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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

#81

Post by underdeserver »

itsspring wrote: post #50

I 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

Agreed.

Devs, please consider the Jetbrains model - make the current version (up to v1 while in beta) have a lifetime license for a one-time fee, even commercial, and keep subscribers updated.

Since it's locally based, if I only need the basic features, I'm not sure what I'll be paying for with a subscription.

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

#82

Post by deltron3030 »

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…

What do you think about CMS usecases like blogging? Where you'd write locally and maybe define some notes or a folder for static site generation, maybe triggering rebuilds from within Obsidian?

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

#83

Post by jhvkjhk »

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…

Obsidian looks great! And I think it will be greater if I can write `[](another_markdown)` as internal links too, it will be easier to generate HTML files to host, using Hugo or something. If people save all markdown files in one folder then it's the same word count as [[another_markdown]].

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

#84

Post by perchard »

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…

this is awesome! i see the 'zettelkasten link fixer' in the markdown format importer ("Fixes [[UID]] links to full [[UID File Name]].") - any plans/thoughts on just supporting [[UID]]? this seems less brittle to me in that you won't break all of your backlinks if you change the (non-ID) part of the filename.

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

#85

Post by yt-sdb »

Can anyone who uses cross-referencing speak to the benefits? I take notes using a simple web server-based Markdown editor and organize them with directories. I link between files occasionally using URLs. Does quick-linking between files or graph views really help? Any examples?

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

#86

Post by ericax »

lukeramsden wrote: post #42
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…

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.

Not aware of many good resources since it's pretty new, but you can probably look into the Zettelkasten method.

The gist is to make your notes atomic and link them together whenever possible. [[ links provides auto-complete, and the backlink plugin tells you what notes links to this note, and what notes mention it but don't explicit link it.

The graph view is for discovery and navigation mostly. It lets you discover clusters, and identify "orphan" nodes that aren't connected anything. That might inspire you to think of connections and strength your knowledge network.

Hope that makes sense!

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

#87

Post by ericax »

jhvkjhk wrote: post #83
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…

Obsidian looks great! And I think it will be greater if I can write `[](another_markdown)` as internal links too, it will be easier to generate HTML files to host, using Hugo or something. If people save all markdown files in one folder then it's the same word count as [[another_markdown]].

Yes we do support the standard format, navigation will work in Obsidian but unfortunately not link auto-completion.

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

#88

Post by ericax »

deltron3030 wrote: post #82
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…

What do you think about CMS usecases like blogging? Where you'd write locally and maybe define some notes or a folder for static site generation, maybe triggering rebuilds from within Obsidian?

We designed the "Publish" add-on service for that purpose (not yet available): https://obsidian.md/pricing

We still want to give you the option to export internal links to standard [Markdown](link) links so that static site generators or sites like GitBooks can understand them out of the box.

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

#89

Post by cxr »

sevensor wrote: post #17
mjedmonds wrote: post #6

This app has changed the way I take notes - markdown, local files, wiki-style [[backlinking]], and Latex support has made it fun to build a personal knowledge base. I never liked the hierarchical structure of most note taking systems, and backlinking just lets you write - you navigate the network structure later (you can also still use a hierarchy on top of the network structure if that's your thing). Highly recommen…

I've had a lot of success with even less organization -- writing one giant append-only markdown file per project. Search for the thing you want and it usually comes up. Notes have a timestamp and they're in order, so it's not hard to determine whether they're still relevant.

Sounds like a blog. Maybe you should publish those notes. Most people won't find it useful. Some people might.

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

#90

Post by ericax »

perchard wrote: post #84
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…

this is awesome! i see the 'zettelkasten link fixer' in the markdown format importer ("Fixes [[UID]] links to full [[UID File Name]].") - any plans/thoughts on just supporting [[UID]]? this seems less brittle to me in that you won't break all of your backlinks if you change the (non-ID) part of the filename.

Obsidian will auto-update all backlinks when you rename it.

Essentially, we think wikilinks should identify the destination exactly and should not perform a search instead.

Thankfully it's all just plain text at the end of the day, and it's not hard to do some text processing to convert both ways.

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