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Obsidian Bases

help.obsidian.md

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Re: Obsidian Bases

#181

Post by bryanhogan »

hresvelgr wrote: post #162

This seems distinctly in opposition to what I believe makes Obsidian a great program, providing an excellent editing environment and extensibility for markdown. The more it ventures into these types of features, the more they're going to lose to applications that designed for this from day dot, like Notion and Anytype.

For me it's the opposite and I highly disagree.

Valuable features such as this make working with markdown files much better. It's overall a huge plus for working with Obsidian. It does not change the content of the markdown files themselves, so there's no lock-in or other potentials long-term problems. It allows me to move further away from Notion, which is a great thing, and I hope to see them be able to fully replace Notion Databases in the future.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#182

Post by bryanhogan »

turing_complete wrote: post #170

I just started using Obsidian. What is the best way to use Obsidian both on your phone as well as your PC/laptop? I use it within git and google drive. How can I sync it most easily to my phone as well?

I'm using Google Drive to sync between my Windows laptop and desktop, and Android phone. It works very well.

In general you can use many cloud provider, SyncThing Fork or GitHub.

I wrote about all these options in more detail here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian

The easiest way to sync would be with the official Obsidian subscription, which costs the most amount of money from the options mentioned here.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#183

Post by bryanhogan »

dottjt wrote: post #24

As much as I like the idea of Obsidian, I just can't get over all the additional functionality that Notion provides due to the integrated nature of it. In particular, I love how you select text/blocks in Notion and how every line is a "block". I really wish other editors did that as well. In fact, it's probably the main reason why I haven't moved away from Notion.

What do you think of Logseq or SiYuan?

Logseq[1] is also markdown based but also has a block approach.

SiYuan[2] is more similar to Notion, but self-hostable.

[1]: https://logseq.com/

[2]: https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan

Re: Obsidian Bases

#184

Post by bryanhogan »

iamrecursion wrote: post #160
submeta wrote: post #159

This is awesome. It’s exactly what I needed at the right time. Is it possible to embed `Bases` in existing notes? Or do they always have to be standalone files? Currently I have lots of files with embedded Dataview queries in files. I’d like to replicate that with this new functionality.

It is unfortunately not possible to have a Base exist without its own file, even if they can be embedded using the standard `![[]]` syntax.

The documentation tells me that it is possible to create a Base using code blocks, similar to how you'd do it with the Dataview plugin: https://help.obsidian.md/bases/create-base#Embed+a+base+as+a...

Re: Obsidian Bases

#185

Post by input_sh »

isege wrote: post #173
hresvelgr wrote: post #162

This seems distinctly in opposition to what I believe makes Obsidian a great program, providing an excellent editing environment and extensibility for markdown. The more it ventures into these types of features, the more they're going to lose to applications that designed for this from day dot, like Notion and Anytype.

It’s a markdown editor, but they can’t modify the markdown standard, so their scope is limited. All they can do is build features around it. Having a database isn’t mutually exclusive with the core functionality. You can simply not use it.

To be very pedantic, "Markdown standard" is basically a blog post written over 20 years ago and never updated.

Everything more "advanced" like tables, to-do lists and multi-line code blocks aren't a part of the "standard" as it was written, but were added on top by different implementations (like CommonMark) which are now commonly-mistaken for the original Markdown.

My point being that this isn't something unique to Obsidian, pretty much everyone does it slightly differently while still calling it "Markdown".

Re: Obsidian Bases

#186

Post by jamiemchale »

bryanhogan wrote: post #181
hresvelgr wrote: post #162

This seems distinctly in opposition to what I believe makes Obsidian a great program, providing an excellent editing environment and extensibility for markdown. The more it ventures into these types of features, the more they're going to lose to applications that designed for this from day dot, like Notion and Anytype.

For me it's the opposite and I highly disagree. Valuable features such as this make working with markdown files much better. It's overall a huge plus for working with Obsidian. It does not change the content of the markdown files themselves, so there's no lock-in or other potentials long-term problems. It allows me to move further away from Notion, which is a great thing, and I hope to see them be able to fully repla…

Plus the config for the individual bases is plain text, so in theory the queries could be read and run in other software too.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#187

Post by criddell »

hresvelgr wrote: post #162

This seems distinctly in opposition to what I believe makes Obsidian a great program, providing an excellent editing environment and extensibility for markdown. The more it ventures into these types of features, the more they're going to lose to applications that designed for this from day dot, like Notion and Anytype.

I'm with you. I think this should be a downloadable plugin, not a standard plugin.

I kind of wish they would slow down development and just polish what is already there. They are on this treadmill where they feel the need to keep adding new features, new maintenance burdens, bloating the product in every dimension.

In a few years somebody fresh will come along with a product that's a lightweight alternative. It sucks, but that seems to be the lifecycle of this kind of thing. For now, I've turned off automatic updates on Obsidian which isn't ideal either. :(

Re: Obsidian Bases

#188

Post by submeta »

bryanhogan wrote: post #184
iamrecursion wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unfortunately not possible to have a Base exist without its own file, even if they can be embedded using the standard `![[]]` syntax.

The documentation tells me that it is possible to create a Base using code blocks, similar to how you'd do it with the Dataview plugin: https://help.obsidian.md/bases/create-base#Embed+a+base+as+a...

Excellent! Thank you very much!

Re: Obsidian Bases

#189

Post by Jgoauh »

for those (like me) who didn't understand the feature : a base is a table where each row is a specific file in your vault, and each column is a proprety of this file.

Using a base you can manage, sort and filter your files and their propreties (ex add a rating, price, or deadline proprety to your files or only show files from my movie folder where my proprety is set to [this])

The base doesn't DO anything you couldn't do by hand, it just allows you to do it faster, as you could always modify a file propreties by hand in that file, or search for it using the search features.

The propreties you add are stored in plain text on top of your markdown files The base is stored in a very readable format similar to yaml to the .base file you can see in obsidian.

Here is the generated .base file for a test Movies folder : views: - type: table name: Movies filters: and: - file.folder == "All/Movies" order: - file.name - tags - Watch Date columnSize: file.name: 167

Re: Obsidian Bases

#190

Post by aquariusDue »

pqs wrote: post #124
UltraSane wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate that article. Taskwarrior is infinitely better than a txt file. A txt file is the worst possible option for task management.

Now I'm using Emacs Howm for task management. It is based on text files and it is great. Org-mode is also great.

Also for anyone interested in trying Howm the guide for it was recently updated.

https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manual

The cool thing about Howm is that it's note-taking and task management for lazy people. It predates org-mode (but it also works with it nowadays) and has a distinct way of linking notes by way of go-to and come-from links, think saved search and automatic backlink respectively. Also the way tasks are displayed and surfaced is pretty neat too, the guide/manual goes more in-depth but if you find stuff like org-agenda too complex you'll appreciate Howm's way of tracking and managing tasks.

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