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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

#101

Post by perchard »

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.

i found the following useful when i was getting started:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook...

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...

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

#102

Post by dvtrn »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #100
dvtrn wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2. Link as first-citizen. sits up in chair, attention captured Where can I read more about this? My current personal wiki is powered by TiddlyWiki and while I don't necessarily love the performance, I do LOVE the link structure of TiddlyWiki (I can create a "table of contents" page a random tag, and then every page using that tag gets rendered on said page). I have similar plugins for VSCode to collect all of my todo…

If I got you right, then you can just open the said tag in Obsidian and see all references to it as backlinks on the side panel.

Backlinks, thank you. That was the word I was trying to think of and describe exactly this, missed it by THAT much, heh-drinks more coffee. Cheers, I'll definitely be taking this for a spin

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

#103

Post by allenleee »

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…

Early user here. Obsidian is literally the best app in 2020 so far IMO.

- Blazingly fast

- Clean UI

- Free

- Sync with Dropbox, Github, iCloud...

- Great community

I have never looked back to Notion and Bear since I found it.

Btw, the Obs team is moving so fast.

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

#104

Post by ihodes »

imglorp wrote: post #74
benrbray wrote: post #47

This 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…

Since roam was lamented, obligatory boost for org-roam: https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

I love this, and used Deft and org-mode for a long while, but formatting and inline images aren't something that's non-hackily possible to do in Emacs. Would love to be wrong about this.

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

#105

Post by ymolodtsov »

maurelian wrote: post #23
katktv wrote: post #9

It'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.

Roam is essentially an outliner: every bullet-point has a unique ID and you can't link directly to it. That way you can a) reference specific blocks of texts (Obsidian only allows to link to headings) b) display the entire block in the backlinks section (Obsidian only renders a set number of words around that mention)

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

#106

Post by BasilPH »

I've been using The Archive (https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/) to browse a knowledge graph of markdown files i.e. a Zettelkasten. It's one-time $19 and worth every penny.

I use it to browse my notes. There is a shortcut to open them in VIM. It's powerful and simple.

Shameless plug: I created a CLI tool to visualize a set of linked markdown files, print stats, and display orphans. See https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel

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

#107

Post by Whil- »

ericax wrote: post #15
cxr wrote: post #14

It 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.

That's an interesting idea and we'll look into it! We plan to stay in business in the long run, but if things do go wrong and we shut down, we do intend to open source the app.

I guess we all have an incentive to make you go out of business then ;-)

On a more serious note: I see no issue with software being a service and costing money if it's built on a standard that leaves the data in the owners hands and in the owners own structures. I.e. Markdown files synced using infrastructure like OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever with some nice features on top of it and a nice UI can cost whatever and no one should complain. Because if that software goes away the data is in the owners hands and in a standardized format supported by many other tools.

That should be the preferred way we build software btw. And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and standardized) database tools that are user friendly, treat them in similar fashion as files by syncing with user owned Infrastructure and we might just get to the point where more rigid data structures can be used in a similar manner as what I described above for files. That future would be great.

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

#108

Post by m-p-3 »

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.

You could build a knowledge base in https://joplinapp.org/ and store/sync it the way you want.

I don't see any restrictions regarding corporate usage.

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

#109

Post by ymolodtsov »

yt-sdb wrote: post #85

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?

I think the Daily Note is the best example here, in both Obsidian and Roam. It makes it easy to jot down quick notes about the things you read/learned without thinking too much where to put it. You just highlight a few key words you find reasonable and then you'd be able to find that piece using any of them and then follow the graph around.

Now instead of just reading articles in Pocket I always take quick notes and save the most important parts for me.

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

#110

Post by ymolodtsov »

mleonard wrote: post #71

Very interesting I'm going to try it out. What's the app written in? It has a VSCode feel to it (which is great!)... Any chance it's built in typescript like VSCode too? I'd love to write a JavaScript extension or two to customise it in the future if that's the case. Can you share what it's built with and what the future extensions will need to be built with? Thanks!

It's Typescript.
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