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Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

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Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#161

Post by afarviral »

jonotime wrote: post #155
spidersouris wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you find restrictive with MD?

MD is great for a readme, or a book where someone is going to read it once and digest the info. Markdown is a presentation format and is much easier to write then HTML since its less expressive. Note taking can be deep and contain a lot of data (lists of items copied form CSVs, code snippets, documenting failures). Notes are more like code. You can spend your whole day in it - tweaking code blocks, refactoring, etc.…

I don't understand. Can you not just indent text to an arbitrary depth? I definitely get what you mean about treating like code/refactoring, but I have found I can easily do this since there so are many options. The only area it is lacking is not being able to take handwritten diagrams and tables (or similar)…furiatingly fiddly. But as far as the depth and complexity of hierarchy ... That's not something markdown is lacking? Especially in comparison to plain text. Maybe revisit it.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#163

Post by vcavallo »

eXpl0it3r wrote: post #139
vcavallo wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just found this: https://workingcopyapp.com/

Sounds like you're in luck with Working Copy, as they mention this as being the only (known) application supporting background-sync for specific directories. https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/iOS+app#Sync

Confirming: Working Copy is _itself_ amazing, and solves the syncing-obsidian-to-github-on-ios problem.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#164

Post by stinkytaco »

rayxi271828 wrote: post #124

Any org-roam users here? I started with Roam Research (one of the believers, even), but then moved to org-roam to keep the files under my control. Is Obsidian worth trying if one's already using org-roam and is reasonably familiar with Emacs?

> Is Obsidian worth trying if one's already using org-roam and is reasonably familiar with Emacs?

What features do you need that org-roam doesn't have? Hard to say if it's worth moving on without knowing that. If org-roam is working for you, then why bother moving? If it's not, why not and does obsidian possess those features?

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#165

Post by xenodium »

slightwinder wrote: post #123

Obsidian is really nice, and quite powerful, especially thanks to plugins. It's also moving fast, the developers are very active. I used it for a while to move on from org-mode, but kinda lost interesst because of certain excentrics it has. One specific problem that killed it for me temporary is the lack of support for multiple vaults, to the point that there is not even a truely centralized global configuation. Ever…

I love org-mode, and use it in all sorts of areas, but I haven't found a mobile (iOS) solution I'm happy with.

Org being so feature-rich, I decided to tackle a subset on iOS, so I built https://flathabits.com.

I'm itching to build a similar thing for personal task management, since I currently rely on Shortcuts emailing myself org-formatted TODOs.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#166

Post by jonotime »

afarviral wrote: post #161
jonotime wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MD is great for a readme, or a book where someone is going to read it once and digest the info. Markdown is a presentation format and is much easier to write then HTML since its less expressive. Note taking can be deep and contain a lot of data (lists of items copied form CSVs, code snippets, documenting failures). Notes are more like code. You can spend your whole day in it - tweaking code blocks, refactoring, etc.…

I don't understand. Can you not just indent text to an arbitrary depth? I definitely get what you mean about treating like code/refactoring, but I have found I can easily do this since there so are many options. The only area it is lacking is not being able to take handwritten diagrams and tables (or similar)…furiatingly fiddly. But as far as the depth and complexity of hierarchy ... That's not something markdown is…

Yes I can do arbitrary depth text in markdown but then it becomes text, not markdown. Then you are rending a mix of different things which are not semantically meaningful to a tool. Are you suggesting I use MD for the top levels, then then free text when nesting gets deeper?

To be clear I cobbled together an example of what my notes may look like: https://gist.github.com/jonocodes/5574dc799774b4613c33d2572b...

I'm not even sure what tab level 2 should be in Markdown. Should it be a unordered list or a heading level 2? At what depth would I switch from headings, to lists, to plain text etc? I hit a wall pretty quickly with Markdowns restrictiveness here.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#168

Post by coffeefirst »

nklmilojevic wrote: post #83

I've tried Obsidian and it is not for me. I really don't like the trend of apps being in Electron and there are much better native apps, especially on macOS (Bear, IA Writer, Ulysses). Trying to understand - what is the feature that Obsidian got you hooked? Usually HN is very critical of Electron apps, but not on this one and I'm really interested why. :)

The internal linking between docs is the best implementation I've ever seen.

I also like that it's just markdown under the hood.

It's not perfect. Multiple vaults can be clunky and if I want to share a vault with someone it's going to get complicated, but it's pretty slick at what it does.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#169

Post by EleanorKonik »

prashantsengar wrote: post #5

I love using Obsidian and it is where all my notes live. Last year when I was searching for wiki-type note taking tools, I stumbled upon many of them including Roam Research, TiddlyWiki, and then Obsidian. Obsidian is what I chose because of how it stores my data - markdown files. And it does not lose any functionality even if it uses markdown. Bidirectional linking, block references, heading references, a beautiful…

I've heard good things about the LogSeq/Obsidian interoperability, but out of curiosity, have you tried the Outliner plugin for Obsidian? I haven't gotten a good sense of how the two differ.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

#170

Post by singhrac »

student2k wrote: post #85

the only things I didn't like of obsidian was working with images was a nightmare, in Evernote you have a shortcut to take an area screenshot, it stores automatically in a folder, then you can write stuff below it, and move it to another folder, really good work flow I miss in obsidian.

For me the copy and paste into a note functionality works perfectly. Actually that’s one of the most seamless parts of the app. I use it everywhere along with macOS’s built in screenshot.
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