I've been using the 'DB Folder' and 'Dataview' plugins, I'll definitely look into this new option. Does it work with Dataview at all?
Obsidian Bases
101–110 of 259 posts
Re: Obsidian Bases
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them. Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the c…
Obsidian is amazing because it is a notepad with pretty colors and the graph that gets everyone's attention. The graph is often the most overhyped and underused thing there. It looks complicated and that's the selling point of all that ecosystem around productivity systems and all that. The appearance of deep complexity and work. I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134
It's _also_ a notepad that runs on android and synchronises mostly successfully with machines elsewhere. I'm ignoring the plugins entirely but getting lots of use out of the text synchronisation across multiple machines.
Re: Obsidian Bases
#103I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it. For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
It's not you, it's the productivity influencers making you think it's "supposed to be" more than what it is: a nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files. I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing). Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative li…
> nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files
wow okay, I kept thinking that there must be more to it, why does it only list my files that I can already see in my filetree on the left, like what's the point? I was expecting to see something like what Atlassian has in Confluence (which was also far more intuitive to create btw) https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a...
Re: Obsidian Bases
#104I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it. For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
I was kinda similar when I first started using it. I watched heaps of videos and had so many plugins installed but I was never really sure if I was doing it "right". Then one day I got annoyed and uninstalled every plugin and just went back to basics. I only reach for plugins when I feel something is missing, but honestly the only plugins I use are Style Settings which let's me customize the theme a bit more and Calendar so I can have... well... a calendar.
I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!
Re: Obsidian Bases
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rows are individual Markdown files and the columns are YAML frontmatter properties in those files. There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension. The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to…
Hmm... so I can't use this to render and filter a table with 10k rows without having 10k markdown files? If I understand correctly, the intention seems to be "curated list of links" which the user can sort, filter, etc when viewing. I guess that's cool, if you use Obsidian lots and have many notes/links - but when I clicked the article and saw the table I was hoping for a "dataframe" plugin for .md (much like how mer…
If you have 10k rows this isn’t for you, but 99% of use cases have less than 100 rows.
For example, book list, movie list, customer list, invoice list, asset register, key register… once you hit a certain point, obsidian probably isn’t the right tool anymore. But no reason to go to the monthly SaaS “right tool” at the POC stage.
Obsidian is the pre-step for a larger database: cheap, fast to customise, easy to backup (git), self supported. It’s probably not going to run a company, but it will suit an individual or small startup.
And 99.99% of discussions about scaling are premature optimisation (cit needed). A lot of people spend more time thinking about scaling then entering their data, which probably means the data is smaller than they think! ha
Re: Obsidian Bases
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Obsidian is amazing because it is a notepad with pretty colors and the graph that gets everyone's attention. The graph is often the most overhyped and underused thing there. It looks complicated and that's the selling point of all that ecosystem around productivity systems and all that. The appearance of deep complexity and work. I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134
It's _also_ a notepad that runs on android and synchronises mostly successfully with machines elsewhere. I'm ignoring the plugins entirely but getting lots of use out of the text synchronisation across multiple machines.
This is one thing I love about it too, Obsidian Sync is very well done and great for moving text files around the place easily.
Re: Obsidian Bases
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I highly recommend Siyuan as an alternative, it has many the best features from obsidian plugins included by default
Dev has a history of installing cryptominers in his previous projects and rootkitting people into starring and forking his projects. https://www.v2ex.com/t/534800
I think the difference here is that Siyuan is fully open source, which means you have more confidence here.
Thanks for bringing this history up, and I think everyone should be careful when downloading a new version for this product, or better build by themselves after checking out the recents commits with some AI tools.
Re: Obsidian Bases
#108I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it. For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
You’re not the only one. I invested months on Obsidian before walking away and returning to OneNote. It’s advertised as a ‘second brain’ but at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer. You can’t even manually sort notes and folders. Directory Opus can do that and more.
Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.
Re: Obsidian Bases
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's _also_ a notepad that runs on android and synchronises mostly successfully with machines elsewhere. I'm ignoring the plugins entirely but getting lots of use out of the text synchronisation across multiple machines.
This is one thing I love about it too, Obsidian Sync is very well done and great for moving text files around the place easily.
Obsidian Sync is a really solid (and complementary) product.
Re: Obsidian Bases
#110How does it compare to the table view of a Logseq query? Is UI the main added value? Is it possible to build a base of content blocks rather than notes?