexibility of Notion (to put advanced blocks like Kanban within the same document, to do drag & drop, etc.) with the performance of native apps by utilizing Qt C++ and QML (actually, Plume is 4x faster than the fastest native block editor on macOS - benchmarks on the website).
EDIT: Also, Plume is opinionated compared to Obsidian. That means much better ease-of-use at the cost of extensibility. I believe this is a trade-off worth to be making. I know first hand the intimidation of starting to work with something as complex as Notion or Obsidian. Plume is taking the block editor abilities of Notion with the familiar Apple Notes UX/UI while all the data is still plaintext underneath.
Plume is built on top of my open source note-taking app Notes[1]. Since Plume is based on Notes, I'll of course comply with the MPL license and release all existing files that were changed (and must stay MPL licensed).
But I recently discussed my reasoning to go close-source[2]. I've been working night and day (every day) converting 4 cups of coffee into code for the last 4.5 months to create Plume. I don't want to risk not being rewarded sufficiently for it. But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.
> But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.
Why withhold the remaining 1%? If you aren't so confident about your decision to open source, there's no need to commit to that decision now.
It's good that you are leaving the door open, but keep in mind that if some folks suddenly become successful with a service that can turn any GitHub repo into a nice looking SaaS, at the click of a button and for a super low fee, I'm pretty sure you'll be hesitant to open source all your hard work so it can harvested.
Because I'm very much still a believer in open source. And you're right, that's a horror scenario I want to avoid. I'll only open source it in a way that won't compromise the sustainability of my work. I've yet to come up with the right model, so until then, it will stay close source.
That being said, there are a great many apps with support for kanban-style boards that one could use before resorting to jira. Notion, for example, can do it.
Anyone tried Dendron (https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron)? It feels like it could almost become a competitor to Obsidian and plus is essentially a vscode plugin, so you get the benefit of using vscode as your code editor as well.
Too bad the project has ended as there is no clear approach for the Dendron team to make it financially sustainable (with their cloud sync subscription, much like Obsidian Sync). But it's basically opensource now so hopefully can be forked and the lessons learnt from Obsidian be applied to it (e.g. Any folder of textfile should be openable under Dendron. Unfortunate at the moment you have to initialize a separate repo and then port it over)
I used dendron with vscode and the extension really screwed up vscode for me. It seems to hook into a lot of things within vscode and created quite a few annoying prompts and added some weird markdown previewing issues.
I used it for a while but I started to have issues of it becoming slow. I'm not 100% sure dendron was responsible of it but I switched to Joplin. The interesting things was is integration with VSCode that I use for coding
I quickly switched to Dendron from Obsidian because I preferred it being open source, and I liked the creator's views on the hierarchical search and categorization instead of just a tangle of wiki links, and liked the idea of it being a VSCode extension and then other extensions would also be available.
I think Dendron is high quality, and encourage everyone interested in markdown notes and Obsidian to check it out, and watch some of the creator Kevin Slin's introductory and overview videos or read the blog posts. He worked for Amazon and had to remember too many things and find them quickly, and that drove the Dendron hierarchical layout and features for managing lots of notes.
But personally, I'm not a big fan of VSCode or markdown; mostly what I want is to take quick screenshots and stash them for later - "here's how it looked before", "here's where to find this option" - and markdown is not great at that, you need to open 'markdown preview' to render your notes and see images. So you get a VS Code interface, and the editing window and the preview window. It's computing pre-WYSIWYG. And no way to draw on images like in OneNote. Similar with snippets of code and command lines, having to write them in markdown fiddling with word wrap and then preview the markdown to see them rendered properly in monospace isn't very convenient.
And of course hierarchy isn't free, it depends on me organizing and categorising (does this command go in "computers.aws.s3" or "software.amazon.s3.cli" or "tickets.12345678-Amazon-s3-client-weirdness" ?) which I'm not very committed to.
On desktop: Nvim with some markdown plugins plus Goyo
On mobile: Obsidian
Syncthing for sync (though previously I've Dropbox as well for the same)
On desktop I find Obsidian's vim mode slightly uncanny valley-ish. Close enough to be able to emulate my vim flow. But not _quite_ right.
On mobile, I've found Obsidian to be just top class. Though admittedly most of my real note taking happens on desktop, on the few occassions I've had to jot down something quick on mobile, Obsidian app has been perfect.
I used VimWiki for a couple of years and build up a sizeable set of notes with it. Although it seems to have most of the features you'd want, in the end it feels a little clunky to use in practice. A huge minus for me (at the time; perhaps this is fixed now) was the lack of ability to open multiple windows / notes simultaneously. I'm not aware of any other text editor which lacks that feature.
I since switched to Emacs + Org Roam, and I'm much happier. If there's something I don't like or a feature I feel is missing, I can either find a plugin for it or just change it myself.
I have indeed tried Markor and used it for quite a while. Atleast several months if not a year. It doesn't hold a candle to Obsidian.
Just two things off the top of my head among plenty of others:
1. No live edit mode in Markor. You can either edit or see the live preview. (Not sure if that's changed in recent times).
2. Here's the most thoughtful killer feature IMO of the Obsidian mobile app: it let's you configure the order of formatting tools that appear on the toolbar above the keyboard. This let's me put the checkbox edit and indent as the most frequent actions on top left. This makes my life so much better.
No your point 1 still stands, and 2 sounds like a feature I would enjoy as well.
I still much prefer Markor for all the quick notes, todo.txt, images and speed in general.
I also tried Syncthing to sync my Obsidian vault between my desktop PC and my Android smartphone. However, I don't like having a file synced multiple times in the background while I'm editing it. Since I want my notes to be versioned with Git, I ended up finding a sync solution using Git that works just fine!
I prefer Obsidian over Logseq as it performs better in lower RAM conditions.
It would have been nice if it could work with AsciiDoc instead of Markdown as I like the syntax better.
I decided to start note taking with VimWiki. It's organization is the same and has full vim support where Obsidian has partial keybindings. I still feel like I'm missing out. Can anyone opine on if it's worth switching over?
Don't fall for the trap of note taking tools. At the end of the day, if you can write down your thoughts then it does the job. Spend less time on thinking about tools and more time on writing notes.
At the same time, in my opinion you should feel comfortable in your tool. If VimWiki does not suit your needs but you still want to use vim (like I do), you could look into https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim to edit notes in neovim, and then view them in Obsidian using :ObsidianOpen. I like to have my terminal and Obsidian open side-by-side for this workflow.
Search for “Logseq data loss $current_year” and you’ll see horror stories of people who did everything exactly right and still lost a bunch of data from it. The most recent one I saw involved someone getting on a plane and thus losing Internet access to the paid syncing service. They did a bunch of work as they flew across the country. When they landed and the connection resumed, it synced everything back to the pre-takeoff state and erased their work.
Logseq is so very close to being exactly what I want, but there are way too many tales like that for my comfort. Yes, I could come up with something involving Git or rsync or whatever, but at that point I’ve conceded that I don’t trust the tool. And if I don’t trust the tool, I’m not going to use it.
This exact issue happened to me. I think it was related to crossing timezones during the flight. The experience has definitely made me think twice about adopting Logseq my primary notes tool.
Logseq really needs the ability to add YAML frontmatter (title:, date:) to the text files. Every text file created by Logseq has a starting bullet point (" - ") because it is an outline. But this makes it impossible to render the file as a web page in a Markdown-friendly CMS as they all require frontmatter at the start of the file.
It's been a while since I've used Logseq, but IIRC you can use yaml front matter. The very first block in the page is special and if you enter YAML there, the underlying markdown will have that yaml block without any bullet points. It renders just like the `foo:: bar` properties.
There was a limitation though that it didn't handle nested YAML. (Obsidian has the same problem I believe though I haven't tested recently)
Logseq is great, but it's another VC-backed app with non-interoperable files. The devs are further working towards lock-in by switching from files to a database.
You can also use Foam, a FOSS VSCode extension that is compatible with the basic markdown files from Obsidian. You can just open your vault in it and it will probably work if you're not using the fancy features in Obsidian.
Just last week I fully committed to Obsidian with the git sync plugin. It took some fiddling and a bit of trust to sync 4 years of notes. (Previously I was just using Sublime Text and my notes folder as a project hooked up to my gitea instance.) But now, its like second nature and I'm looking for neat plugins that you cant live with out.
It does so far - I have not had more than 3 or 4 commits in a single push though so it hasn't broken for me yet. The notes said that if you do have many changes it can run out of memory due to the git plugin it is using.
Obsidian is a killer app and I've moved all my note taking to it over the past few months. The app is top notch in my opinion and with git integration you basically get a free Evernote with no restrictions and control over your data. I would say the one downside is that it's only "free" for those that have the technical knowhow to setup git sync. I tried converting my stepfather to using it but he didn't like that you had to pay for sync and wasn't technical enough to setup git integration and maintain it.
I actually do both. On one machine I keep it in the dropbox folder, and have Sync turned on.
Importantly, don't do this in multiple machines. Either:
1) Use Dropbox to store and keep your notes in sync across multiple machines
2) Use Dropbox as a backup on one machine, and use Sync on that and all other machines, but on the other machines, only point the Obsidian app to a copy of your vault outside of dropbox.
Otherwise, I could see you ending up in a horrible sync/dropbox update loop that would be a mess.
I do it this way so if Obsidian ever dies as a Sync service, I have a secondary backup. I might even eventually git a github repo for extraness.
I like Obsidian, too, having recently switched over from 9 years of OneNote (the fact that there's a tool to import my OneNote notes helped a lot).
The most important tip for getting started with Obsidian, in my mind, is to absolutely ignore all of the Obsidian "power users." I'm 99% convinced that no one actually uses zettelkasten seriously, but even if so, it's overkill for when you're just checking out the app. And, please, don't buy one of these $500 Obsidian courses. It's just not necessary.
With that said, I have started extending out my own setup, and one of the plugins that I like the most is DataView, which allows me to automatically link to other notes, or pull in tagged text, or to-do items. It has allowed me to really take daily recaps reliably for the first time ever, because, even if I have nothing to write, I at least have a repository of what I was doing for that day.
More specifically, Obsidian shows me, at this moment, 1382 plugins available from the app itself. Some more are probably not available there. And an insanely large amount of them also seems to be already broken, abandoned or having a rather poor quality or just duplicating each other's features with a slight twist in flavor.
I guess, it's now big enough, that having some pre-selection of high quality-plugins accessible from within the app, would make sense.
It feels like WordPress. Core product is solid but minimal in features, expectation is for plugin developers to provide the rest. WordPress was FOSS though.
100% agree. The barrier to using Obsidian can seem intimidatingly high before jumping in. I tried and failed a few different systems before I just started using the daily notes as scratch pads. From there, I figured out more and more slowly over time. I’m now at a kind of system that works for me, but probably won’t work for anyone else.
Obsidian has the sama problem as Bullet Journaling does.
It's really simple and not complicated unless you want it to be, but then you watch a video about one Mega User who is really into the System and get demoralised by the amount of crap and whizbangs you see.
yeah exactly. The problem is that the Mega Users are the ones who are most likely to share their system. People who say "I just use X as a notepad" aren't as likely to share.
In case it helps anyone: I use Obsidian as a notepad. I put in text in notes and sometimes put those notes in some folder if it seems to make sense. It works great and the only plugin I added for editing is a latex helper. You don't need a system or many modifications to be a happy Obsidian user.
Why would anybody get demoralized? Does the tool get the job done or not?
Your goals are not the same as the person making a Youtube video. Nobody's going to put down "Highly Proficient with Obsidian" on their resume in hopes of it giving them an edge in the job search.
The problem is that in niche tools / gear / whatever, the message 'you must do it this way' plays to the curiosity and concerns of new users looking to get into something.
A cottage industry of people have thus sprung up around providing this content, and recommendation algorithms and search results wind up being dominated by this content.
For a new user who's just heard about something, the path is often straight to this content, which then leads some to bouncing off of it because it seems too daunting.
One thing I appreciate about Ryder Carroll‘s original explanation about bullet journals, was that it was pretty simple. It seems it was the Pinterest and other such social media folks who complicated it.
I use a semi-bullet journal method in my Obsidian notebook for work, but it’s even more basic than what Ryder Carroll outlined and I don’t care that much. Not caring is extremely helpful.
I have a similar thing, I was a semi-regular BuJoer some years ago but then I noticed that even though I did enjoy the physical action of writing stuff down - I forgot to write things down eventually. The time from idea to finding my notebook and the correct place to write something down was too long.
Now my system is geared towards minimal friction from "crap, I need to remember this" to actually storing it in Obsidian.
Currently I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that activates when I double tap the key on the left side of 1 on my keyboard, which then will activate Obsidian (or start it if needed) and brings it to the front with a QuickAdd dialog where I can write down whatever I was thinking about.
QuickAdd will then append it to an Inbox file with a timestamp. I might take a look at it later or maybe not, but at least it's written down _somewhere_ =)
I was doing something similar for a particular work function where I had to log things constantly throughout the day. However, since Obsidian simply uses text files, I used a keyboard shortcut to bring up a text prompt, which then appended the text to the correct file (which was based on the current date. This way it didn't matter if Obsidian was open or not, it would all get logged. In theory, I could have switched to a different text editor to manage the notes and kept by automation in place, I like that flexibility.
On the Mac I was using Hammerspoon for this. On Windows it would have been something like AutoHotKey.
Agreed on the power-user stuff and the courses. I use Obsidian in a simple way, but it's nice that the extensibility and the community is there.
Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
As mentioned elsewhere, users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. I don't think most of those drive-by open-source commenters have thought about the work that goes into running an open-source project.
In other words, on some theoretical plane I'd like Obsidian to be an open-source native app, but in reality those things haven't bothered me at all. The app is as simple as I want it to be, as complex as I need it to be, and it's regularly improved in a thoughtful way.
You can paste images now as of the latest version; it was driving me crazy as well. Even in older versions you can drag an image in but that was an extra step.
> users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me.
Completely agree. Not everything needs to be open-sourced. If I'm looking for a framework/library to build something upon, sure, I'll prioritize open-source. But -- and this may be a hot take -- for a consumer-oriented software, sometimes a great vision trumps community development.
> Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
Dude, VSCode is a freaking IDE, running all sorts of processes in the background (at least one terminal, language servers, type checkers, linters and formatters, possibly extensions, etc.) whereas Obsidian is just a text editor.
Not arguing with that. In discussions about Electron, there are often comments along the lines of "Electron apps can be fast if done right, just look at VS Code" and that just doesn't hold true for me.
> running all sorts of processes in the background (at least one terminal, language servers, type checkers, linters and formatters, possibly extensions, etc.)
That's a terrible excuse.
Your terminal is a separate process and should not affect how the editor itself feels. The language server exists out of process. The linters / type checkers exist out of process. (Or at least shouldn't block the main interaction/GUI thread) If those things make editing slow, either the design or the implementation is bad.
Sublime text runs the same stuff for me and works much faster than vscode. No excuses.
This is an example for context. We've got 3 cases: Obsidian (non-ide/electron/fast), vscode (ide/electron/slow-ish), sublime (ide/non-electron/fast). My point was that neither the electron not the ide part is an excuse for vscode not being responsive, because we've got counterexamples for each.
> Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
VS Code feels fast to me (on linux), but perhaps I'm just slow. I remember when VS Code came out, I was surprised at how responsive it felt, compared to Atom which felt like typing with a molasses membrane keyboard.
Actually, I realize now that I'm using Codium with lots of things disabled that made it less responsive to me (like code completion), so I'm probably an outlier.
You definitely can't just jump into zettelkasten, but it is actually used in various modified forms. I've been doing so for years and know of a number of others that do as well.
Yeah, most of the academics I know have a pile in OneNote or mountains of paper notebooks. I don't know if zk is good for research tbh, but I do think you can take some ideas from it. I personally use "bullet journaling" + a modified zk method.
I'd be curious to hear what the "highly productive" academics you know use.
As a heavy OneNote user, I was stymied by Obsidian for a long while as the mental models are different. OneNote is best thought of as an actual paper notebook, where pages can inserted, re-arranged to one’s liking, images pasted into the page, etc.. Obsidian is better thought of as a sophisticated overlay to the file system. It’s ultimately more powerful than OneNote, but does have some frustrating limitations for the OneNote/Notion/Scrivener user as not being able to manually sort notes. For now I’m using both but ultimately will switch to Obsidian as it develops (hopefully) further.
1. Obsidian imposes its own take on Markdown. For instance, why can't we disable "indent using the tab key"? It's so annoying to accidentally indent/quote text while pressing tab to do something like "accept autocomplete suggestion". Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/...
2. I had to install tens of plugins to give Obsidian the features I needed, which felt too hacky and unstable in the long term.
3. I don't want to learn a new set of keyboard shortcuts for simple things like expand/collapse the sidebars. You can customize lots of things but at that point, why not stay in your IDE (e.g., VSCode) and simply add Vim Wiki extenions?
Off the top of my head, things like "Paste URL into Text" (which VSCode Markdown supports out-of-the-box), an extension for being able to define shortcuts for heading 1, 2, etc., connecting to Zotero, converting links to Markdown before exporting PDF, exporting PDF using pandoc templates, "Zoom" in sections while hiding the other sections (it was a neat extension), etc.
> I don't want to learn a new set of keyboard shortcuts for simple things like expand/collapse the sidebars. You can customize lots of things but at that point, why not stay in your IDE (e.g., VSCode) and simply add Vim Wiki extenions?
This is what I used to do with Vim, but I had two problems: (1) I would often forget to `git push`, (2) I wanted to easily access notes on my phone.
Importing into Obsidian and paying for Sync made both issues go away.
> Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring
This is my main worry about choosing Obsidian for the long run. The devs seem very opinionated about a system that is meant to be customizable to each user's workflow.
Their Vim implementation does not support setting hard line breaks, making modal editing a little funky (every paragraph is just one long line and any action working on a line will work on the entire paragraph, such as "dd").
Came from Vim-Wiki (and Org-mode and some other short-lived note-taking systems) and I think the plugin hell of Vim/Emacs (or VS Code) is much worse than Obsidian. You can get by without any addons in Obsidian as it's built to be a notetaking system first, not a general text editor. You can't do the same with Vim (hence needing "Vim-Wiki" plugin).
I've also noticed that Obsidian hides text automatically inside of <div> or other HTML elements if they contain the property "markdown='1'", thereby blocking you from writing perfectly valid HTML inside of a Markdown file which was designed to be HTML-compatible.
Attributes dont need to be in the spec, if I add an attribute mycustomattr="xyz" and it changes how the document is rendered, that probably violates the HTML spec.
Yeah, I wasn’t super-thrilled with their response. OTOH, I eventually came back to using it, my (arguably justified) snit in that thread notwithstanding.
I kept trialing alternatives like VimWiki, Joplin and Logseq, but everything else is even quirkier. Org-mode is about the only thing that seemed really competitive, but since I’m not an emacs person there’s a big ramp there for me. Plus, as with most of the alternatives, that loses Markdown compatibility entirely.
Re learn new hotkeys, that’s actually not been a huge issue. Most of them simply aren’t mapped by default, which is its own pain. I did a lot of bouncing between VSCode hotkey lists and the Obsidian hotkeys UI to align shortcuts. At least they do enable you to remap most every UI action. I haven’t used the built-in vim bindings, but supposedly they also work fairly well, fwiw.
For now, Obsidian + Obsidian Tasks just does way too good a job for my work journaling for me to completely ignore. Plugins do work around most of the more questionable behavior, though it does sometimes make for an inconsistent experience.
Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understand the passion for our tools!)
#3 I'd likely be using my IDE (nvim) as well, except that I rely a lot on media and attachments for my work. And I just like to have dashboard/Kanban style views of things.
In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments.
I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say.
All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports.
Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed.
As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over.
But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.
Since the time of that thread, the dev team has grown, and WhiteNoise has joined the team officially in charge of bugs. I don't know the full systems they use in the background.
But I think I can definitely see where some of the burden of sorting and cleaning things up (following bug templates, or avoiding duplicate feature requests, etc.) could be abstracted away from the users, so that even if they can't be guaranteed any followup, they at least don't get the experience of being instantly shot down, just because we're trying to organize a busy forum.
For example, I really like how Linear App takes feedback. They have a button in the app, with a simple text-field prompt, "What if...". All the sorting and prioritizing is invisible to the users, but then somehow they even send a courtesy email to users after a related change has been made. That might be a function of team size vs. userbase size. No idea.
Definitely some room to improve. I'll pass this conversation on to the team, thanks.
I don’t use Obsidian, but I use wikilinks in markdown.
Recently I wrote a lightweight alternative to Dataview, which renders directly into the markdown itself. It’s a lightweight standalone script that embeds any references and builds those “recaps” in a more portable way.
OP here. Absolutely! I didn't want to go too in-depth into plugins because I wanted to emphasise Obsidian's basic features but DataView is also a plugin that I love!
No affiliation, just a happy user for over a year now.
If you take kindle highlights when you read, the https://github.com/hadynz/obsidian-kindle-plugin plugin is amazing for auto generating source files with those highlights in (and other templated sections you wish to include in a review).
I tried zettlekasten and found I just didn't use it enough to justify the effort involved.
Instead I just have an org-mode folder that I dump documents in. I search across them with Deft in Emacs. Sure, the links between documents can be incredibly useful to some people, but I've found I'm more chaotic than that.
I have read a bit about Zettelkasten and watched a video explaining it, and to me it feels like a pretty random collection of mostly good ideas on organizing information.
Esoteric and personal are both adjectives I didn't find before to describe what Zettelkasten represents. That kind of thing that you need to visit again and again until you realize it doesn't fit to your own way of thinking
I’ve written off Zettelkasten. It’s not for me. It seems to be optimized for turning notes into publications, but that’s not my own goal behind taking notes. For me, good ol’ wiki style interlinking is much more useful (and vastly easier). I use the “Map of Content” ideas to have a few quick indexes, like “Current work projects” or “orders from restaurants we like”, but that’s about the most formal organization I do.
If I had a career in writing, I might seriously consider Zettelkasten. But even then, I’d be cautious with its output. I’ve seen some results that looked like it was great for shoving words onto paper, so long as you don’t worry about the quality of the end result.
I do write for a living, and I found Zettelkasten too high friction to be worth using. Plus, as Cal Newport has argued, it solves the wrong problem. The whole pitch of ZK is that you can jump into your notes and quickly generate new ideas. But experienced writers and researchers rarely struggle to come up with ideas—rather, the real challenge is execution.
My guess is ZK is used primary as a very complex and tedious form of procrastination. Writing the book is hard, so instead, one can endlessly tweak and tune their notes and feel like progress is being made.
I just use "search" on my Obsidian notes, and that's enough for me. Instead of zettelkasten, I would prefer to have AI hooked to my notes, which I can query like "Find my notes about Symfony request life cycle". I don't think it would be a life changer, just a nice addition.
As a OneNote person for two years now, how do you deal with the added friction of linear notes in Obsidian (or any other plaintext based tool)?
In OneNote I can just dump down anything literally anywhere (because each page is an infinite canvas). It feels as easy as having a pen and random free papers. But with my notes increasing, I do want to have some way to manage this data which OneNote fails at. I can do basic text/OCR search but that's it. There is no linking etc. All note management is manual.
I usually search for an actual open source OneNote alternative (with easy jottable infinite canvases) every 6 months or so. Obsidian has added Canvases but they are definitely not a OneNote alternative at the moment.
I never understood the appeal of infinite canvas. Something about it makes me feel like I'm not in full control of my notes/documents. I like it when the information is clearly structured.
I don't use the width of the canvas, but what I do love/appreciate is the way I can click anywhere and start writing. It feels as easy as pen and paper. I can go in any direction.
It doesn't have to be infinite canvas in practice, just allow enough width and length to let you put down your cursor anywhere and start writing/pasting images or whatever you wish.
I use OneNote at work, but it's just for mostly plain text and a few images pasted here and there. However, OneNote seems to get really flaky when the Notebooks themselves become too big or have too many PDF attachments inserted.
I ultimately just didn't end up missing it as much as enjoying what I gained. I do miss how in OneNote I could keep a list of study questions next to the notes, but it's okay that I don't have it in the end, because I'm taking better notes in Obsidian.
One tip I’d have is to go easy on plugins. One can try to explores what are available, but when committing (to have it enabled and relying on it) be cautious about its implications on performance and startup time (there is a setting that can show you plugin load time at every startup.)
And as you scales the number of plugins and files, test it on multiple platforms.
P.S. I learn this the hard way that each time I open Obsidian on iPhone (14 Pro which is not slow) it will hangs indefinitely without being able to open a file. On iPadOS it is ok albeit slow to start. I suspect it is related to having too many files (including git and git sub modules) inside and relying on iCloud sync. But basically I tested out things works great on Mac without constantly checking how well it works on iPhone and then now I’m in a situation it’s difficult to roll back some of the decisions I made.
iCloud removes files from local storage randomly and downloading them again is very slow and gets stuck often.
I think that is the main reason why obsidian hangs at the start on the iPhone.
I have not yet figured out, how to keep iCloud files reliably on local storage on iOS. It seems independent of free storage and file size and is driving me mad.
Very sad that Apple does not succeed in syncing files. The same issue was there with iTools, mobile me, and now iCloud.
People using Obsidian Sync said it solves these issues (I guess by using a database rather than directly via file I/Os.)
There are other solutions via plugins too. E.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, or GitHub. There was a post earlier in HN which is a reimplementation of Obsidian Sync, but it seems their reversed engineering uncovered something not secure there and Obsidian soon made a patch breaking that. There might be workarounds to fix it, but I haven't closely follow it.
When I have the time to do the refactoring and cleaning, I will probably choose one of these alternatives (or even an alternative of Obsidian if there are better solutions for me.)
That’s what I was alluded to when I mentioned GitHub. I have that app, but I already foresee that workflow won’t work for me and my wife. So I didn’t do it that way.
But the way you say it seems to mean it no longer work?
This is good advice for anything that supports plugins. Web browsers, VS Code, whatever else. Plugins can be useful, but too many is almost always a problem.
It started with Notion and Roam. There's a whole cottage industry of courses designed to make you "master" these tools. A lot of their users are in school or university, and given that the marketing of these tools is all about improving productivity, I can see why those courses sell.
"I'm 99% convinced that no one actually _understands_ zettelkasten"
Fixed that for you ;)
For real, anyone interested should go read the original book (How to Take Smart Notes[1]) and you learn that it's not about creating backlinks between your notes (that's just a wiki or personal knowledge base). It's about capturing ideas inspired by your reading, etc. and linking them other ideas.
Yes, building your own personal knowledge base can be very powerful, but that's something different.
That was one of the worst books I’ve ever read. I went into it expecting practical advice and found mostly vague hyperbolic promises of the magical benefits. If the hypothesis was that this note taking method produces lower effort, higher quality output, then the author either didn’t use the system or the book is evidence against its effectiveness
Thank you. Those are my thoughts exactly. The title was wrong: it should've been "Why to Take Smart Notes". I'd already decided I was interested before I ever bought the book and I wish it hadn't wasted 3/4 of pages trying to further convince me. I finished it and still had no idea how to practically implement the magical system it described.
I've also never read a book so packed with redundancy.
I kind of understood Zettelkasten only after I implemented it with slip notes in analogue form. I had read How to Take Smart Notes, zettelkasten.de, watched several videos, etc., but I only got more confused. Then I read Antinet Zettelkasten, by Scott Scheper, implemented the system on paper, and finally I understood the system. Now I could go back to Obsidian and implement my Zettelkasten in Obsidian again in a way that would be much more straightforward than what I had tried the first time (and honestly, sometimes I think of doing that because of the convenience of digital). But I enjoy writing on paper and using my fountain pens.
Zettelkasten was created for a world which didn't have computers.
People are cargo-culting it today without thinking if it still makes sense.
Zettelkasten author would not have created it today, because it makes no sense when you have much more efficient ways to index/search information with a computer.
What many people ignore from Ahrens description of Luhmann's Zettelkasten, is that it isn't an indexing system to find pre-existing knowledge/texts. It is the place where he stored his own insight, his own summaries, his own formulation of ideas he found somewhere. The book quotes Luhmann even before the table of contents with "One cannot think without writing." Strictly speaking, this is obviously not true. Metaphorically speaking it is something that many proficient authors have concluded as well. They need to write in order to make progress. And then Luhmann used this one space of notes, the Zettelkasten to work on all his publications. This allowed him to find shared ideas between different projects of him.
I've got the impression that many tried Zettelkasten as the one true note taking system just dumped stuff they found in blog articles into pages in their storage system for later retrieval. Nothing is wrong about that, but that is not Luhmanns idea of Zettelkasten.
Me too, one of my favorite pieces of software (I've been using Obsidian for a few years now). The fact that there are courses is hilarious, but anyways. I found it enjoyable to start from the absolute bare install and add notes like a regular to-do. Eventually adding up additional plugins that you need. My use case is daily software engineering notes, and I have a simple button/command that creates a new note for the day in a specific format. I love that there isn't so much extra junk that came along with the big note taking apps.
Other than that, I have vim mode and a few other things, but not much. Themed it to match the rest of my setup and terminal, it feels like an easy extension to the workflow. I have a few folders broken out for commands and constants I like to refer back to (and can search for!) Maybe a neat one-liner. Plenty of code snippets.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on your favorite notetaking app OP, it's more than I've done for mine. I'm glad it works for you, the in-between applications trying to do notetaking is a pain.
I settled on OneNote because I'm always trying to capture context with my notes, codify my knowledge. Usually that means screenshots, handwriting, file copies, rarely video or audio embeddings.
I'm not going to try to convince you to use onenote, I want to instead complain about how this makes me boring and uncool, I see how trendy/popular the 'markdown files plus some goodies' notetaking applications are, but somehow I just don't get why those have enough ROI for my usecase, but still, my ego of not being a cool 10x developer who uses only certified organic grass-fed markdown files for my notes means I write rant comments like this.
Anyways, that's much ado about nothing on my part, again, thanks for sharing!
Speaking of boring, my entire life runs on Apple Notes. Everything to-dos, from family, kids, work, car, etc. I am just not sure how to migrate all of my 2,000 plus notes on to a new system. Plus with limited mobile data signal, I’m not sure if apps like Obsidian will work.
This might have been necessary at some point but if you sync your notes with icloud then they can be exported by logging into privacy.apple.com and clicking "request a copy of your data"
You can also get your icloud drive and photos this way.
It’s Good Enough. Other tools have a million cool extra features, but in practice most of those just give me an excuse to screw around with the tool instead of work with the information inside it.
Notes isn’t flashy. Howver, it does all of the things I truly need such an app to do. So fine.
It also has the huge, free feature that I can share notes with my wife and we can edit them together. That came in handy over Christmas with our shared shopping list.
I once had a job where I needed tons of notes on hundreds of clients and dozens of subjects. Detailed technical notes with screenshots and code snippets and names and birthdays and to-do lists.
I used OneNote. It worked brilliantly.
Until my notebook file corrupted.
Obsidian does the same job, but I miss the tabs. At least it’s all text files - no proprietary files to corrupt.
Lovehate OneNote; the easy paste and type and draw, all WSYWIG, is great. But it feels like a place to lose notes and never find them again. "OneNote for Windows 10" gives a weird hierarchy view of notebooks on the left, which slides into folders and pages; "OneNote" shows the same data as a dropdown list of notebooks at the top, tabs along the top for folders and tabs down the right for pages; why so different?
And it's obsessed with slurping your data up to Microsoft. If you want to stick with an older (unsupported) classic Desktop OneNote, you get a modal dialog box every. single. time. you. open. it. saying "Get more out of OneNote. A newer version of OneNote is now available for free. Go to www.onenote.com to download."
So you can programatically add and update content in pages in a shared team notebook, for example. And because it "runs" in MS cloud it supports things like asking the cloud services to "screenshot this webpage for me and add it as a note" and "extract content from this website and add it".
I love the way OneNote handles images - and the ability to include ink annotations. I wish there was a FOSS equivalent on Linux with a similar UI experience (Obsidian image handling is incredibly clunky), although the improved availability of various exporters from OneNote makes me less leery about committing to a proprietary database format and the risks associated with potential dataloss from a random bug or database corruption.
I mean, obsidian has support for audio and video out of the box, you can paste a screenshot into the note, and this all gets synced or published like normal
I wrote some generator to scrape a mandarin learning site to download all the audio files, sentences, etc into a markdown table for obsidian. My biggest complaint is that the "master vocab sheet" I made with hundreds (thousands?) Of words+sentences lags like hell, especially on android.
I'm also a fan of the excalidraw plugin, but it could be a bit more user friendly
Tl;Dr those features exist but IDK if their UX suffices for you
I believe it's a UX issue for most. Being able to float images to the side of text versus only being able to paste them linearly is a bigger deal than it sounds, organization-wise. And I know there's the canvases but I'm actually not a fan of those either. I don't want infinite in every direction, I just want the ability to move things around in the way that I want within a page-like document.
Honestly I like everything about obsidian except the markdown, but I know for many people that is it's big selling point.
I was an Evernote subscriber for a time, then I asked: Why am I paying just to save notes? So I switched to plain old text files. After a while, on a whim, I tried Obsidian, and I love it! I find the Android app very responsive, and with the files saved locally, it's future-proof.
I don't pay for syncing or anything. If I need a note on my PC from my phone, I send it via Bluetooth. It's a system that works for me.
Logseq is more opinionated than Obsidian:
- It's an outliner, meaning you don't have paragraph but collapsible block.
- It's focused on journaling. The default view when you open the app is a journal that's internally a list of all `<date>.md` (today's file is automatically created).
- Backlink are built-in instead of being a plugin (albeit an official one). It's automatically displayed at the bottom of the page, meaning I can have a [[SecretProject]] page and have a list of all relevant blocks/page in one go (in LogSeq, all tags are regular pages, so I put a #SecretProject page in the top of my page)
- Obsidian ecosystem is massively bigger
- LogSeq is FOSS (AGPL), Obsidian is not. I cannot (or rather, should not) use Obsidian at work (but nothing mechanically prevents you), so I'm using LogSeq.
- I'm not clear about LogSeq funding
Apple just needs to add Markdown to Notes and it would be the perfect app.
Right now I am making do with creating little sections where I put monospaced fonts, but it's not ideal. I just need to plop down code between my notes once in a while, and Markdown's ``` makes that very easy.
I agree. I’ve considered trying to use Keyboard Maestro to implement an ersatz Markdown mode, like “replace '##<space>' with ‘trigger the Set Heading Format menu’” or “replace ``` with ‘trigger the Monostyled format menu’”.
Huh. Having actually written that out, that should be easy. I know what I’m doing this morning.
Welp, I did it. I can share the macro if needed, but it ended up exactly as I described it. I also made macros for #, ##, ###, and --- while I was at it.
Btw, I also like the CEO's[1] writing and philosophy. I think he is also active here on Hacker News. One such is “File over app”[2] which I have sent to quite a few friends, kids, to read and think over it.
If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.
I was unaware of this until a few weeks ago, so I'd like to raise awareness for anybody who it affects: Obsidian is not FOSS, and purchasing a license is required for any work that generates revenue at a for-profit company of 2 or more people.
Obsidian looks awesome to me, and for a long time I've been thinking about adopting it, but this licensing issue caused me to back away and look for alternatives. I'm not suggesting that paying for software is a bad idea, but the free distribution of it led me to believe that it is FOSS, and it is not.
What I am wondering about is that although the basic files are markdown, some of the plugins might be proprietary. So that the part of the contents in the markdown files in effect creates a lock-in?
I would suggest editing and reading the markdown files in other editors to make avoid getting "locked in."
You certainly could create your own lock-in by making some unique workflow that requires a combination of plug-ins to function. The plugins are all third party, some of them are just annotating the existing markdown files, some are just visual.
My workflow isn't reliant on Obsidian's plugins, they just make stuff easier.
Like having a template for my Daily Note that also automatically includes all files tagged #todo using Data View. Or a few global shortcuts via Keyboard Maestro that open specific notes on Obsidian.
I could maybe whip up a similar system in a day on top of any editor that can render Markdown and handle links, but now I don't need to.
No, becasue the plugins are just JavaScript running against markdown that generally produce more markdown.
You might get a plugin that produces an image and that would "stop working"; but it hard for the JS to be locked down/etc.
When I already have access to the iCloud ecosystem, and Notes is excellent across iOS and macOS, I have never really seen much point in trying to use Obsidian.
I found that trying to sync (Windows Obsidian app «=» Android Obsidian app) just via a cable would get the files over fine, but would not produce usable results, at least not without a lot more fiddling that I wanted to do. I was hoping that we could simply transfer the folder structure over and just have it work, but no such luck.
Evidently it requires not only transfer, but some kind of transformation that they do in their cloud, and I'm not interested in another cloud subscription, particularly one so specific. (Happy to pay for the software & updates, just not to maintain the subscription and maintain the concern about another connection in the loop)
This was a couple years ago. Perhaps this has changed, or there's now a plugin to make such a bidirectional transfer work?
Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.
You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.
There is a popular method which I use. Syncing the vault between devices with Syncthing.
It reportedly causes problems if you edit the same file in two different places at the same time, it will generate a conflict when saving since the files won't match, doesn't affect me in my workflow (if I have access to my desktop I won't use it on my phone) but YMMV
I can highly recommend to use Git, the Obsidian Git plugin on Desktop and Termux on Android for syncing. Works great!
I have documented my setup here: https://github.com/davidkopp/termux-scripts/
I think it depends on what you use notes for. Just a scratchpad of random, mostly ephemeral ideas or simple folders? Notes is probably good enough.
Obsidian is designed for those people that want to minmax their note taking and find reasons to increase productivity by providing robust linking and search capabilities within any document. The photos in the OP are a good example of how many people use Obsidian.
That said, I'm not an expert (never used it personally), but that's how I understand it.
The killer feature of Obsidian was the wikilinks, but now that other editors are getting that feature it is replaceable.
But the other killer feature is avoiding vendor lock-in. With some apps your notes are on their servers in an inscrutable data format, and some apps don't even let you export without paying.
With markdown notes on the other hand you can take your notes anywhere, sync them with git, dropbox, syncthing, etc.
You're not bound to obsidian, and your markdown notes format will always be readable, unlike many of today's formats! See [1] "LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"
I'm syncing using Syncthing, across three devices which are only syncing intermittently (home laptop, smartphone, work computer), and it appears to work fine. I cannot recall ever having a sync conflict. But then again, I'm hardly using any plugins in Obsidian.
Mainly I prefer to be able to move my data around. I'm pretty sure those formats are really hard to you data out of. I know it doesn't seem like an issue now, but it might be if you ever decide to leave Apple's Ecosystem. On principle, I will not support systems that design their products to lock you into platforms.
While Obsidian may not be FOSS at all, my understanding is that in general needing to purchase a license is orthogonal to whether something is FOSS - correct?
If you cannot use the software however you wish (including for profit) then it is not Free Software. The developers can choose to not distribute the software to you unless you pay, and they can choose to provide support if you pay (which if you're making a profit from their software is a reasonable thing to pay for), but with Free Software the developers cannot decide how you use it once they have distributed it to you.
However, this becomes less significant when the applications are interoperable. If you ever stop using Obsidian, you can just grab your files and use another Markdown editor on top.
It's what caused me to pick it. Selling usage for commercial use is a smart move, and I want to ensure the original developers are incentivized to keep working on the product.
Looks like it's still alive and kicking. I guess you're probably upset by a lack of updates or something - luckily upgrading to a paid plan would be a good way to incentivize whoever is developing it to continue working on it, at least at the margin.
Long-term heavy Workflowy and later Dynalist user here. I am not upset that the developers started working on Obsidian instead, since I see Obsidian as the superior product, which has replaced both Workflowy and Dynalist for me.
Both Workflowy and Dynalist were treated as finished software for years. Workflowy did pick up again when it started losing customers.
Subscriptions do motivate ongoing development, but only if there's a threat to stop going or start incurring subscriber losses. Product software categories have different ratios of customers who buy subscriptions for the current utility vs the investment into future utility.
I made the choice at the time I knew this, and preferred FOSS, but the alternatives just wasn’t as usable, so in the end I still chose this, partly because at least I still have complete control over the data (not true for some alternatives.
P.S. my comparison was done probably a few years ago and the landscape could have changed quite a bit. One solution I tried was a code extension that promised to do something similar. I thought it would be good as I use vscode all the time. Then I find out it is bad because exactly of that. Obsidian and the like is dedicated to notes taking so this single software is unambiguously for that task. In vscode there’s just too much other things going on as distraction.
I think it’s pretty likely that a lot of Obsidian users use it for their professional activity without paying.
Personally I haven’t considered it because of that. I have no use for a complex notes app in my private life, and there’s no way my employer would pay for the subscription.
> I have no use for a complex notes app in my private life
I thought so too, but then I noticed I was searching the internet for the same things over and over again. (Or asking it from GPT).
Then I started writing stuff down as I searched it, with a sentence or two of my own text + a few tags.
Now I can find stuff directly from Obsidian (or more like from the set of markdown files on my drive) instead of having to sweep the internet _again_ for the same thing.
That really belongs in the browser I think. Ideally we could just highlight the info we want to save, type a note, and the whole page gets saved offline as plain HTML, along with a markdown file that points to it.
The deal breaker with obsidian for me is that it is not opensource. It's great that it's at least using a markdown derivative format.
I am using Emacs Org Mode and quite happy with it. You can link different files, include images, embed and view LaTeX, encrypt your notes with GPG and much more. I think it will stand the test of time better than Obsidian which is something I care a lot for note taking and journaling.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadDoesn't HTML have all of these features - hyperlinks, folder structures, "plain" text? Isn't HTML also future proof? It's been around long enough. And doesn't it also work offline? There's a bunch of different apps out there that support viewing these both on and offline.
So, do people just use Obsidian/Markdown because they like dislike "<em>HTML</em>"?
edit: I'm not saying it's "wrong" to dislike HTML. I'm 50% trolling and 50% saying none of these are features of Obsidian. They're features of HTML (and Markdown is its shorthand).
# title
this is the paragraph
is more natural to write than:
<html> <head>...<head/> <body> <h1> title </h1> <p>this is the paragraph</p> </body> </html>
when you're just jotting some thoughts down.
If you rewrite your comment with lists I think your question becomes self-explanatory.
You can comfortably read plaintext that has a little structure, while HTML adds some ceremony that makes it a bit harder to glance at the material as the tags are much more in your face.
``` - [ ] Item 1 - [ ] Item 2 ```
``` <ul> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 1</label></li> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 2</label></li> </ul> ```
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosop...
Here is a nice article of many light weight markup languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language
I like Markdown a lot, though I prefer org-mode due to the extra features it comes with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode
I am in the camp if I like the idea of Obsidian but I have a bunch of other stuff I want to include and do stuff with like JSON-LD data for example.
But the idea of writing raw HTML is in fact a huge pain in the ass as everyone was all too eager to point out here.
We have had markdown to HTML converters and visual editing experiences for a long time now and I don’t know why the argument has to be “write in raw HTML” I barely even want to write Markdown when taking notes, I just want to write.
So in that spirit I think HTML and and in browser experience is in fact the right answer I just need to put an editor on top of it and a way to run code when I hit publish to update the graph visualisations and statistics that people seem to really like with Obsidian.
I actually think this might be a really good usecase for the built in IndexedDB API built into browsers so long as you can also back it up and sync across devices.
But I still don't know what Obsidian gives you besides letting you write in Markdown instead of HTML. And that is basically a Markdown to HTML converter, as you pointed out.
We could have that exact same workflow and user interface with HTML.
I (presumably along with the person you’re replying to) don’t understand what value Markdown as the storage format is providing here exactly but I can think of many limitations it imposes.
I’m not against markdown as an idea of file format, I’m just saying that it has some pretty clear limitations that I think are very much within the scope of what I want out of a tool like that and that weird MDX format they have as a substitute is a step backwards in my opinion.
Your answer was that that doesn't matter. If that's your view, you are welcome to it, but that's why /other/ people choose Markdown over HTML for notes.
I don't understand where all the feelings are coming from. :)
People do not find writing SGML-based formats ergonomic for focusing on the content of their writing. SGML-based formats are great for formats that need to be both human-readable, but also unambiguous and extensible for machine parsing, but awful when the task is purely just producing writing.
If I need HTML from my writings in Markdown, there are a plethora of tools to handle that; I don't need to waste vital brain bandwidth on writing perfect spec-complaint HTML when Markdown handles only the task of writing structured text and does it well.
Markdown does not handle layout, and barely handles tables. It is the technological equivalent of HTML 1.0, and does not contaminate itself with the task of presentation like how the evolution of HTML over the years has.
> I was just wondering if there's anything else that Obsidian offers besides Markdown syntax, since hyperlinking documents and application-agnostic data formats are also features of HTML.
Yet you reply asking if there is anything beyond Markdown. That's dismissing what a lot of people have reiterated: Markdown is the main thing.
You keep looking for a different killer feature because you are dismissing everyone else's killer feature.
I agree the noted features aren't really special to obsidian, but they might feel special when you consider markdown first and foremost as a plaintext format, and only second as a style convention
Markup is still plaintext.
> why not HyperText Markup Language?
Why not json or yaml? If you remove the users ability to write the text directly, then why limit yourself to the unstructured mess that HTML is?
> Doesn't HTML have all of these features - hyperlinks, folder structures, "plain" text? Isn't HTML also future proof?
Markdown is human-friendly. There is a whole ecology around using it for those usecases. And you can create HTML from markdown anyway.
a backup.sh script, which boils down to: `cd ${obfolder}; git add .; git commit -m "auto backup $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S)"; git push`. Give it a `chmod +x` and it's ready.
a crontab entry: `1 17 * * * ${obfolder}/backup.sh`, which is "at 5:01pm every day, run the backup script.
${obfolder} is the actual path of the vault directory and I haven't had to think about it in years.
I'll go ahead and do a shameless plug for an alternative built with similar philosophy around privacy & data ownership aimed at developers https://acreom.com
Do you support collecting individual checkbox items into a unified view as well?
Would you also consider adding an outline view/toc? Tysm!
> Would you also consider adding an outline view/toc? already supported!
I don’t find it weird they would want to keep the source for their commercial application closed when there are so many copy-cat apps in the same space.
I prefer Obsidian since I like the UI and they offer a subscription for sync, which is very convenient.
Car manufacturers don't release their source code either, yet people trust something as important as their life to it daily.
I personally find it extremely disturbing. Two bads don't make a good.
The incentives are aligned -> If a specific car model won't be safe, people won't buy it. Also, there is regulation in place.
I think we need exactly the right combo in software too. Obsidian is not open source, but you can gauge what they track in their privacy policy. You can try to confirm it using apps like Little Snitch. Also, all their notes are just plaintext so your data is portable.
The world is not this black and white. This assumes the customer actually knows all of the pros and cons of available options and is able to take the time to make a decision that best aligns with their values. In practice (at least in the US) we have and infrastructure that makes it practically impossible for many people to live their lives without a car, and purchasing decisions are based almost exclusively on marketing materials and social forces.
> Obsidian is not open source, but you can gauge what they track in their privacy policy
A privacy policy is a pinkie promise. Why depend on something so fragile for such an important function in your life, when there are much more trustworthy options? Logseq, Org Roam, and Joplin immediately come to mind.
> A privacy policy is a pinkie promise. Why depend on something so fragile for such an important function in your life, when there are much more trustworthy options? Logseq, Org Roam, and Joplin immediately come to mind.
Yep, I agree. This is why my own previous note-taking app is completely open source[1]. But this comes with many difficulties, and often times subpar experience compared to closed source apps. That's why I decided to close source my next note taking app[2].
[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38584960
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/90sbrx0esggnsmbsva2hg/Video-J...
Did it progressively get worse over time? I only have a couple hundred notes.
Editing files is even slower since you have to pick a file from the android file search.
It's a well designed app otherwise.
Case in point: one of my favorite productivity plugins is a full-fledged Kanban board. It has deep integration into Obsidian features:
- https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban
Unlike Obsidian, Plume's editor is a block-editor. That gives it the flexibility of Notion (to put advanced blocks like Kanban within the same document, to do drag & drop, etc.) with the performance of native apps by utilizing Qt C++ and QML (actually, Plume is 4x faster than the fastest native block editor on macOS - benchmarks on the website).
EDIT: Also, Plume is opinionated compared to Obsidian. That means much better ease-of-use at the cost of extensibility. I believe this is a trade-off worth to be making. I know first hand the intimidation of starting to work with something as complex as Notion or Obsidian. Plume is taking the block editor abilities of Notion with the familiar Apple Notes UX/UI while all the data is still plaintext underneath.
[1] https://www.get-plume.com/
[2] https://imgur.com/NIgDLOU
But I recently discussed my reasoning to go close-source[2]. I've been working night and day (every day) converting 4 cups of coffee into code for the last 4.5 months to create Plume. I don't want to risk not being rewarded sufficiently for it. But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.
[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38584960
Why withhold the remaining 1%? If you aren't so confident about your decision to open source, there's no need to commit to that decision now.
It's good that you are leaving the door open, but keep in mind that if some folks suddenly become successful with a service that can turn any GitHub repo into a nice looking SaaS, at the click of a button and for a super low fee, I'm pretty sure you'll be hesitant to open source all your hard work so it can harvested.
Too bad the project has ended as there is no clear approach for the Dendron team to make it financially sustainable (with their cloud sync subscription, much like Obsidian Sync). But it's basically opensource now so hopefully can be forked and the lessons learnt from Obsidian be applied to it (e.g. Any folder of textfile should be openable under Dendron. Unfortunate at the moment you have to initialize a separate repo and then port it over)
I think Dendron is high quality, and encourage everyone interested in markdown notes and Obsidian to check it out, and watch some of the creator Kevin Slin's introductory and overview videos or read the blog posts. He worked for Amazon and had to remember too many things and find them quickly, and that drove the Dendron hierarchical layout and features for managing lots of notes.
But personally, I'm not a big fan of VSCode or markdown; mostly what I want is to take quick screenshots and stash them for later - "here's how it looked before", "here's where to find this option" - and markdown is not great at that, you need to open 'markdown preview' to render your notes and see images. So you get a VS Code interface, and the editing window and the preview window. It's computing pre-WYSIWYG. And no way to draw on images like in OneNote. Similar with snippets of code and command lines, having to write them in markdown fiddling with word wrap and then preview the markdown to see them rendered properly in monospace isn't very convenient.
And of course hierarchy isn't free, it depends on me organizing and categorising (does this command go in "computers.aws.s3" or "software.amazon.s3.cli" or "tickets.12345678-Amazon-s3-client-weirdness" ?) which I'm not very committed to.
On desktop: Nvim with some markdown plugins plus Goyo
On mobile: Obsidian
Syncthing for sync (though previously I've Dropbox as well for the same)
On desktop I find Obsidian's vim mode slightly uncanny valley-ish. Close enough to be able to emulate my vim flow. But not _quite_ right.
On mobile, I've found Obsidian to be just top class. Though admittedly most of my real note taking happens on desktop, on the few occassions I've had to jot down something quick on mobile, Obsidian app has been perfect.
I since switched to Emacs + Org Roam, and I'm much happier. If there's something I don't like or a feature I feel is missing, I can either find a plugin for it or just change it myself.
From my perspective though, I like that my notes are simple plain text files in a single folder whose backup and sync is entirely under my control.
This often lets me run grep on my notes to quickly find old note topics.
For neovim markdown plugins my recommendations are SidOfc/mkdx and dbridges/vim-markdown-runner.
desktop: nvim + syncthing + vimwiki (md markup instead of default)
mobile: syncthing + Markor[1]
On mobile I have a todo.txt[2] in addition to the vim wiki files which are all synced.
All this works pretty well for my personal needs. For work I use OneNote because the whole company uses OneNote.
[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/net.gsantner.markor/ [2] http://todotxt.org/
I have indeed tried Markor and used it for quite a while. Atleast several months if not a year. It doesn't hold a candle to Obsidian.
Just two things off the top of my head among plenty of others:
1. No live edit mode in Markor. You can either edit or see the live preview. (Not sure if that's changed in recent times).
2. Here's the most thoughtful killer feature IMO of the Obsidian mobile app: it let's you configure the order of formatting tools that appear on the toolbar above the keyboard. This let's me put the checkbox edit and indent as the most frequent actions on top left. This makes my life so much better.
I have documented my setup with Git, the Obsidian Git plugin on Desktop and Termux on Android here: https://github.com/davidkopp/termux-scripts/
Nevertheless, I still use Syncthing to sync other files between my devices. Great tool!
Also consider trying Emacs org mode.
At the same time, in my opinion you should feel comfortable in your tool. If VimWiki does not suit your needs but you still want to use vim (like I do), you could look into https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim to edit notes in neovim, and then view them in Obsidian using :ObsidianOpen. I like to have my terminal and Obsidian open side-by-side for this workflow.
Try Obsidian too, for a week to write down your thoughts. Don't even commit to it, just use it to journal for a week to see if you like it.
For those looking for an open source alternative (or don't want to pay the Obsidian fees for professional usage) check out Logseq: https://logseq.com/
Logseq is so very close to being exactly what I want, but there are way too many tales like that for my comfort. Yes, I could come up with something involving Git or rsync or whatever, but at that point I’ve conceded that I don’t trust the tool. And if I don’t trust the tool, I’m not going to use it.
I'm trialling both with syncthing across multiple machines and so far no data loss but I'll make sure backups are in place!
Never happened to me with Logseq, also why are we making a trend of something that has happened to 5 people out of 10000 users?
Kind of a bias when you see only horror stories of people losing data, but not the rest who are fine.
There was a limitation though that it didn't handle nested YAML. (Obsidian has the same problem I believe though I haven't tested recently)
https://foambubble.github.io/foam/
I have a license for Working Copy, so I use that alone with shortcuts, but I’m always interested in a solution with fewer parts.
I actually do both. On one machine I keep it in the dropbox folder, and have Sync turned on.
Importantly, don't do this in multiple machines. Either: 1) Use Dropbox to store and keep your notes in sync across multiple machines 2) Use Dropbox as a backup on one machine, and use Sync on that and all other machines, but on the other machines, only point the Obsidian app to a copy of your vault outside of dropbox.
Otherwise, I could see you ending up in a horrible sync/dropbox update loop that would be a mess.
I do it this way so if Obsidian ever dies as a Sync service, I have a secondary backup. I might even eventually git a github repo for extraness.
The most important tip for getting started with Obsidian, in my mind, is to absolutely ignore all of the Obsidian "power users." I'm 99% convinced that no one actually uses zettelkasten seriously, but even if so, it's overkill for when you're just checking out the app. And, please, don't buy one of these $500 Obsidian courses. It's just not necessary.
With that said, I have started extending out my own setup, and one of the plugins that I like the most is DataView, which allows me to automatically link to other notes, or pull in tagged text, or to-do items. It has allowed me to really take daily recaps reliably for the first time ever, because, even if I have nothing to write, I at least have a repository of what I was doing for that day.
I agree, just ignore all of that. Plain files and internal links, that's it.
I guess, it's now big enough, that having some pre-selection of high quality-plugins accessible from within the app, would make sense.
This is the way.
It's really simple and not complicated unless you want it to be, but then you watch a video about one Mega User who is really into the System and get demoralised by the amount of crap and whizbangs you see.
Your goals are not the same as the person making a Youtube video. Nobody's going to put down "Highly Proficient with Obsidian" on their resume in hopes of it giving them an edge in the job search.
A cottage industry of people have thus sprung up around providing this content, and recommendation algorithms and search results wind up being dominated by this content.
For a new user who's just heard about something, the path is often straight to this content, which then leads some to bouncing off of it because it seems too daunting.
I use a semi-bullet journal method in my Obsidian notebook for work, but it’s even more basic than what Ryder Carroll outlined and I don’t care that much. Not caring is extremely helpful.
Now my system is geared towards minimal friction from "crap, I need to remember this" to actually storing it in Obsidian.
Currently I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that activates when I double tap the key on the left side of 1 on my keyboard, which then will activate Obsidian (or start it if needed) and brings it to the front with a QuickAdd dialog where I can write down whatever I was thinking about.
QuickAdd will then append it to an Inbox file with a timestamp. I might take a look at it later or maybe not, but at least it's written down _somewhere_ =)
On the Mac I was using Hammerspoon for this. On Windows it would have been something like AutoHotKey.
Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried.
As mentioned elsewhere, users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. I don't think most of those drive-by open-source commenters have thought about the work that goes into running an open-source project.
In other words, on some theoretical plane I'd like Obsidian to be an open-source native app, but in reality those things haven't bothered me at all. The app is as simple as I want it to be, as complex as I need it to be, and it's regularly improved in a thoughtful way.
Completely agree. Not everything needs to be open-sourced. If I'm looking for a framework/library to build something upon, sure, I'll prioritize open-source. But -- and this may be a hot take -- for a consumer-oriented software, sometimes a great vision trumps community development.
Dude, VSCode is a freaking IDE, running all sorts of processes in the background (at least one terminal, language servers, type checkers, linters and formatters, possibly extensions, etc.) whereas Obsidian is just a text editor.
That's a terrible excuse.
Your terminal is a separate process and should not affect how the editor itself feels. The language server exists out of process. The linters / type checkers exist out of process. (Or at least shouldn't block the main interaction/GUI thread) If those things make editing slow, either the design or the implementation is bad.
Sublime text runs the same stuff for me and works much faster than vscode. No excuses.
Okay but this discussion is about electron apps. Sublime isn't.
VS Code feels fast to me (on linux), but perhaps I'm just slow. I remember when VS Code came out, I was surprised at how responsive it felt, compared to Atom which felt like typing with a molasses membrane keyboard.
Actually, I realize now that I'm using Codium with lots of things disabled that made it less responsive to me (like code completion), so I'm probably an outlier.
I'd be curious to hear what the "highly productive" academics you know use.
1. Obsidian imposes its own take on Markdown. For instance, why can't we disable "indent using the tab key"? It's so annoying to accidentally indent/quote text while pressing tab to do something like "accept autocomplete suggestion". Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/...
2. I had to install tens of plugins to give Obsidian the features I needed, which felt too hacky and unstable in the long term.
3. I don't want to learn a new set of keyboard shortcuts for simple things like expand/collapse the sidebars. You can customize lots of things but at that point, why not stay in your IDE (e.g., VSCode) and simply add Vim Wiki extenions?
This is what I used to do with Vim, but I had two problems: (1) I would often forget to `git push`, (2) I wanted to easily access notes on my phone.
Importing into Obsidian and paying for Sync made both issues go away.
This is my main worry about choosing Obsidian for the long run. The devs seem very opinionated about a system that is meant to be customizable to each user's workflow.
Their Vim implementation does not support setting hard line breaks, making modal editing a little funky (every paragraph is just one long line and any action working on a line will work on the entire paragraph, such as "dd").
Came from Vim-Wiki (and Org-mode and some other short-lived note-taking systems) and I think the plugin hell of Vim/Emacs (or VS Code) is much worse than Obsidian. You can get by without any addons in Obsidian as it's built to be a notetaking system first, not a general text editor. You can't do the same with Vim (hence needing "Vim-Wiki" plugin).
I kept trialing alternatives like VimWiki, Joplin and Logseq, but everything else is even quirkier. Org-mode is about the only thing that seemed really competitive, but since I’m not an emacs person there’s a big ramp there for me. Plus, as with most of the alternatives, that loses Markdown compatibility entirely.
Re learn new hotkeys, that’s actually not been a huge issue. Most of them simply aren’t mapped by default, which is its own pain. I did a lot of bouncing between VSCode hotkey lists and the Obsidian hotkeys UI to align shortcuts. At least they do enable you to remap most every UI action. I haven’t used the built-in vim bindings, but supposedly they also work fairly well, fwiw.
For now, Obsidian + Obsidian Tasks just does way too good a job for my work journaling for me to completely ignore. Plugins do work around most of the more questionable behavior, though it does sometimes make for an inconsistent experience.
#3 I'd likely be using my IDE (nvim) as well, except that I rely a lot on media and attachments for my work. And I just like to have dashboard/Kanban style views of things.
I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say.
All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports.
Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed.
As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over.
But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.
But I think I can definitely see where some of the burden of sorting and cleaning things up (following bug templates, or avoiding duplicate feature requests, etc.) could be abstracted away from the users, so that even if they can't be guaranteed any followup, they at least don't get the experience of being instantly shot down, just because we're trying to organize a busy forum.
For example, I really like how Linear App takes feedback. They have a button in the app, with a simple text-field prompt, "What if...". All the sorting and prioritizing is invisible to the users, but then somehow they even send a courtesy email to users after a related change has been made. That might be a function of team size vs. userbase size. No idea.
Definitely some room to improve. I'll pass this conversation on to the team, thanks.
Recently I wrote a lightweight alternative to Dataview, which renders directly into the markdown itself. It’s a lightweight standalone script that embeds any references and builds those “recaps” in a more portable way.
In case anyone is interested, let me know: https://twitter.com/matteing/status/1746598313745371263
No affiliation, just a happy user for over a year now.
If you take kindle highlights when you read, the https://github.com/hadynz/obsidian-kindle-plugin plugin is amazing for auto generating source files with those highlights in (and other templated sections you wish to include in a review).
Instead I just have an org-mode folder that I dump documents in. I search across them with Deft in Emacs. Sure, the links between documents can be incredibly useful to some people, but I've found I'm more chaotic than that.
Right up there with drinking coffee on exactly two specific days per week... https://zettelkasten.de/posts/practical-integration-deep-wor...
I think this stuff is esoteric and personal enough that we are under no obligation to follow it to the letter.
If I had a career in writing, I might seriously consider Zettelkasten. But even then, I’d be cautious with its output. I’ve seen some results that looked like it was great for shoving words onto paper, so long as you don’t worry about the quality of the end result.
We're all suckers for processes that promise to solve all your problems, aren't we?
In OneNote I can just dump down anything literally anywhere (because each page is an infinite canvas). It feels as easy as having a pen and random free papers. But with my notes increasing, I do want to have some way to manage this data which OneNote fails at. I can do basic text/OCR search but that's it. There is no linking etc. All note management is manual.
I usually search for an actual open source OneNote alternative (with easy jottable infinite canvases) every 6 months or so. Obsidian has added Canvases but they are definitely not a OneNote alternative at the moment.
It doesn't have to be infinite canvas in practice, just allow enough width and length to let you put down your cursor anywhere and start writing/pasting images or whatever you wish.
https://obsidian.md/canvas
And as you scales the number of plugins and files, test it on multiple platforms.
P.S. I learn this the hard way that each time I open Obsidian on iPhone (14 Pro which is not slow) it will hangs indefinitely without being able to open a file. On iPadOS it is ok albeit slow to start. I suspect it is related to having too many files (including git and git sub modules) inside and relying on iCloud sync. But basically I tested out things works great on Mac without constantly checking how well it works on iPhone and then now I’m in a situation it’s difficult to roll back some of the decisions I made.
I think that is the main reason why obsidian hangs at the start on the iPhone.
I have not yet figured out, how to keep iCloud files reliably on local storage on iOS. It seems independent of free storage and file size and is driving me mad.
Very sad that Apple does not succeed in syncing files. The same issue was there with iTools, mobile me, and now iCloud.
There are other solutions via plugins too. E.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, or GitHub. There was a post earlier in HN which is a reimplementation of Obsidian Sync, but it seems their reversed engineering uncovered something not secure there and Obsidian soon made a patch breaking that. There might be workarounds to fix it, but I haven't closely follow it.
When I have the time to do the refactoring and cleaning, I will probably choose one of these alternatives (or even an alternative of Obsidian if there are better solutions for me.)
But the way you say it seems to mean it no longer work?
It's weird how there's even a large enough market for all of these in the first place.
Fixed that for you ;)
For real, anyone interested should go read the original book (How to Take Smart Notes[1]) and you learn that it's not about creating backlinks between your notes (that's just a wiki or personal knowledge base). It's about capturing ideas inspired by your reading, etc. and linking them other ideas.
Yes, building your own personal knowledge base can be very powerful, but that's something different.
[1] https://a.co/d/5Ntl43P
I've also never read a book so packed with redundancy.
People are cargo-culting it today without thinking if it still makes sense.
Zettelkasten author would not have created it today, because it makes no sense when you have much more efficient ways to index/search information with a computer.
I've got the impression that many tried Zettelkasten as the one true note taking system just dumped stuff they found in blog articles into pages in their storage system for later retrieval. Nothing is wrong about that, but that is not Luhmanns idea of Zettelkasten.
Other than that, I have vim mode and a few other things, but not much. Themed it to match the rest of my setup and terminal, it feels like an easy extension to the workflow. I have a few folders broken out for commands and constants I like to refer back to (and can search for!) Maybe a neat one-liner. Plenty of code snippets.
I settled on OneNote because I'm always trying to capture context with my notes, codify my knowledge. Usually that means screenshots, handwriting, file copies, rarely video or audio embeddings.
I'm not going to try to convince you to use onenote, I want to instead complain about how this makes me boring and uncool, I see how trendy/popular the 'markdown files plus some goodies' notetaking applications are, but somehow I just don't get why those have enough ROI for my usecase, but still, my ego of not being a cool 10x developer who uses only certified organic grass-fed markdown files for my notes means I write rant comments like this.
Anyways, that's much ado about nothing on my part, again, thanks for sharing!
http://falcon.star-lord.me/exporter
You can also get your icloud drive and photos this way.
https://help.obsidian.md/import/apple-notes
It’s Good Enough. Other tools have a million cool extra features, but in practice most of those just give me an excuse to screw around with the tool instead of work with the information inside it.
Notes isn’t flashy. Howver, it does all of the things I truly need such an app to do. So fine.
It also has the huge, free feature that I can share notes with my wife and we can edit them together. That came in handy over Christmas with our shared shopping list.
I used OneNote. It worked brilliantly.
Until my notebook file corrupted.
Obsidian does the same job, but I miss the tabs. At least it’s all text files - no proprietary files to corrupt.
Obsidian's tabs along the top show open documents, whereas with OneNote it's more a placeholder for more data.
And it's obsessed with slurping your data up to Microsoft. If you want to stick with an older (unsupported) classic Desktop OneNote, you get a modal dialog box every. single. time. you. open. it. saying "Get more out of OneNote. A newer version of OneNote is now available for free. Go to www.onenote.com to download."
On the plus side, if you do use Microsoft Cloud storage then you can query and work with the OneNote data through the MS Graph REST API: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/integrate-with-oneno...
So you can programatically add and update content in pages in a shared team notebook, for example. And because it "runs" in MS cloud it supports things like asking the cloud services to "screenshot this webpage for me and add it as a note" and "extract content from this website and add it".
I wrote some generator to scrape a mandarin learning site to download all the audio files, sentences, etc into a markdown table for obsidian. My biggest complaint is that the "master vocab sheet" I made with hundreds (thousands?) Of words+sentences lags like hell, especially on android.
I'm also a fan of the excalidraw plugin, but it could be a bit more user friendly
Tl;Dr those features exist but IDK if their UX suffices for you
Honestly I like everything about obsidian except the markdown, but I know for many people that is it's big selling point.
I don't pay for syncing or anything. If I need a note on my PC from my phone, I send it via Bluetooth. It's a system that works for me.
Right now I am making do with creating little sections where I put monospaced fonts, but it's not ideal. I just need to plop down code between my notes once in a while, and Markdown's ``` makes that very easy.
Another reason stopping me from using apple notes is that their search sucks (both within note and across all notes)
Huh. Having actually written that out, that should be easy. I know what I’m doing this morning.
Edit: That also turned into a new blog post at https://honeypot.net/post/making-notes-looks-like-markdown-e... . Thanks for the nudge! I've been trying to get into a cadence, but hadn't had anything to talk about recently.
1. https://stephango.com/about
2. https://stephango.com/file-over-app
https://obsidian.md/license
Obsidian looks awesome to me, and for a long time I've been thinking about adopting it, but this licensing issue caused me to back away and look for alternatives. I'm not suggesting that paying for software is a bad idea, but the free distribution of it led me to believe that it is FOSS, and it is not.
https://obsidian.md/pricing
You certainly could create your own lock-in by making some unique workflow that requires a combination of plug-ins to function. The plugins are all third party, some of them are just annotating the existing markdown files, some are just visual.
Like having a template for my Daily Note that also automatically includes all files tagged #todo using Data View. Or a few global shortcuts via Keyboard Maestro that open specific notes on Obsidian.
I could maybe whip up a similar system in a day on top of any editor that can render Markdown and handle links, but now I don't need to.
When I already have access to the iCloud ecosystem, and Notes is excellent across iOS and macOS, I have never really seen much point in trying to use Obsidian.
But then maybe I'm missing the point of Obsidian?
Evidently it requires not only transfer, but some kind of transformation that they do in their cloud, and I'm not interested in another cloud subscription, particularly one so specific. (Happy to pay for the software & updates, just not to maintain the subscription and maintain the concern about another connection in the loop)
This was a couple years ago. Perhaps this has changed, or there's now a plugin to make such a bidirectional transfer work?
TIA for any suggestions!
Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.
You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.
It reportedly causes problems if you edit the same file in two different places at the same time, it will generate a conflict when saving since the files won't match, doesn't affect me in my workflow (if I have access to my desktop I won't use it on my phone) but YMMV
Once you actually understand how sync works in details it does wonders.
Obsidian is designed for those people that want to minmax their note taking and find reasons to increase productivity by providing robust linking and search capabilities within any document. The photos in the OP are a good example of how many people use Obsidian.
That said, I'm not an expert (never used it personally), but that's how I understand it.
But the other killer feature is avoiding vendor lock-in. With some apps your notes are on their servers in an inscrutable data format, and some apps don't even let you export without paying. With markdown notes on the other hand you can take your notes anywhere, sync them with git, dropbox, syncthing, etc.
You're not bound to obsidian, and your markdown notes format will always be readable, unlike many of today's formats! See [1] "LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906331
Looks like it's still alive and kicking. I guess you're probably upset by a lack of updates or something - luckily upgrading to a paid plan would be a good way to incentivize whoever is developing it to continue working on it, at least at the margin.
What you missed is that the paid offer didn‘t stop the developers to lose interest and… start Obsidian!
Subscriptions do motivate ongoing development, but only if there's a threat to stop going or start incurring subscriber losses. Product software categories have different ratios of customers who buy subscriptions for the current utility vs the investment into future utility.
P.S. my comparison was done probably a few years ago and the landscape could have changed quite a bit. One solution I tried was a code extension that promised to do something similar. I thought it would be good as I use vscode all the time. Then I find out it is bad because exactly of that. Obsidian and the like is dedicated to notes taking so this single software is unambiguously for that task. In vscode there’s just too much other things going on as distraction.
Personally I haven’t considered it because of that. I have no use for a complex notes app in my private life, and there’s no way my employer would pay for the subscription.
I thought so too, but then I noticed I was searching the internet for the same things over and over again. (Or asking it from GPT).
Then I started writing stuff down as I searched it, with a sentence or two of my own text + a few tags.
Now I can find stuff directly from Obsidian (or more like from the set of markdown files on my drive) instead of having to sweep the internet _again_ for the same thing.
Pocket is about as close as it gets it seems...
I am using Emacs Org Mode and quite happy with it. You can link different files, include images, embed and view LaTeX, encrypt your notes with GPG and much more. I think it will stand the test of time better than Obsidian which is something I care a lot for note taking and journaling.