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A structured note-taking app for personal use

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Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#51

Post by Brajeshwar »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #48
bayindirh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logseq is "Everything plus the kitchen sink" when compared to Obsidian out of the box. For me, I already have a daily planning and project management tool, and it's called Pagico. What I needed is a note taking application. Simple, down to earth, knowledge base. A successor to Zim wiki, I may say. That thing is Obsidian. I tried to resist to moving it for so long because it's closed source, but it creates value and e…

In which way does Obsidian "create value and extract structure and knowledge from your Markdown files"? I tried it a few months ago because of all the hype, and from a quick try I didn't see anything useful that my current choice (Joplin) didn't have, but from what you are saying, maybe I didn't try for long enough? I like Joplin, one of its strong points being that it's open source, but I'd be willing to switch if a…

I like Obsidian on the Desktop and not much on the phone where I like iA Writer. As I manage the files and synced, I can use anything to access the files. I can use iA Writer on the Mobile and still access my files, while I edit that on Obsidian on the Desktop. Sometimes, I just open the whole folder in Sublime Text and start editing it or use Draw/Excalidraw to work on something. Obsidian being the primary but I'm not limited.

My reasoning is to approach contents as data-first with tools on the top. Obsidian happens to be one such brilliant tool for now.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#52

Post by laurent123456 »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #33
burnished wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems an odd take given the content of the discussion: https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/why-im-leaving-joplin-for-... Especially since it looks like a solution via plugin was identified? Thanks for bringing it up though, I went for spicy programmer drama but instead found a somewhat interesting and incredibly polite disagreement. I am curious about what happened that they have such a solid opinion about accepta…

>incredibly polite disagreement Not sure I agree. Here's one comment by the developer (laurent): "Ok, there's so much wrong in what you write about that it's hard to know where to start. I guess it would help if you had a clue about what you're talking about." https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/why-im-leaving-joplin-for-...

I'm not proud of that answer but to be fair there are also more balanced views in this thread. It's also an old thread and some of what's in there is no longer relevant. For example someone recently created a prototype of the app that saves the notes to disk, and although we can't merge his work as it is, we plan to investigate and see whether it can be somehow integrated.

It's one of these features that, all things being equal, we'd rather have than not have, but it's obviously not trivial to add it when the app wasn't originally designed for it.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#54

Post by jddj »

Vingdoloras wrote: post #50
vunderba wrote: post #21

Nice going. I've gone through quite the list of note taking tools from a bunch of unorganized text files, to Microsoft OneNote, to Evernote before it became a total pile of molten garbage, Logseq, and finally settled on Obsidian. There's a healthy ecosystem of plug-ins, searching is highly performant, all of my files are just structured in folders as markdown files so there's zero vendor lock-in, has a very good mobi…

How does Obsidian's text editing experience compare to VSCode? I'm using VSC for everything at the moment, which includes a workspace roughly structured into GTD categories via subfolders, filled with markdown documents. The only thing that keeps me curious about Obsidian is the note linking/network visualization and features related to that. But I'm so used to having dev tool levels of text editing available in VSC…

Same here, but other side of the chasm.

I use logseq for note keeping but I just want the text editing experience of vs code.

I'm not sure why they all roll their own editor. Can't it be a plugin?

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#56

Post by Der_Einzige »

The best note taking app ever made by far is called verbatim and was built originally for the competitive debate community. It’s so good that people who watched me use it in college were jealous at the power it enables within Microsoft word for structured notes.

https://paperlessdebate.com/verbatim/

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#57

Post by atoav »

Sakos wrote: post #39
atoav wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I do that? I use only apps that use text files anyways. I am pretty confident I will be able to open them in 30 years.

I even have files from 20+ years ago that I can open just fine, including notes. If you use something proprietary, then yeah, it might be difficult. But that doesn't stop us from asking whether something we're interested in using now uses data formats that would be easily readable in 20-30 years.

Exactly my point, then.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#58

Post by burnished »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #33
burnished wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems an odd take given the content of the discussion: https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/why-im-leaving-joplin-for-... Especially since it looks like a solution via plugin was identified? Thanks for bringing it up though, I went for spicy programmer drama but instead found a somewhat interesting and incredibly polite disagreement. I am curious about what happened that they have such a solid opinion about accepta…

>incredibly polite disagreement Not sure I agree. Here's one comment by the developer (laurent): "Ok, there's so much wrong in what you write about that it's hard to know where to start. I guess it would help if you had a clue about what you're talking about." https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/why-im-leaving-joplin-for-...

Sure - but it is a departure in tone and sandwiched by more normal and productive comments (from that dev). It isnt ideal but it is also a pretty normal and minor human mistake (growing frustrated and then short to be specific).

And the previous comments were claiming that this project's data was 'proprietary' and not 'open' and the situation was inexcusable, basically because they assumed a database was this big scary thing (as opposed to an open book). That is a frustrating experience, and yeah maybe indicates that the person telling you how to write software doesn't know what they are talking about (for the folks following along at home, those frivolous cries of foul play were distracting from the real need they had for plain text over a database, someone else describes it quite succinctly a little later)

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#59

Post by bayindirh »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #48
bayindirh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Logseq is "Everything plus the kitchen sink" when compared to Obsidian out of the box. For me, I already have a daily planning and project management tool, and it's called Pagico. What I needed is a note taking application. Simple, down to earth, knowledge base. A successor to Zim wiki, I may say. That thing is Obsidian. I tried to resist to moving it for so long because it's closed source, but it creates value and e…

In which way does Obsidian "create value and extract structure and knowledge from your Markdown files"? I tried it a few months ago because of all the hype, and from a quick try I didn't see anything useful that my current choice (Joplin) didn't have, but from what you are saying, maybe I didn't try for long enough? I like Joplin, one of its strong points being that it's open source, but I'd be willing to switch if a…

> In which way does Obsidian "create value and extract structure and knowledge from your Markdown files"?

It's search is extremely fast, plus with a bit of metadata, you can pack tons of information into a standard markdown file.

Moreover, when you start to add more and more knowledge, you start to connect notes to each other, which creates a Zettelkasten-like connected notes web. I write gigantic notes generally, but even they have connections, and again the searching for linking is so instant, you can write at the speed of thought.

I have a simple tree note organization scheme, and Obsidian can handle it extremely well, plus files are open on the filesystem. I can unleash another tool on top of that file tree, if I want to edit or analyze them.

I still use Evernote for some personal notes, and Joplin is just the same thing, and its limitations on file/note organization is very limiting for my needs.

Lastly, Obsidian vaults are completely isolated from each other, so the vault which I manage my small digital garden is completely isolated from my work vault. They are on different places, sycned differently, can have different plugins, etc. This is a very nice feature.

TL;DR: Obsidian is a pure "knowledge/documentation" management tool and allows for creation at the speed of thought. It's unobtrusive and Markdown metadata is extremely powerful. Also leveraging internote-connections supercharges Obsidian.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#60

Post by vrnvu »

account-5 wrote: post #53

Unless I'm missing something obviously, quite likely, I can't see how the notes are structured. Screenshots would be nice. Why would I use this over sonething like zim-wiki? Admittedly there is no mobile client but in a pinch I use markor for that.

If you visit the website, there is a demo: https://www.penx.io/
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