After searching around (and trying Roam, Obsidian, a bit of Tiddlywiki, etc) I ended up sticking with Athens [0][1]. It's essentially an open-source version of Roam, and it's YC funded. I've found it to already be mature enough to be a good replacement for Roam.
Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
271–280 of 329 posts
Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
#272Obsidian has really delivered in a crowded note-taking space by focusing on the fundamentals: 1. Privacy. You can roll your own syncing (or use iCloud, Dropbox, etc.), without the notes being stored on the note editors' servers, which is a huge win over Roam, Notion, Evernote, etc. After the Evernote fiasco from a few years ago (where they considered reading your notes for ML model training and got massive pushback),…
+1. I found Obsidian a few weeks ago and it really is everything I've been wishing for in a "note taking" app. I put "note taking" in quotes because I've moved all my writing into it, too--it's wonderful to have notes so close at hand while I'm working, and Markdown is the gold standard for exporting to every presentation format I care about. It's the only richly featured writing app I've found that seems to understand how overbearing WYSIWYG editing and proprietary file formats/cloud garbage just get in the way of productivity.
The only shame with the mobile version is that (last I checked) it doesn't have Dropbox support, which makes it more or less useless to me. Hopefully it's on their list.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
#273Obsidian is the closest thing I've found to the Pensive from Harry Potter. It's a data recording format good enough for me to extract thoughts from my mind, represent them with enough fidelity to reconstruct later, connect them to the concepts that they are related to in my head, and then forget the thought completely so I can move on and process it later. I was only willing to try it out because I had heard it menti…
Starts at ~37 min mark
Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re right it was on Cortex, clarification though: Grey loves Obsidian, Mike doesn’t really get it though. Neither like Notion, even though it has a massive fan base. There is a whole episode (maybe the one in question) where it comes to light that Grey has spent most of his life NOT making notes like most people do and instead just highlighting areas in source material and referring back to it. Very funny episode…
I think this is the episode you are reffering to? https://www.relay.fm/cortex/105
Yes! That’s the episode. To hear two people realise they’ve been effectively having two different conversations with each other about the same topic without realising it is a special kind of amazing.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
#275lmk when open source and I'll give it a shot
Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
#276Obsidian 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.
Have you checked beorgapp?
I find that it supports surprisingly large parts of org mode.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
#277Aside from the other praise people have given Obsidian it is also by far the fastest electron app I've ever used by a lot. Curious if the devs have any insight how they have made it feel so performant.
The secret to development is to just follow classic programming patterns instead of new school "best practices" that are rife among the kinds of programmers who are creating Electron apps, and you should be good. In fact, JS is insanely fast, so you don't even need to do that. (Netscape 6, which came out 20 years ago, had tons of its parts written JS, down to the AOL Instant Messenger client it shipped with. It was e…
Can you list out some classic patterns that you see being ignored?
Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
And isn't this a side project? They are also the dev team behind Dynalist?
Yes they develop Dynalist as well but as far as I know it is on "hold" and they are focusing on Obsidian atm.
That actually scares me a bit. I liked Dynalist but stopped using it because of random UI issues on mobile, it just didn't feel worth it.
Hope they do better with Obsidian.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
#279I’ve been very much enjoying FSNotes [0] as a replacement for Notational Velocity (and nvALT) which are both abandonware at this point. FSNotes is a native app, is FLOSS and is actively maintained. It lacks some of the advanced features of Obsidian (like Graph View) but it has the essentials (hyperlinks and tag sidebar). [0] https://fsnot.es/
I switched from nVALT to FSNotes, and then to Obsidian. FSNotes was too buggy for me. In particular, I'd go to search for something and somehow after a few characters I was randomly typing in to some saved note. Obsidian has been excellent. I suggest dragging the "magnifying glass" icon to it's own "tab" so it's always visible (something I'm used to with nvALT / FSNotes).
I’ve filed bug reports and the FSNotes developer fixed them within days. I’ll take a look at Obsidian too, thanks!
Re: Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go
#280Obsidian has really delivered in a crowded note-taking space by focusing on the fundamentals: 1. Privacy. You can roll your own syncing (or use iCloud, Dropbox, etc.), without the notes being stored on the note editors' servers, which is a huge win over Roam, Notion, Evernote, etc. After the Evernote fiasco from a few years ago (where they considered reading your notes for ML model training and got massive pushback),…
> My entire personal knowledge base was in Evernote for a few years, and now happily migrated to Obsidian. Can I ask what your use-cases were for Evernote, and how well they all migrated to Obsidian? When I think over my Evernote usage, for me it really boils down to three things: 1. Evergreen notes, like lists of books to read 2. Wiki-ish knowledgebase for work, like how do I get data from this server, or whatever 3…
My Evernote usage is a lot like yours. Ever since the Windows client switched to being a web app I've been planning on moving to something else but it's hard to find something that ticks all the boxes from me.
I still use a web clipper because pages go away too often.
I want image OCR because it's nice to search for something and have a snapshot of a whiteboard come up.
I want a native client on iPad and Windows. I would prefer local storage if possible.
Basically, I want Evernote from about 7 years ago.