Why I Like Obsidian • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#11

Post by paxys » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:37 PM UTC

jimmytucson wrote: post #2

> allows structure to grow organically > powerful feature ... Internal Links. > plain text files Well, they're not _plain_ text - there is some markup. So that invites the question - why not HyperText Markup Language? Doesn't HTML have all of these features - hyperlinks, folder structures, "plain" text? Isn't HTML also future proof? It's been around long enough. And doesn't it also work offline? There's a bunch of di…

HTML is (1) a lot more painful and verbose to write and (2) impossible to decipher in source mode. Markdown fixes both these problems.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#12

Post by inferense » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

obsidian is awesome.

I'll go ahead and do a shameless plug for an alternative built with similar philosophy around privacy & data ownership aimed at developers https://acreom.com

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#13

Post by px43 » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:41 PM UTC

Super weird IMO that they refuse to release source code. Hard to trust something as important as notes to an opaque app.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#14

Post by hiAndrewQuinn » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:42 PM UTC

Obsidian is my IDE for Markdown, if that makes sense.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#15

Post by abelaer » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:43 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #4

I love Obsidian for being a dead simple UI for managing my markdown files. I’ve found that the cloud features are not for me. What I need is to wire it more organically up to a GitHub repo.

I've done exactly this, and set up a cron job to sync regularly. Still very sub-optimal imo.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#16

Post by midasz » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:43 PM UTC

I really like Obsidian but the long startup time (on mobile) has stopped me from using it as a daily driver.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#17

Post by drakenot » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:43 PM UTC

px43 wrote: post #13

Super weird IMO that they refuse to release source code. Hard to trust something as important as notes to an opaque app.

But the notes are maintained as plain markdown files?

I don’t find it weird they would want to keep the source for their commercial application closed when there are so many copy-cat apps in the same space.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#18

Post by midasz » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:44 PM UTC

Waterluvian wrote: post #4

I love Obsidian for being a dead simple UI for managing my markdown files. I’ve found that the cloud features are not for me. What I need is to wire it more organically up to a GitHub repo.

I used the git-sync plugin, worked fairly well.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#19

Post by zschuessler » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:44 PM UTC

The killer feature for me is how extensible the software is made to be. It truly lets you operate how you know best, making very few assumptions on how you use it.

Case in point: one of my favorite productivity plugins is a full-fledged Kanban board. It has deep integration into Obsidian features:

- https://github.com/mgmeyers/obsidian-kanban

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#20

Post by mofosyne » Wed, Jan 17, 2024, 1:44 PM UTC

Anyone tried Dendron (https://github.com/dendronhq/dendron)? It feels like it could almost become a competitor to Obsidian and plus is essentially a vscode plugin, so you get the benefit of using vscode as your code editor as well.

Too bad the project has ended as there is no clear approach for the Dendron team to make it financially sustainable (with their cloud sync subscription, much like Obsidian Sync). But it's basically opensource now so hopefully can be forked and the lessons learnt from Obsidian be applied to it (e.g. Any folder of textfile should be openable under Dendron. Unfortunate at the moment you have to initialize a separate repo and then port it over)