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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

#121

Post by bayindirh »

sciurus wrote: post #116
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 short, Logseq feels too big, feels too hard to start with, and demands too much at the first impression. If failed to get me, and I failed to get it. This is interesting, because it wasn't my experience at all. I migrated from Roam to Logseq after I realized I didn't use enough of the fancier features to justify the price. Basically I open Logseq, take notes in my daily journal, and tag blocks so that I can easi…

I think, because the reason is what we want from our tools is different. I already use a much sophisticated tool for my tasks, and project planning (Pagico), and what I want is a bona fide desktop wiki which I want to store my technical research and howto docs (and share them in my digital garden).

This is what Obsidian is. If I wanted something to organize my tasks and other things, I'd take a much different route.

What I'm aiming to get is akin to these: [0] & [1]

[0]: https://nick-black.com/dankwiki/index.php/Hack_on

[1]: https://notes.joschua.io/

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#122

Post by filchermcurr »

uxp8u61q wrote: post #63
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.

My point is that I sincerely doubt that these notes will have any usefulness in 30 years.

Situational, I suppose. I still have an active project that's not quite 30 years old (it's mid-20's) that I reference old notes for all the time.

Actually... I reference a lot of notes from at least 20 years ago. There is a lot that doesn't change, you forget, and is an instantaneous search away. I don't foresee this changing in the interim 10 years.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#123

Post by Sander3Utile »

bayindirh wrote: post #121
sciurus wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In short, Logseq feels too big, feels too hard to start with, and demands too much at the first impression. If failed to get me, and I failed to get it. This is interesting, because it wasn't my experience at all. I migrated from Roam to Logseq after I realized I didn't use enough of the fancier features to justify the price. Basically I open Logseq, take notes in my daily journal, and tag blocks so that I can easi…

I think, because the reason is what we want from our tools is different. I already use a much sophisticated tool for my tasks, and project planning (Pagico), and what I want is a bona fide desktop wiki which I want to store my technical research and howto docs (and share them in my digital garden). This is what Obsidian is. If I wanted something to organize my tasks and other things, I'd take a much different route.…

Hey I follow that first guy on Goodreads. Good taste in book he has.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#124

Post by Ringz »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #100
Ringz wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won a lot and didn't lose anything. Obsidian plus a few plugins beats Joplin on every level. And I can edit all notes without redundancy by exporting from a Joplin database with nvim, iA Writer, find, grep, cat and millions of other tools.

> Obsidian plus a few plugins beats Joplin on every level. Not really. Obsidian has its shares of problems too, and most of them originate from using Markdown. Markdown is a freeform text-format, and works very well for writing text, but it really sucks for data and structured content. Most plugins and features in that area are very brittle and overspecialized, working only well enough in their specific use case. And…

> Not really. Obsidian has its shares of problems too, and most of them originate from using Markdown.

Aha. Which problems do you mean?

> Markdown is a freeform text-format, and works very well for writing text, but it really sucks for data and structured content.

Joplin is using md to. And if Joplin does a good job on "data" and "structured content" (whatever you mean by that) by separating that in their DB, it's a big NO for me since it's a closed silo.

This: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview works so wonderful for me, and it never breaks anything in my simple md files.

> Most plugins and features in that area are very brittle and overspecialized, working only well enough in their specific use case.

Aha. I don't think so. Which authority says that? And even if It's like that, my markdown files would survive everything, since they are a) in git. https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git and b) easy to fix since it's a text file. Gosh!

> And gosh, Obsidian has really a huge amount of plugins for data-handling.

And gosh, this is a good thing!

> At some point, it was so bad that there were multiple competing task-plugins which broke each other just because they had different formatting for dates.

Installing multiple task plugins shows that something is "broke" on the user side. It's not the fault of Markdown or Obsidian.

Just have a look on: https://github.com/ivan-lednev/obsidian-day-planner but you dont need a fancy task plugin like this, if you know your way around https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview or https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks

Since the Ecosystem around Obsidian and pure Markdown, most of the time I stay in my browser https://github.com/deathau/markdownload and nvim https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#125

Post by Ringz »

rubslopes wrote: post #115
PurpleRamen wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obsidian plus a few plugins beats Joplin on every level. Not really. Obsidian has its shares of problems too, and most of them originate from using Markdown. Markdown is a freeform text-format, and works very well for writing text, but it really sucks for data and structured content. Most plugins and features in that area are very brittle and overspecialized, working only well enough in their specific use case. And…

> And gosh, Obsidian has really a huge amount of plugins for data-handling. At some point, it was so bad that there were multiple competing task-plugins which broke each other just because they had different formatting for dates. Depends on how you see it. I think it's great that they have a free market of open-sourced plug-ins that you can donate to. I'm actually impressed of how rarely they break each other.

Agree! See my next comment.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#126

Post by mejutoco »

Aicy wrote: post #120
bradley13 wrote: post #118

I look at these apps occasionally, and I've even tried a few of them. In the end, I find them to just be overkill. Give me a simple text editor, and I put the text files where the information belongs. Using fancy apps, where you can do formatting, place links, etc? I spend too much time futzing with all that stuff and less time actually getting stuff done.

I spent lots of time with notion and obsidian and this is what I came to as well. What I do now is have markdown files, and use the OS folder system for organising. I then use OneDrive for syncing - this works perfectly fine between MacOS and Windows, and for both I use Visual Studio Code for editing. For android I use an app called FolderSync to sync and TMarkor for editing. Has been working perfectly for over a yea…

Obsidian also uses markdown files, so you could have stayed with it and backup the folders normally, if you do not want to pay for the syncing.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#127

Post by stack_underflow »

Aicy wrote: post #120
bradley13 wrote: post #118

I look at these apps occasionally, and I've even tried a few of them. In the end, I find them to just be overkill. Give me a simple text editor, and I put the text files where the information belongs. Using fancy apps, where you can do formatting, place links, etc? I spend too much time futzing with all that stuff and less time actually getting stuff done.

I spent lots of time with notion and obsidian and this is what I came to as well. What I do now is have markdown files, and use the OS folder system for organising. I then use OneDrive for syncing - this works perfectly fine between MacOS and Windows, and for both I use Visual Studio Code for editing. For android I use an app called FolderSync to sync and TMarkor for editing. Has been working perfectly for over a yea…

Just curious, any reason you're using TMarkor instead of Markor? (https://github.com/gsantner/markor/ , https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.gsantner.m...)

Only asking since this was also the editor I ended up settling on in Android, but it seems like TMarkor is just a repackaging of Markor without any references to its forked(?) source.

My requirement was that the editor had to be open source so that I could audit the repo and compile the APK from source, as well as potentially fork it for personal modifications if needed.

Re: A structured note-taking app for personal use

#128

Post by canoebuilder »

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…

Are you(or anybody) using the Obsidian iOS mobile app with git for sync/versioning? Is that possible?
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