I've tried Obsidian, but the data structure is far inferior to Roam Research and not worth wasting my time with it. With Roam I know that my notes are building a rich forest of hierarchies and networks that will be more useful in the future.
Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
101–110 of 120 posts
Re: Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but I feel desperately uncomfortable tying my notes to a piece of proprietary software Obsidian is proprietary, but Markdown isn’t. And there will always be Markdown personal wikis. I guarantee it. > What about if I want to style a real PDF in Asciidoc? Pandoc can export MD to PDF, HTML, .doc, anything. And you can style with CSS. But once you add spreadsheets and sketches into the mix, there’s basically no way aro…
What about org-mode?
I recently moved from Workflowy to org-mode after being recommended by someone here and it has been a fantastic experience. Henrik's Doom Emacs distribution has really made the transition easy with its amazing out-of-the-box usability.
There is one minor feature from Workflowy that I miss though, which is is the ability to "zoom" into a headline. You can narrow subtrees, but its level won't be adjusted. I tried to use some horizontal scroll hackery but couldn't get it to play well when you're switching buffers. I'm not sure how to save those narrowed buffers across sessions either.
But in any case I definitely will stay with org-mode for quite a long time, it truly is a powerful piece of software.
Re: Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
#103I'm a mathematician who scripts everything I can. I've been thinking about mind-mapping for decades.
My breaking point: I have DropBox folders for 1770 math papers, that I periodically read on computers and tablets. The significance of most of these papers is lost to me. I want to be able to browse this collection in a "supermarket shelf" topology. Most of creatitivity is not planned; planning tends to stifle creativity. Rather, a frenetic mind is fortunate enough, after months of fruitless wanderings, to encounter the right set of ideas in close enough proximity to notice. For example, a PCB protoboard has the correct 0.1" spacing to guide a router jig for making a pasta guitar. Who knew?!
Ideally one traverses a private web site with links to every asset. The associations need to be both manual and automated, logical and accidental. For example, time of creation or visits is critical data for determining proximity. Looking at each PDF in plain text to attempt to infer proximity would be a great application of deep learning tools, leveraging existing proximities as training data.
On a larger scale I have repeatedly urged the American Mathemetical Society to open up its MathSciNet cash cow to be a premier playground for machine learning. Unlike computer science, mathematics does have a detailed index of all published research, through the efforts of many volunteer reviewers. However, math is crippled by many archaic beliefs: That ideas are organized by fields such as number theory, and there is a single global worldview specifying this organization. That the value of MathSciNet is its hand-curated organization. I believe that we're crippling a generation of mathematical progress by not allowing mathematics to be at the forefront of mind mapping efforts, with many competing voices/tools describing its organization and facilitating idea browsing. Autocomplete is still at the "pager" stage of development, with "smart phones" yet to come. We could all benefit from the cloud autocompleting each of our mind-maps. Mathematics is a relatively small, constrained domain where shared mind-mapping and autocomplete could first flourish.
I've separately used a text file as scratch paper many days for the last fifteen years, saving every file. I can retrieve much useful information through full text search. I am reminded however of Don Knuth's adage "Premature optimization is the root of all evil," and the smaller optimization problem of how to best organize physical receipts. Excessive organization is wasted effort and a form of neurosis. I scan lots of documents but not every receipt; they all go in boxes dated by quarter, vacuum packed after a year. When I really need a receipt I can find it, but the effort to file has been properly balanced with the effort to retrieve. Same with text files; full text search works. It would be a mistake for me to put more effort into the structure of these files. Rather, through scripts and AI tools, I can evolve an indexing exoskeleton around these existing unstructured raw materials.
I need mind-mapping to manage assets, not to create a private web site of my thoughts. And there cannot be a user/programmer dichotomy; we each need to script additional associations into our mind maps. That belongs in exoskeleton, not cluttering up primary text.
Re: Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
#104I just want a simple kanban board with dependency graph. Like Trello but with dependencies.
I gather you mean an actual dependency graph, since that's what you said. :) Most task software with dependencies don't support graph data structures.
I regularly use Flying Logic for this sort of thing - I make a huge dependency graph, and then I create a collapsible group that encompasses the stuff that is active. The part of the graph that is "below" that window is stuff that is already done, and the stuff that is "above" that window is stuff that can't be started until I do stuff in the active window.
("below" and "above" can be reoriented to "left" and "right" if you prefer)
Re: Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
#105After having used Bear, Notable, and Atom + plugins, I’m realizing I don’t really want an app to manage my notes. I just want the notes, plus a tool to traverse them that’s got a bit more beef to it than Finder.app. I’d like to use a more powerful app like the one promoted here, but I feel desperately uncomfortable tying my notes [in] to a piece of proprietary software . I feel like that was a mistake I made already,…
there are open source options for creating markdown wikis, that support (almost?) all platforms, and filesystem-storage as well.
I'm a happy user of Boostnote.
Re: Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
#106I've tried Obsidian, but the data structure is far inferior to Roam Research and not worth wasting my time with it. With Roam I know that my notes are building a rich forest of hierarchies and networks that will be more useful in the future.
Did you read the linked article? Sounds like some people are having some issues with stability of Roam. It's one of the things first talked about in the article.
Re: Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
#107Does anyone have a working org-mode setup with back-links?
Not me, but this guy[1] seems to have a pretty interesting setup using backlinks with Org. Other than that, org-roam[2] is becoming popular nowadays.
[1]: https://karl-voit.at/2020/07/22/org-super-links [2]: https://www.orgroam.com/
Re: Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The learning curve and attitude of the old guard are what pushed me away from org mode. I loved the structure and the promise of being able to code/adapt workflows.. and being able to merge config and comments (literate programming, is it?) to document the few changes I managed to make. But learning Emacs around it, especially on a Windows system just isn't worth it :/
FWIW, there's a VS code extension. I haven't used it yet personally but I'd like to try it out eventually. I use vim-orgmode, otherwise, and it's been great. I should note that I've never used the original org-mode in emacs so I'm not sure if it's missing features or behaves differently, etc...
I used Org for about 8 months last year, while I was testing out Spacemacs and Doom Emacs.
My experience was that the Org-mode in Emacs was great. Especially how you could capture notes with backlinks from any Emacs context, and the Agenda view it generates. I went all-in on the ecosystem and wrote my mail in mu4e, for instance, which can integrate with Org-mode for writing HTML mail. Being able to add inline LaTeX equations and syntax-highlighted code snippets to such emails was gold. Having easily executable script snippets embedded in sysadmin notes was useful as well.
As for other implementations of it — including vim-orgmode and every mobile app I tried — too many features were lacking or broken for it to be useful to me. In the end, I ended up going back to MarkDown when I left Emacs. The transition was quite painful; Pandoc helped a lot, but many things in my notes just broke during conversion, so I ended up just trashing most of my notes and spending an evening manually fixing the important ones.
While Org is free and open source software, and it’s often repeated that “it’s just plain text”... I’d like to caution others that if you really use the features it has to offer, you’ll be locked into it just like with most proprietary formats. If you’re not completely sure you’ll use Emacs for the rest of your days, MarkDown is a safer option for a knowledge base you wish to keep over time.
Re: Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
#109After having used Bear, Notable, and Atom + plugins, I’m realizing I don’t really want an app to manage my notes. I just want the notes, plus a tool to traverse them that’s got a bit more beef to it than Finder.app. I’d like to use a more powerful app like the one promoted here, but I feel desperately uncomfortable tying my notes [in] to a piece of proprietary software . I feel like that was a mistake I made already,…
I use zim-wiki for my notes. Open-source and stores notes in text organised by folders. I like markdown but actually prefer the simple wiki syntax it uses. If they need to create a PDF I use pandoc and if I need to move a table to a spreadsheet I just copy the text and use the text to columns from delimiter feature. Not sure if this help you or not.
Zim’s main drawback in these days is that it doesn’t have its own mobile app, and since it’s not based on MarkDown, you can’t use any existing MarkDown mobile apps with it.
Re: Using Obsidian to manage goals, tasks, notes, and software dev knowledge base
#110For me, I'm unwilling to invest time in an app thats not open source. Other key things for me would be a web gui, mobile gui, self hosted and easily backed up. Trilium notes is the best thing I have found so far.
I suppose “self hosted” and “easily backed up” works fine since Obsidian is supposed to work on local MarkDown files which you can store and backup in any way you want.
Not sure why you’d need a WebGUI since the app appears to be cross-platform; personally, I tend to view web interfaces more as a last resort when there is no native app available. I’m not sure a WebGUI makes sense either if you’re storing your data in a local folder.
As far as I know, they don’t have a companion mobile app though, and that’s a deal-breaker for me too.