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Introduction to Obsidian

bryanhogan.com

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Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#101

Post by ChadMoran »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #86
ChadMoran wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of people who build elaborate Notion "second brains" that serve no purpose other than to develop/demo them.

On the other end of the spectrum you have me, who’s been only vaguely organising my files for years. I am currently collecting my data from across different hard drives I have and running hashdeep as a first step to identify duplicate files. Even though I’m not organising the files themselves well, I do maintain backups. Both in the form of ones that are replicated ZFS snapshots, but also files that I’ve manually cop…

I have an inbox/ folder and a daily/ folder.

Inbox is where all new docs go to, I just use #tags and file references.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#102

Post by pdpi »

One specific bit of advice in there that I disagree with is keeping just one vault. Rather, I find that having one vault per topic/project is the right approach.

The reason for having multiple vaults is simple: I find that the usability of the one big über-vault drops off sharply if you're not disciplined in maintaining organisation, and a consistent workflow, and, if you're storing a bunch of disparate things in a single vault, an organisation/workflow that's universal enough to encompass everything rapidly becomes a pain in the arse to maintain. Inversely, topic-specific vaults tend to rapidly develop their own bespoke structures and workflows that match the topic closely and are very natural to work in.

For example, I have a large vault dedicated to Blue Prince (the game). As in several hundred megs worth of screenshots, over a hundred individual .md files (most of which are almost empty, but their existence is helpful in itself), folder structure that groups information on a per-puzzle basis, and it features pervasive use of tags to encode game features)

Another vault is a cookbook. I don't cook by recipe all that often, so that one mostly has reference tables for cooking times/temps for different foods in different appliances (I don't cook pearl barley often enough to remember how much liquid to use and what rice cooker programme to set).

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#104

Post by BrokenCogs »

iammjm wrote: post #18

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly i…

Relevant skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZK8Z8hulFg

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#105

Post by chrisweekly »

ahmadyan wrote: post #94

A few months ago, i took the bullet and migrated my notes from Notion to .md files. This was the second time i migrated my notes (last time from Evernote to Notion), and this time it was a lot easier. Kudos to the Notion team for making export so easy. Just downloaded the notes, then told Claude to organize and remove duplicate or index mds (Notion keeps a lot of random indexes) and clean up and within 30mins i had a…

Regarding your visual editor experience, be sure your Obsidian settings use both "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode", which combination makes for fantastic WYSIWYG note-taking.

As for multi-user, the Relay plugin is amazing.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#107

Post by chrisweekly »

echelon wrote: post #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 you…

The Relay plugin is fantastic for multiplayer and/or nesting a "work" vault in a parent "personal" vault.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#108

Post by chrisweekly »

raincole wrote: post #15
echelon wrote: post #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 you…

For me, it's a Wolfram Engine plugin. My notes now scatter between Obsidian vault and Wolfram notebooks. It would be nice if I can unify them. But I understand that my use case is niche and I certainly don't want the Obsidian officially bloats itself into such feature creating.

Obsidian's plugin architecture is a real strength, ideal for niches like that w/out bloat for the core product.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#109

Post by chrisweekly »

on_the_train wrote: post #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

Relay plugin lets you manage permissions at a granular folder level instead of all-or-nothing vault level.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#110

Post by SilentM68 »

Thank you for this. I am one of those that find Obsidian a mystery but now wish to learn to be able to reproduce How to build a Karpathy-Style AI Wiki in Obsidian Without Writing Code as mentioned here: https://x.com/KanikaBK/status/2042973243888554122 Hopefully this will help me with the Obsidian-based AI Wiki
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