Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Like Obsidian

ddanieltan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 376 posts

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#131

Post by nullandvoid »

dustincoates wrote: post #41

I like Obsidian, too, having recently switched over from 9 years of OneNote (the fact that there's a tool to import my OneNote notes helped a lot). The most important tip for getting started with Obsidian, in my mind, is to absolutely ignore all of the Obsidian "power users." I'm 99% convinced that no one actually uses zettelkasten seriously, but even if so, it's overkill for when you're just checking out the app. An…

If you want to setup a zettelkasten like system for free, with minimal effort / requirement on any plugins (just "templater" will be helpful) I highly recommend https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-...

No affiliation, just a happy user for over a year now.

If you take kindle highlights when you read, the https://github.com/hadynz/obsidian-kindle-plugin plugin is amazing for auto generating source files with those highlights in (and other templated sections you wish to include in a review).

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#132

Post by jbstack »

twiclo wrote: post #37
hannofcart wrote: post #21

My notes system is: On desktop: Nvim with some markdown plugins plus Goyo On mobile: Obsidian Syncthing for sync (though previously I've Dropbox as well for the same) On desktop I find Obsidian's vim mode slightly uncanny valley-ish. Close enough to be able to emulate my vim flow. But not _quite_ right. On mobile, I've found Obsidian to be just top class. Though admittedly most of my real note taking happens on deskt…

Why not use VimWiki on desktop?

I used VimWiki for a couple of years and build up a sizeable set of notes with it. Although it seems to have most of the features you'd want, in the end it feels a little clunky to use in practice. A huge minus for me (at the time; perhaps this is fixed now) was the lack of ability to open multiple windows / notes simultaneously. I'm not aware of any other text editor which lacks that feature.

I since switched to Emacs + Org Roam, and I'm much happier. If there's something I don't like or a feature I feel is missing, I can either find a plugin for it or just change it myself.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#133

Post by [deleted] »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #129
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…

> Well, they're not _plain_ text - there is some markup. Markup is still plaintext. > why not HyperText Markup Language? Why not json or yaml? If you remove the users ability to write the text directly, then why limit yourself to the unstructured mess that HTML is? > Doesn't HTML have all of these features - hyperlinks, folder structures, "plain" text? Isn't HTML also future proof? Markdown is human-friendly. There i…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#134

Post by drio0 »

Hoefner wrote: post #91
lawgimenez wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of boring, my entire life runs on Apple Notes. Everything to-dos, from family, kids, work, car, etc. I am just not sure how to migrate all of my 2,000 plus notes on to a new system. Plus with limited mobile data signal, I’m not sure if apps like Obsidian will work.

Also Obsidian has Importer plugin for Apple Notes https://help.obsidian.md/import/apple-notes

Which you need a Mac to run

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#135

Post by jbstack »

kuter wrote: post #72

The deal breaker with obsidian for me is that it is not opensource. It's great that it's at least using a markdown derivative format. I am using Emacs Org Mode and quite happy with it. You can link different files, include images, embed and view LaTeX, encrypt your notes with GPG and much more. I think it will stand the test of time better than Obsidian which is something I care a lot for note taking and journaling.

There's also Org Roam which adds some useful ZK-like features to Org Mode.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#136

Post by drio0 »

mrpotato wrote: post #113
hannofcart wrote: post #21

My notes system is: On desktop: Nvim with some markdown plugins plus Goyo On mobile: Obsidian Syncthing for sync (though previously I've Dropbox as well for the same) On desktop I find Obsidian's vim mode slightly uncanny valley-ish. Close enough to be able to emulate my vim flow. But not _quite_ right. On mobile, I've found Obsidian to be just top class. Though admittedly most of my real note taking happens on deskt…

Mine's close to yours also desktop: nvim + syncthing + vimwiki (md markup instead of default) mobile: syncthing + Markor[1] On mobile I have a todo.txt[2] in addition to the vim wiki files which are all synced. All this works pretty well for my personal needs. For work I use OneNote because the whole company uses OneNote. [1] https://f-droid.org/packages/net.gsantner.markor/ [2] http://todotxt.org/

Which mobile app do you use for todo.txt?

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#137

Post by tester457 »

firecall wrote: post #86
hoherd wrote: post #69

I was unaware of this until a few weeks ago, so I'd like to raise awareness for anybody who it affects: Obsidian is not FOSS, and purchasing a license is required for any work that generates revenue at a for-profit company of 2 or more people. https://obsidian.md/license Obsidian looks awesome to me, and for a long time I've been thinking about adopting it, but this licensing issue caused me to back away and look for…

And also no Synching with a subscription! When I already have access to the iCloud ecosystem, and Notes is excellent across iOS and macOS, I have never really seen much point in trying to use Obsidian. But then maybe I'm missing the point of Obsidian?

The killer feature of Obsidian was the wikilinks, but now that other editors are getting that feature it is replaceable.

But the other killer feature is avoiding vendor lock-in. With some apps your notes are on their servers in an inscrutable data format, and some apps don't even let you export without paying. With markdown notes on the other hand you can take your notes anywhere, sync them with git, dropbox, syncthing, etc.

You're not bound to obsidian, and your markdown notes format will always be readable, unlike many of today's formats! See [1] "LibreOffice is better at reading old Word files than Word"

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38906331

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#138

Post by PurpleRamen »

I like Obsidian, but I really dislike the annoying design-philosophy which restricts my usage.

For example, it's not possible to open any random folder with it, you need to first register the folder as a vault, and then can open the vault. It also doesn't handle file links under Linux correctly. For whatever reason, any link pointing to a file inside the vault, disappears. Probably some flaw in their file system-abstraction, but that made several workflows for me impossible. And then there is the problem with every vault having its own isolated configuration. Basically, every vault has a folder ".obsidian" which contains all installed plugins, configurations and whatever. For any new vault, you need to link this folder, and for whatever reason they are still unable to let obsidian handle this automatically.

Overall, Obsidian is designed to have mainly one, or at least just a very low number of vaults. But considering how poor obsidian scales with file numbers, this is not working well for every one. For me, this removed any motivation to use Obsidian for everything.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#140

Post by toss1 »

WJW wrote: post #95
firecall wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And also no Synching with a subscription! When I already have access to the iCloud ecosystem, and Notes is excellent across iOS and macOS, I have never really seen much point in trying to use Obsidian. But then maybe I'm missing the point of Obsidian?

It's entirely possible to just stick your files in dropbox or something like that and they sync just fine.

I found that trying to sync (Windows Obsidian app «=» Android Obsidian app) just via a cable would get the files over fine, but would not produce usable results, at least not without a lot more fiddling that I wanted to do. I was hoping that we could simply transfer the folder structure over and just have it work, but no such luck.

Evidently it requires not only transfer, but some kind of transformation that they do in their cloud, and I'm not interested in another cloud subscription, particularly one so specific. (Happy to pay for the software & updates, just not to maintain the subscription and maintain the concern about another connection in the loop)

This was a couple years ago. Perhaps this has changed, or there's now a plugin to make such a bidirectional transfer work?

TIA for any suggestions!

Post reply on HN