Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

obsidian.md

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 329 posts

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

#281

Post by at-fates-hands »

darekkay wrote: post #74
TRcontrarian wrote: post #20

Obsidian 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…

> when the one with a Onenote license died OneNote has been free for the last few years. > port those notes in an exportable format You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.

> You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.

You can export as a .pdf, .xps or into most MS office doc formats like .docx

OneNote isn't great if you want to regularly export to a different format. Especially if you want to make your notebooks accessible to other non-MS software. Right now, I sync my notebooks between several different devices which is kind of a pain.

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

#282

Post by TuringTest »

bachmeier wrote: post #182
dkislyuk wrote: post #173

Obsidian 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),…

> Speaking of future-proofing, Markdown is as close as it gets to having interoperability with the notes. Obsidian is at its core just a Markdown file editor, which means your notes are stored as plaintext and easy to export. There is a bit of Obsidian-flavored syntax (e.g. bi-directional links [[...]]), but these are becoming standard in note-taking. Many note-taking apps claim export functionality, but at the end o…

On the open source front you get zettlr.com, a pure markdown WYSIWYM editor with image preview, pandoc integration for exporting groups of pages into whole documents, support for Zettlekasten workflows, and academic references management.

It's a one-man effort by a guy who created it for working on his PhD, but it's quite robust and usable despite a few small flaws (who should be corrected in version 2.0, likely coming during the year).

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

#283

Post by jimkleiber »

I've been playing with Obsidian on Mac and really like it, so I'm excited to have it on iOS as well.

I also have hesitated to install community plugins on my Mac because of the scary safe mode warning (and also I believe plugins do have quite a lot of access to my computer).

Do community plugins have similar access on iOS? In other words, does iOS do a better job at sandboxing/silo'ing so that I can use community plugins on my phone without giving access to everything?

Thanks to anyone who has insight

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

#284

Post by perchard »

manigandham wrote: post #43

”Obsidian loads blazing fast. No network requests or fancy animations.” This makes such a big difference. I wish everyday that I could turn off iOS animations…

Although this doesn't turn off animations completely, you might be interested in the 'reduce motion' preference: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202655

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

#285

Post by kemayo »

zmix wrote: post #244
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…

> 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. Everything is saved in the vault itself, > including plugins. [...] Did this change in the meanwhile? You can invoke an overview, that lists the last five, or so, Vaults, you used. From there you can switch. But that is all. The configuratio…

Perhaps-interestingly, I like this about its config and would view that feature as a bonus. It makes it easy to really tailor a given vault to a purpose, without having to consider layered configuration and how that might propagate.

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

#286

Post by nsriv »

eddyg wrote: post #247
nsriv wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any tips for making Obsidian function like Noteplan? I'm out of the iOS/Mac ecosystem but love how it works.

This post may be of interest: https://axle.design/why-and-how-to-use-obsidian-and-noteplan...

Appreciate it, thank you! I'm looking for Obsidian to be more of a replacement to Noteplan though.

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

#287

Post by nsriv »

rvieira wrote: post #212
nsriv wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any tips for making Obsidian function like Noteplan? I'm out of the iOS/Mac ecosystem but love how it works.

I use a few plugins to manage tasks: - "Calendar" to organise daily notes (my "inbox") - "Tasks" and "Rollover Daily Todos" - "Checklist" for a unified todo view "Day Planner" seems cool, but I haven't played with it.

Thank you! These look great, will tinker with these over the weekend.

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

#288

Post by bachmeier »

adkadskhj wrote: post #259
pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case, GitHub doesn't support Markdown, then, considering it shits the bed on one of the most crucial parts of the Markdown design: line-breaking behavior to preserve the readability of the "raw" form. (Watch now as everyone rushes in to try to say that this behavior is an exception, as if you just brought up that their favorite uncle has some unsavory qualities.)

Agreed. And what is exactly expected to be done, if sticking to strictly "Markdown spec"? You can't do anything meaningful with such a small subset of language features, where as Obsidian and Obsidian Plugins are all about extending Markdown to provide additional features ontop of the language, but stored in plain markdown. This would only be non-Markdown if it fundamentally broke something in Markdown. Ie lists no l…

I'm not arguing against anything you've written. None of it changes the fact that you're dumping your notes into a format that only works properly with a single proprietary app.

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

#289

Post by HungSu »

TRcontrarian wrote: post #20

Obsidian 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…

The comparison to the Pensieve is so so so good. I had previously used Tim Ferriss' metaphor for writing: that it was to freeze thoughts into a solid so that you could sculpt it into whatever shape you wanted. But as you've already noticed, there isn't really a final form a thought takes, and a lot of it's value is in bouncing amongst other thoughts.

I know this isn't a very hacker newsy comment, but wanted to highlight how amazing your comparison is :D

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

#290

Post by hoppyhoppy2 »

bachmeier wrote: post #288
adkadskhj wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. And what is exactly expected to be done, if sticking to strictly "Markdown spec"? You can't do anything meaningful with such a small subset of language features, where as Obsidian and Obsidian Plugins are all about extending Markdown to provide additional features ontop of the language, but stored in plain markdown. This would only be non-Markdown if it fundamentally broke something in Markdown. Ie lists no l…

I'm not arguing against anything you've written. None of it changes the fact that you're dumping your notes into a format that only works properly with a single proprietary app.

Your Obsidian vault is a folder of Markdown files that use [[links like this]]. You can load your Obsidian vault folder in the open-source version of VSCode with either the "Foam"[1] extensions or Markdown Memo[2] VSCode extension. [[This style of link]] works great with either. I think I also saw a new feature (or plugin?) for VimWiki that allows [[links]] to work even when the target is in a different subfolder, but I haven't tried it myself so don't quote me on that. There are also other programs that use this style of linking.

You can alternatively set up Obsidian to use [regular markdown links](regular.md) , it's just not the default setting.

[1]: https://foambubble.github.io/

[2]: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=svsool.m...

Post reply on HN