I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward. In my mind and experience, Trili…
Another person in the thread recommended it. I'll have to check it out this week thanks!
I am also searching for an alternative to Obsidian, that also works well on iOS and macOS. Obsidian is currently really slow somehow although all extensions are disabled, e.g. rendering the content when switching between notes is not instant. I really really like Outline, but I don't want to access the web just to write and read notes.
I really don't want to critisize OP since building stuff for yourself is always a good mentality. But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing. It will always cost more if you consider your own time for maintenance long term. Obsidian is one of the most consumer friendly business for note taking out of there, they are not VC so the Evernote comparison is unwarranted IMO.
I think the author point still stands though: Obsidian won’t probably be here in 20 years.
Why not? It’s got a huge user base, a massive open source plug-in ecosystem and a sensible revenue model. It’s probably one of the note apps that has the largest community around it outside of Notion, which is heavily VC influenced and is more of a do everything app
Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints: > After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel ti…
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed Git can be used to sync your notes. Its a great solution for those comfortable putting their notes into a Git repo like Github. I wasn't comfortable with that however. Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!
It's not just git. You have the plugins available for S3, couchdb, FTP, MongoDB, cloud drives, rsync, syncthing, and probably every other storage/protocol in the world. And they're all available for free in obsidian.
fwiw, on mac/ios you can put your obsidian vault inside icloud directory and have a “free” cross-device sync feature.
Hell, you don't even need obsidian. Just create a bash function notes() { if [ ! -z "$1" ]; then mkdir -m 00750 -p /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes Now=$(date '+%B %d %Y %H:%M') echo -en "\n$Now\t$@\n" >> /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes/notes.txt else echo "${Now}" cat /Users/User/iCloud/Documents/notes/notes.txt 2>/dev/null fi }
While we're sharing simple note taking functions, here's mine that I used for a few years. :)
function nod { mg +-1 "/home/user/notes/$(date "+%Y-%m-%d").txt"; }
* 'nod' stands for "notes of (the) day" and was quick to type.
* 'mg' is micro emacs, my first shell-based editor thanks to OpenBSD. The '+-1' syntax means "open at end of file" so I could easily append.
Obviously no right answer, but personally I think worrying too much finding the perfect tool instead of just integrating more knowledge to your PKMS is a distraction. Rolling your own solution is especially limiting in the context of the sheer amount of integrations the popular ones (like Notion for example) support. You're basically saying you will quickly build something better than the X hundred engineers at PKMS…
I agree Notion is great. I prefer it if I need a shared PKMS such as a company wide document system.
That said I've played around with its API a few years ago and with page elements being block elements you need to loop through n amount of requests to get the content, it didn't make sense for my use case.
Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints: > After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel ti…
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed Git can be used to sync your notes. Its a great solution for those comfortable putting their notes into a Git repo like Github. I wasn't comfortable with that however. Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!
No one said anything about GitHub… git is perfectly fine for this use case and 100% private.
I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward. In my mind and experience, Trili…
Trillium looks great! I'm curious if it has an outliner mode or something similar? I currently use logseq and the two features I love are how each bullet/block is its own thing that can be cross-referenced and embedded in other blocks and pages, and that my workflow is essentially to have daily journal pages I dump everything into and tag and references/crossreferences are automatically handled and linked to build out a network of things.
I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children?