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Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

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Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#471

Post by geraltofrivia »

Obsidian is a crazy project, and I would recommend you all to give it far more weight when deciding to use it or not. Before I switched to Notion earlier this year, I used to maintain my notes in a Github repository. A folder with a bunch of markdown and txt files. I then used some editor like Sublime Text to easily switch between pages and to write. And sometimes, I would render them using a combination of [Markserv](https://www.npmjs.com/package/markserv) (to convert Markdown to static HTML files), and [Live Reload Addon](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live-reload/) to pull those HTML files from disk every second. It was ugly, but it worked for me for years.

Obsidian fits this workflow perfectly. I use Notion now, but I believe it's got too many bells and whistles, syntactic sugar, and non-native text editing experience, which makes me focus more on the interface than the content. I'm making the shift back to my previous way of managing notes/knowledge (going to take weeks), only because of this Application. I recommend you keep a close eye on it.

I am not in any way involved with the project.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#472

Post by woodrowbarlow »

douglaswlance wrote: post #470
fsloth wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! But the question was "is an open source software more extensible...". And for most situations where software is used the answer is no.

If being open-source improves extensibility by even 0.0000001%, then to make something as extensible as possible requires it to be open-source. As someone who writes plugins, being able to see "behind the curtain" is very helpful, especially for taking advantage of un-documented features.

someone created something that they'd like to make a little money off of, while still taking very extensive steps to make it available, extensible, and prevent lock in. they chose a path to profit with all of these goals in mind. you're demanding an awful lot for something that "improves extensibility by even 0.0000001%". in the spectrum between "i want to extract money from the users of this product" and "i want this product to be used as the users see fit", i would say this product's goals lean towards the latter.

please don't say the wording is the problem. "as extensible as possible" is fine. "as possible" is a qualifier, it clearly means "as extensible as possible without undermining other goals". you're pretending that they've promised to make it extensible at the expense of _everything_ else, and that assumption in context in unfounded.

it's true that paths to monetization exist for open source software, but they usually aren't accessible to an individual developer who is building a small bootstrapped side-project to generate small amounts of passive income.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#473

Post by winxton »

ericax wrote: post #7

Maker here, excited to be on Hacker News. Obsidian is going into public beta today! (We're also on Product Hunt, come check us out!) We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services. We believe you second…

Awesome work guys! Judging by such an active and enthusiastic community, I could see this having a very sizable market share of knowledge bases like roam / bear / notion in the future. So far I haven't found a good filesystem based note taking app that fit my needs. Quiver came the closest but has not been active in development recently, so I'm switching to this and I'm excited where it goes.

You and Shida have some serious product & programming chops ~ UWaterloo represent!

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#475

Post by aesadde »

627467 wrote: post #378
rhezab wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting stuff! I currently use Andy Matuschak's [1] system, using his note-link-janitor script [2] to generate backlinks and Typora to edit. The only thing Obsidian adds is the graph view for me, but it seems that Obsidian generates backlinks using file name, not title. I prefer linking by title. Perhaps this can be an option? The editor also seems to be lacking a little... for instance I can't seem to render mat…

I discovered andy's notes in the past and has been trying to determined what he uses to publish those clean yet powerfull notes. The janitor is only one part. do you also publish your notes as HTML? How to you make use of the backlinks generated by janitor?

I believe you can use this Gatsby theme to get the behavior you're looking for https://github.com/aravindballa/gatsby-theme-andy

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#476

Post by kixiQu »

voxelghost wrote: post #468
kixiQu wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any commenter with a greensward is a friend of mine! The answer is Google, sort of: https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/getting_started#ena... The anaglyph effect is what I tweaked. It's not too unreadable with simpler fonts--I 100% acknowledge readability takes a massive hit with both the fraktur and the anaglyph. Ultimately, though, my goal with that blog is mostly to have fun, so the expressive aspect is impo…

I'm all for artistic freedom. Just letting you know in a jestful way that the design (and I am certainly not a proper, nor any other kind, designer either) that the design detracted/distracted from the message for this reader, to the point where I just hit back. Then I went back in again, and started poking around with the element inspector. Then we had this discussion, and I am still not sure what the page content w…

Fair enough; that artistic aspect means that for me, the design is part of the message so it's worth keeping. I think I do a similar thing with unstyled websites a la https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ ; the content has to look very interesting to me to be worth copying and pasting in CSS a la http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ to actually read the thing. It's interesting to think about the wide range of tolerances out there for different kinds of visual presentation.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#477

Post by mathnmusic »

627467 wrote: post #378
rhezab wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting stuff! I currently use Andy Matuschak's [1] system, using his note-link-janitor script [2] to generate backlinks and Typora to edit. The only thing Obsidian adds is the graph view for me, but it seems that Obsidian generates backlinks using file name, not title. I prefer linking by title. Perhaps this can be an option? The editor also seems to be lacking a little... for instance I can't seem to render mat…

I discovered andy's notes in the past and has been trying to determined what he uses to publish those clean yet powerfull notes. The janitor is only one part. do you also publish your notes as HTML? How to you make use of the backlinks generated by janitor?

It's possible to get a similar system with TiddlyWiki and the Krystal theme plus a few plugins:

https://twitter.com/Learn_Awesome/status/1265574525342793730...

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#478

Post by dunefox »

MiroF wrote: post #200
ericax wrote: post #7

Maker here, excited to be on Hacker News. Obsidian is going into public beta today! (We're also on Product Hunt, come check us out!) We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services. We believe you second…

I've been looking for something like this for... so long. It's like tiddlywiki but with first class & local markdown! Thank you!!! Add a separate GUI for a workflow-y like list-editing (that saves as a markdown list format) and you've got a serious competitor to Roam as well as beating out more traditional competitors like Notion, Boostnote, etc. e: ah, no inline LaTex.. I knew there was a catch!

> e: ah, no inline LaTex.. I knew there was a catch!

Sadly, this makes it completely useless for me.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#479

Post by SimplGy »

This is a beautiful app, thank you for making it.

I can't find how to use a fixed-width font: are community themes the right way to accomplish that?

Markdown is a whitespace sensitive format, it might be that fixed pitch is a candidate to be a first class setting, even the default.

Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

#480

Post by roryokane »

ericax wrote: post #57
loughnane wrote: post #36

I will never again build any kind of workflow for my knowledge on top of anything that isn’t open source. 5y is a long time and 10y is an eternity for these sorts of products but its just a fraction of my working life. My own personal setup is a bunch of markdown files and it’s great, so I like that approach, but I’m very cautious about investing time for something so important in a product i don’t control.

We'll likely make a formal guarantee to open source in the case of us shutting down. Didn't realize that was a possibility, thanks for the suggestion!

If anyone is wonder what this comment is in reply to, this comment is a dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325105, replying to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325035.
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