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Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
41–50 of 501 posts
Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
#42Maker 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…
Have you any good resources for getting started with this graph-type note-taking? Currently I just used notable.md in a NextCloud folder and it works pretty slickly.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have been in private beta for a few months already, with 5000+ beta testers and a community. We did let them know that we're doing a "Show HN" today. Hope that explains things!
Thanks for taking the time to reply! I guess it does explain things ... Best of luck with the product, also +1 to the suggestion of an open source client from a sibling thread!
Yes! We really want people to be able to leave their knowledge bases as a legacy to their grandchildren, so we'll do everything it takes.
Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
#44My two biggest issues, skimming the website:
- this does not seem to be open source or free-as-in-speech. That worries me - especially when it comes to longevity. It's the reason I wouldn't use this product if it was by Google.
- i don't see an easy way to export my data in case I would like to migrate to a different service.
That being said I am definitely going to try it out and see what it does for me! There is definitely a gap in knowlege-mapping software in my life
Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
#45Can't comment on the merits of the product itself. That in the first five minutes of this post being online, several users more or less claim that this has changed their lives in their first-ever comment on HN strikes me as a little odd however. (Yes I'm aware that this is also my first-ever comment on HN.)
I've been using Obsidian for a short while after seeing a comment here on HN. I've used a lot of desktop notetaking apps, and this one really is different. It's the app HN commenters would write themselves. I expect it to be very successful in the next few years. It hasn't changed my life, because I'm not going to trust it with anything important right now, but they do have an ethusiastic community.
There's a new video out today if you want an overview:
Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
#46It's not exactly Roam, but the thing looks promising still. I like that it is offline-first and Markdown based, really feels like the crew has got some ideas in what direction to lead this project to. The bi-directional links in themselves are quite a killer feature that makes many note-taking apps like Evernote feel obsolete.
Curious what it's missing that Roam has? I liked the Roam concept, but didn't use it for long before moving to Obsidian because of the privacy model, so I never really got a good feel for it. I still feel like I'm not getting the most out of the bi-directional link functionality everyone loves so much because I keep forgetting to create them.
I think Roam's graph is flawed, but it's much better that Obsidian's, which you can't even zoom out of. Also Conaw experiments with some neat things like to-do lists that double as backlinks, Kanban boards, Pomodoro timer (ok that's overkill but it was added recently anyway). Daily note-taking is also pretty streamlined in Roam with new notes created every day that can be referred to in a neat fashion, and perhaps also allow for SRS.
Idk, Roam feels too familiar to me as well, so I doubt that I'll drop it anytime soon (we'll see how will I handle the future $15 price tag).
Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
#47This looks great! Good timing too, since Roam has recently closed its doors to new signups. I've been looking for a new notetaking / PKM / Markdown app recently, but unfortunately all apps out there fall short in at least one of the following criteria:
* bidirectional [[wiki links]]
* support for both inline and display math
* customizable themes / CSS
* rich formatting beyond markdown (e.g. wrap content in tags with custom formatting--useful for e.g. placing a box around text, etc.)
* WYSIWYG (crucial for documents with tons of math and rich formatting as above) including wysiwyg editing of tables
Tools I've tried that come close but aren't quite good enough:
* Jupyter Lab / Notebooks
* Typora
* Roam
* OneNote (just let me write $\LaTeX$ math!)
It's actually been quite frustrating. because some apps are soooo close to what I need, but they're closed-source so I'm powerless to make the small improvements I need. My current workflow for notetaking uses a pretty suboptimal combination of Overleaf, Typora, and OneNote. I'd really like to be able to replace all three with a single tool. At the moment, the only thing that comes close is a Chrome tab with document.designMode="on".
To the Obsidian team: Please add inline math support and consider WYSWIG!
Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
#48The graph view seems cool but I don't feel it is much useful in the long term. It has a wow factor in the initial use but it is just a mingled web of links. It is like creating a graph of the www but I don't see how that could be useful.
If the links between node could be directed and annotated, then it'd become much more powerful, though. Similar to how TheBrain works [1] I see that the public plugin interface is a long term goal at this point [2] but it'd be amazing if plugins could expose ways to mark up graph relationships! [1] https://www.thebrain.com [2] https://trello.com/c/Z7qqKVXd/19-public-plugin-interface-v10
Still not sure if having a mind map would make it more usable. Do you feel having mind map like this would help you ?
Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
#49It looks like this isn't open source. If this is supposed to be one's second brain, please at least consider using a time-bomb FOSS license. Something like: you're permitted to use Obsidian under Apache/MIT/GPL license either 7 years after a given release, or effective immediately in the event that Obsidian shuts down.
Thanks for raising this. I couldn't imagine using anything like this without a serious guarantee that if development ever bogs down I'd still have some way to keep it working and up-to-date. Even if the founders honestly intend this to be the case, who is to say that the firm that buys them up feels similarly?
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!
Re: Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files
#50I was about to spend $25 for a one-time/lifetime license, until I read your license. No commercial or professional use?
I'm not paying $50/yr for that sorry. A yearly fee for this is unrealistic and is way more expensive than other products like Quiver or SimpleMind which offers a lifetime product