Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

obsidian.md

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 501 posts

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

#351

Post by prepend »

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!

That’s pretty cool and it’s good of you to think about the scenario.

The problem is the bankruptcy court/buyer/ex-spouse/whatever may have a different preference. So you may want to set up something legally binding now when everyone is the same agreement.

Could you also solve this by GPL+Commercial license for those that pay?

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

#352

Post by mandliya »

mfranzs wrote: post #327
bnlxbnlx wrote: post #259

I wonder how this could be connected to some flash card system. I've been using anki for some months now to help me rememer things better (apps on linux, iOS and OSX and syncing via ankiweb). My notes are not linked so far as I have been looking for a solution that allows me keep all my notes in plain markdown files while linking them. I'm syncing the md files across all my devices via a self-hosted rpi-nextcloud and…

Although it's not markdown based, we're building https://www.remnote.io/ for this purpose; it lets you take hierarchical, nonlinear, linked notes and internalize them with spaced repetition.

+1 for remnote! I really love its research based spaced repetition functionality!

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

#353

Post by ericax »

crooked-v wrote: post #343
ericax wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't reply to your post further down, but it seems like space characters aren't allowed by Markdown spec. Apparently you have to convert it to "%20" :(

For deeply nested posts, you have to click on the "X minutes ago" header to get the reply option to show up. It looks like when I add the angle brackets that CommonMark allows to circumvent the spaces thing, some variations still don't work: https://i.imgur.com/nqiQnl3.png For one more note, the obsidian.css thing for styling is deeply unintuitive, because you can't edit it from inside the app: if you make a note nam…

Thank you for the tip!

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

#354

Post by ericax »

dcsan wrote: post #344

This looks really cool, but: Is there a reason this doesn't work with plain markdown links? I have a local working kbase already as a bunch of markdown files. If I use the obsidian markdown importer I guess it will destroy any links in that KB for any viewer or rendered that does NOT support GFM style [[links]]. Perhaps related to how Obsidian uses backlinks? Ideally I could use Obsidian for structuring links / overv…

Plain Markdown links should work just fine in Obsidian, but you might need to convert space characters to "%20" according to Markdown spec, since space is not allowed.

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

#355

Post by roel_v »

Is it possible to do inline video, or is it possible to write a plugin that does it? I have a highly specific note taking application in mind, if you'd like to have a somewhat concrete use case for a specific market and you'd like to talk that over with me, feel free to contact me. (I'm using tiddlywiki now)

I think this is in general a problem with note taking apps - their market is too broad. Not many people want to 'take notes', they want to 'track the research for my book' or 'track references of the papers I write' or 'collect recipes'. It takes an engineer's mind to naturally abstract that into 'note taking'.

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

#356

Post by ericax »

roel_v wrote: post #355

Is it possible to do inline video, or is it possible to write a plugin that does it? I have a highly specific note taking application in mind, if you'd like to have a somewhat concrete use case for a specific market and you'd like to talk that over with me, feel free to contact me. (I'm using tiddlywiki now) I think this is in general a problem with note taking apps - their market is too broad. Not many people want t…

Yes! You can use the embed syntax ![[video.mp4]] to embed videos in Obsidian. The video should show up in preview mode.

I think you would really enjoy our active discord community where a lot of people share and discuss their use cases and specific workflows. https://obsidian.md/community

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

#357

Post by pandatigox »

agambrahma wrote: post #268

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 be…

Ive been trying to get into tinderbox but there is no easy manual to follow. how do you get started with tinderbox?

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

#358

Post by kixiQu »

voxelghost wrote: post #341
kixiQu wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psst, if you end up wanting to do backlinks in context by your notes in Tiddlywiki like Roam does, as shown here... https://i.imgur.com/n9ef25L.png I have how to do that here: https://lesser.occult.institute/an-opinionated-approach-to-t... :)

Dang, my optical nerve retracted and disconnected from the retina, and is now sitting in some dark corner of some bar in the adrenal cortex drinking whisky in pure protest to your H1 styling.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ kids these days can't handle a little 𝕵𝖗𝖆𝖐𝖙𝖚𝖗

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

#359

Post by prostheticvamp »

Counteroffer:

I use Kiwi to create a personal wiki on my phone. It sits in a Dropbox folder I always have open as a project in Sublime. It’s also the folder that my NotePlan app uses - so my todo list, calendar, and wiki are all the same set of markdown files.

It’s super portable (just a pile of markdown docs in a Dropbox folder), does knowledge base management, and ties my knowledge base directly into my todo/project management/time management. And it costs peanuts (kiwi is buy-once; I don’t remember what I paid for NotePlan).

People remember wikis, right? “Interconnected markdown” isn’t some new feature, and sure isn’t worth a monthly subscription fee.

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

#360

Post by Thorentis »

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.

Joplin is the state of the art in terms of open source note taking in my opinion. It too uses Markdown, and supports a whole heap of other features on top of it. But it's been around for a long time, has mobile apps, cloud backups, the lot - and is all open source on Github.
Post reply on HN