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Introduction to Obsidian

bryanhogan.com

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Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#111

Post by on_the_train »

kepano wrote: post #11
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

What do you mean by "multiple vaults hardly work"? If it helps Obsidian has a newish command called "Change vault..." that switches vaults without opening a new window.

But I don't want to change vaults, I want to work in both. I want to search for something and get results from all vaults. Or rather: I want to select which folders to sync - that would effectively be the same for me.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#112

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

ChadMoran wrote: post #67
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…

I've embraced radical simplicity with Obsidian. I have an inbox folder that is where all new docs go. Then daily notes. That's it. I tag lines with #thething #theotherthing. Tagging acts as the organization, lowers the barrier of entry and keeps things discoverable.

Indented lines don't inherit tags, right?

I use logseq but Obsidian seems way more widespread, but I am struggling to give up tag inheritance

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#113

Post by realityfactchex »

chrisweekly wrote: post #105
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.

> "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode"

Are you somehow showing raw markdown source text and also rendered markdown in Obsidian side by side? That would sound awesome.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#114

Post by poglet »

realityfactchex wrote: post #113
chrisweekly wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode" Are you somehow showing raw markdown source text and also rendered markdown in Obsidian side by side? That would sound awesome.

You can ctrl click the little book icon in the top right to show both modes side by side.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#115

Post by poglet »

quibono wrote: post #58
highphive wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For folks interested, Obsidian also has a free sync option that just uses your cloud drive, you just have to set it up yourself. It's pretty simple. Just get Google Drive Desktop to mount your Google Drive to your filesystem, then point obsidian to work within that mounted directory.

Google Drive Desktop will only help if you're on macOS or Windows. I know it's technically possible to mount GDrive on Linux but it's neither pretty nor user-friendly.

You can also use Dropbox.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#116

Post by poglet »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #106

Is there a reliable way to move content from OneNote to Obsydian? I have 10+ years of notes there and have a hard time figuring out how to migrate them to markdown.

https://obsidian.md/help/import/onenote

I had issues with images coming across not being correctly linked. Might be working better now.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#117

Post by briHass »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #106

Is there a reliable way to move content from OneNote to Obsydian? I have 10+ years of notes there and have a hard time figuring out how to migrate them to markdown.

Have you tried the Import plugin in Obsidian? I used it the other day, and it seemed to do a good job with OneNote, though my ON notebooks are just simple text and images. I believe it automates an export from ON to HTML and then converts that to MD.

Once they're in MD format, you can always get your favorite agent to do more formatting and organization, which was one of the big reasons I moved away from ON.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#118

Post by j_bum »

hgoel wrote: post #35

I recently setup Obsidian thinking of it as an easy note taking system with self-hosted sync that Claude can read from. I'm still building the habit for using it instead of scattering notes in text documents or self-DMs on various platforms, but during setup, the complexity was concerning, since I associate complexity in this kind of system with fragility. For now I am still in the exploring phase, so not ruling it o…

What self-hosted sync approach are you using?

I’m thinking of doing the same thing, as I want everything on my home NAS and not iCloud/Google Drive

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#119

Post by Capricorn2481 »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #36
torben-friis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines. Nothing against it, you just need the warning early on to avoid the timesink if you want things done and follow the wrong guide.

It really baffles me that a forum full of people who casually deep dive into all corners of tech regardless of its “usefulness” can’t understand people might want to do the same with their personal notetaking or organization.

I can't speak for those commenters, but I think a lot of people have gone down this path and felt like it was a negative experience for them. I'm sure other people don't, but since a lot of these deep dive resources come from "productivity" communities, it's not surprising there's people that didn't feel very productive reorganizing their second brain, even if it seemed kinda intoxicating in the process.

I also feel like there's an odd assortment of people in the note optimization community that tries to present themselves as super human taskmasters, like Neo on a keyboard. The Roam research videos do not look like they're trying to teach me to use Roam. They look like they're trying to sell me a cozy aesthetic and vision of merging my brain with a computer to become greater than. I just want a note taking app.

It just ticks exactly the right boxes for people who are into STEM without really being satisfying at the end of the rainbow. Personally I'm done trying to do more than just some tags and backlinks.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#120

Post by hgoel »

j_bum wrote: post #118
hgoel wrote: post #35

I recently setup Obsidian thinking of it as an easy note taking system with self-hosted sync that Claude can read from. I'm still building the habit for using it instead of scattering notes in text documents or self-DMs on various platforms, but during setup, the complexity was concerning, since I associate complexity in this kind of system with fragility. For now I am still in the exploring phase, so not ruling it o…

What self-hosted sync approach are you using? I’m thinking of doing the same thing, as I want everything on my home NAS and not iCloud/Google Drive

I setup the LiveSync plugin in an LXC on one of my proxmox servers, since I was going to have to host the MCP server too (so Claude could read from it).

It doesn't require iCloud/GDrive, I just exposed the corresponding port through a cloudflare tunnel and set up the apps to connect through it.

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