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Introduction to Obsidian

bryanhogan.com

1–10 of 160 posts

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#2
> Don’t fall for FOMO marketing or feel anxious. Keep it simple. Obsidian should help you work on other things.

Great advice, I tried to get into Obsidian a few weeks ago and could immediately feel myself getting pulled into the "Workflow Optimization Spiral". I love nothing more than fruitlessly tooling with workflow stuff, in place of actually, you know, working. I kind of just decided to set it aside, rather than parse through exactly which parts would be actually helpful for stuff I needed that day. Really appreciate this blog post to help me revisit the app from a more practical starting place.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#3
I'm just so bummed that multiple vaults are pretty much unusable. I can't sync my sensitive work notes. But I want to sync general programming notes between work and other PCs. But multiple vaults hardly work. The just open in a new window.

Other than that, I love so many things about the program. Just linking and graphs are weird and strangely overrated. Search and tags still rules over everything imo

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#4

I'm just so bummed that multiple vaults are pretty much unusable. I can't sync my sensitive work notes. But I want to sync general programming notes between work and other PCs. But multiple vaults hardly work. The just open in a new window. Other than that, I love so many things about the program. Just linking and graphs are weird and strangely overrated. Search and tags still rules over everything imo

The Raycast Obsidian plugin makes vaults pretty easy for me. Cmd+Space > "Open Vault" and then pick which one you want. You'll still have a window per vault but it makes it really fast to get to where you want.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#6
post #2

> Don’t fall for FOMO marketing or feel anxious. Keep it simple. Obsidian should help you work on other things. Great advice, I tried to get into Obsidian a few weeks ago and could immediately feel myself getting pulled into the "Workflow Optimization Spiral". I love nothing more than fruitlessly tooling with workflow stuff, in place of actually, you know, working. I kind of just decided to set it aside, rather than…

The first time I got into Emacs and vim I also spent way too much time on the editor customization spiral. Then in 2015 I just picked and settled on Spacemacs while strictly limiting how much time I spend on customizing my editor. I’ve had three jobs since then and I brought basically the same editor config to all three jobs.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#7
I have tried many times to migrate to Obsidian and DataView from OrgMode, but I just can't get there.

Obsidian is appealing because it's available on iOS, but the whole approach ended up (for me) being more fiddly and less effective (again for me) than orgmode.

OTOH & to be fair, I've been using Org for a really long time.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#8

I'm just so bummed that multiple vaults are pretty much unusable. I can't sync my sensitive work notes. But I want to sync general programming notes between work and other PCs. But multiple vaults hardly work. The just open in a new window. Other than that, I love so many things about the program. Just linking and graphs are weird and strangely overrated. Search and tags still rules over everything imo

I think separate vaults being in different window is probably intentional behavior to clearly show that they're separate vaults, not something that needs to be fixed.

If you want to sync only some of the things from a single vault and not other things, can't you just use different top-level folders? Have a "to-sync" folder and a "do-not-sync" folder, and only sync the to-sync one. I'm not sure if that's possible using Obsidian's paid sync, but it should be possible with other sync options.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#9
Three asks for Obsidian to make it my #1 tool (and I mean #1 tool):

- First-class multi-vault support. It's difficult to keep personal / business / team separate. I want to keep shared notes for my team, but it's really hard.

- First-class git support. The git plugin is dangerous and will overwrite changes from other devices. The mobile git plugin (which requires hacks to even use) is deadly bad with blowing away your entire git history. Do not use. Obsidian sync is cool and good and all, but I want git. And the existing git isn't just bad, it's deleterious.

- Spreadsheets. Literally just free-form tabular data would work too. Their "bases" thing isn't it. I just need to be able to sort data and keep it versioned. Google Sheets is a huge daily use product - if I had the same function in Obsidian, Gsuite would be dead to me.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#10
The only thing I use openclaw for is managing my obsidian vault. The flow is a series of crons that prompt me to fill out daily files and update projects as they progress. I also use it for calorie tracking and basic daily journaling. This is simple, secure, and very cheap 'life coaching.'
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