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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

#261

Post by chrischen »

jtbayly wrote: post #178

Can somebody help me understand something about Markdown and Obsidian? Why would I ever want an edit mode and a preview mode while taking notes? Don't I want to be able to both see my note and edit it at any time? I mean, I guess I could just ignore preview mode if the edit mode actually allowed me to see all of the content of my note, but it doesn't. Images are only visible in preview mode. So all the talk about tra…

I also feel like hot keys, VIM key bindings, and org-mode key bindings are a big part of what make it good to use for a power user. Bindings are learn once, benefit forever, whereas no key bindings may make it easy initially but are an infinite drag on productivity.

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

#262

Post by colinjoy »

ddrdrck_ wrote: post #232
hkh28 wrote: post #225

As several people have pointed out, both the "Personal" and "Catalyst" licenses are intended for personal use only, making this quite an expensive product should I want to use it for work as well. But in the full license text, there seems to be an even more problematic phrasing: > The use of OBSIDIAN for the exercise of your own trade or profession (...) does not qualify as personal use. I would interpret this to mea…

Commercial license is 50$ per year. Not even 5 bucks per month. I do not think this qualifies as "expensive", especially if you intend to use it for work related stuff

If you are going to use it as a knowledge base, you are probably looking at a few years of use.

Currently the closest match to this software I have installed is Quiver. Let’s compare costs over a period of 5 years:

Quiver: $9.99 Obsidian: $250.00

That may not be a lot of money to you personally, but it fits my mental model of “expensive” pretty well.

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

#263

Post by ThouYS »

soapboxrocket wrote: post #59
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.

I'm in agreement with you on this. I've been playing with a package for Atom that would simplify a bunch of stuff in my process, but in general I don't like the risk of proprietary software/stack for my workflow.

that’s a funny idea, putting the logic in the editor

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

#264

Post by Reelin »

hkh28 wrote: post #225

As several people have pointed out, both the "Personal" and "Catalyst" licenses are intended for personal use only, making this quite an expensive product should I want to use it for work as well. But in the full license text, there seems to be an even more problematic phrasing: > The use of OBSIDIAN for the exercise of your own trade or profession (...) does not qualify as personal use. I would interpret this to mea…

If we're internet armchair lawyering then I'd point out that a carpenter building something is "exercising their trade or profession" but a carpenter reading a textbook or watching a how-to video is not.

Analogously, a salaried software developer learning something and taking notes on their own time would be in the clear but a freelance developer tracking their projects or clients would be in violation.

What's not clear is how it applies to a salaried developer learning something and taking notes on the job (ie is time provided for professional development part of practicing your trade or merely a perk?) or a freelance developer using this product at all (same issue as previous scenario, except now it's not even clear where your job ends and personal time begins).

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

#266

Post by heavyset_go »

s_trumpet wrote: post #235
loughnane wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually using Joplin for the past year after migrating to evernote. I really liked it but am now migrating to something with a little more flexibility around structuring. Thinking to structure it around hugo.

I'm checking out Joplin on this suggestion. Couple of questions - In what way did you use it? And what were your problems with it?

Joplin isn't like your typical web app, and you need to either carry a copy of your notes around on every device, or you need to sync them using a cloud service. For that reason, I went with other note-taking and wiki software.

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

#267

Post by tsp »

Not very impressed with this, because:

- Rendering of files takes quite long (a couple of seconds) - Interface looks dated - Graph view is not very usable, it just shows a bunch of words. No idea how to get any meaning out of this. - Backlinks did not update in my test

Typora [0], another markdown editor is light-years ahead with the basic features – being able to edit markdown files and search through them all at once.

I appreciate the competition, tho. Good to have another option.

The price is quite high for such an editor in my opinion. More polished note-taking apps like Bear [2] or Notion [3] https://www.notion.so/ are even cheaper. They are proprietary, so not using markdown files directly, but I think it is fair to compare them anyways.

[0]: https://typora.io/ [1]: https://bear.app/ [2]: https://notion.so

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

#268

Post by agambrahma »

Probably worth mentioning that if you're looking for "all this and more", try out Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) too.

- local storage

- notes can be "namespaces" within documents

- "zip links" that are the equivalent of the `[[...]]` style common to both Obsidian and Roam, showing Inbound, Outbound and "suggested" links, for each note

- ad-hoc linking between notes on top of all this

- switching between "plain notes" and a Map view, or an Outline view, or a Timeline view

- viewing the resulting graph in different ways, auto-arranging it, etc.

- Ad-hoc "decorators" (colors, labels, tags, icons) for notes

- Ad-hoc "backgrounds" on all or portion of the graph view

- Ad-hoc "note queries" (that allow you to collect notes matching certain metadata, having certain text etc)

- ... and more that I haven't found time to use yet :-)

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

#269

Post by rcarr »

kotutku wrote: post #30
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…

Are you going to add some features for more structured data? I'm thinking about tables like in Notion where you can sort by any column. Working with Markdown tables is very clunky.

If you need to edit tables then you could just use TableFlip, gives you a spreadsheet style interface to edit tables, automatically updates your markdown file without the need to copy paste https://tableflipapp.com

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

#270

Post by ansible »

rhezab wrote: post #157
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…

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…

That's interesting.

I'm imagining a version that runs as a daemon, watching the folder containing all the notes. It then looks for files that have been modified, and are not currently edited (.swp files for vim, for example), and runs an update.

I think I'd prefer something running in the browser, though that is of course not ideal for several reasons...

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