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Obsidian Bases

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Re: Obsidian Bases

#121

Post by profsummergig »

raviisoccupied wrote: post #34

I’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.

Off topic, but I discovered this recently:

http://tangentnotes.com/

Similar to Obsidian, but offers good code syntax highlighting in markdown files.

I found it useful for reading code in markdown.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#122

Post by kid64 »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #108
raviisoccupied wrote: post #34

I’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 br…

Breakage is the best-case scenario. Mass data exfiltration is the bigger concern. The community plugin system is both an unacceptable security risk, and a necessary part of achieving even a baseline level of usability. Imagine the scale of theft that must already have taken place.. the targets may never even know. The fact that Obsidian falsely claims to audit this cesspool is hilarious.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#123

Post by dmje »

raviisoccupied wrote: post #34

I’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.

Just use it how you want to use it. For me, a bit of structure is enough - too much and it becomes unwieldy. But don’t let anyone tell you it’ll either save your life or become your “second brain”, that’s all bullshit. Just stick with no plugins or a small and solid set of ones you love. For me probably the only absolutely critical plugin is omnisearch, but YMWV.

My other advice is that it’s fine to boot up new vaults for other things. I’ve got two main vaults - a sort of work KB and a journal. But then I’ve got a bunch of smaller ones - songs I’m writing, courses I’m making, writing. Don’t be told that you’ve got to get some kind of universal thing that does everything. This is also b/s and often pedalled by the productivity wonks.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#124

Post by pqs »

UltraSane wrote: post #114
cloud_watching wrote: post #100

Earlier 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

I really hate that article. Taskwarrior is infinitely better than a txt file. A txt file is the worst possible option for task management.

Now I'm using Emacs Howm for task management. It is based on text files and it is great. Org-mode is also great.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#125

Post by dustincoates »

dimitri-vs wrote: post #71
raviisoccupied wrote: post #34

I’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…

While I agree that the zettle-nerds take it way too far, I disagree with this:

> Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.

I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my " Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).

Re: Obsidian Bases

#126

Post by raybb »

safety1st wrote: post #119
raybb wrote: post #42

For those curious, this feature is just now publicly launching and before it was only available to people who paid for early access. The Reddit thread has some good discussion about the feature https://old.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1mtxh52/obsidia...

Is there a good AI plugin for Obsidian yet?

There are plenty of AI plugins. I guess "good" just depends what your use case is. Let us know if you find one that works well though.

https://obsidian.md/plugins?search=openai

Re: Obsidian Bases

#127

Post by tietjens »

profsummergig wrote: post #121
raviisoccupied wrote: post #34

I’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.

Off topic, but I discovered this recently: http://tangentnotes.com/ Similar to Obsidian, but offers good code syntax highlighting in markdown files. I found it useful for reading code in markdown.

You can also create a code block in markdown and then write the language type at the top. This also creates highlighting.

‘’’go {your code} ‘’’

Re: Obsidian Bases

#128

Post by matwood »

cloud_watching wrote: post #100
muppetman wrote: post #96

Earlier 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

I know it’s not the best place to end up, but I always end up back on Apple Notes. It’s has enough features, syncs across my devices, and is simple to use.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#130

Post by leokennis »

blubber wrote: post #129

This one-file-one-record approach to databases somehow makes me feel strange.

Notion does the same; every database entry is a separate note/page. As someone working with databases often it “freaked me out”. Over time I’ve learned to accept it…
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