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Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

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Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#201

Post by unethical_ban »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #131
throwaway984393 wrote: post #129

Quoted post unavailable.

I’m slightly relieved reading this. I see markdown everywhere, I can’t stand it, and I wonder why people are so crazy about it. It’s nice to know I’m not alone. Unfortunately I don’t think markdown is going anywhere. I think I see it far more than ever and there’s no sign of it slowing down.

I fell in love with Markdown in the early 2010s. My team at work didn't have a corporate wiki, and the only alternative to documentation was network shares and non-searchable folder hierarchies. I installed Dokuwiki, and its editing is all markdown.

The alternative became Confluence, which is now a pretty decent product(for the end user, I can't speak to operating it).

But in 2013, the editor was terrible. WYSIWYG was broken and non-deterministic. You never knew how it was going to try to "intelligently" format your next press of the enter key, or bullet list or table. There was no visual cue on the work it was doing for you.

Markdown is very clear, if limited: There is no ambiguity on how it will format a page.

I will say, I think there are tools that provide WYSIWYG composers that store data in Markdown backend, giving the benefits of both easy editing, and a stable, human-editable source format.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#202

Post by desireco42 »

kepano wrote: post #158

This is an incredible time for knowledge management tools. Just a couple of years ago I was pulling my hair out trying to get a local wiki to feel like a native app, and now we have a dozen great options to choose from. I started using Obsidian when it came out last year, and it instantly clicked for me. I immediately migrated 20 years of notes to it. What differentiates Obsidian from all of the other tools in this a…

Hey, your Minimal theme, that I just installed, pretty much solves most of the issues I had with Obsidian. Even without that it is a great tool.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#203

Post by cratermoon »

jasode wrote: post #121
bambax wrote: post #71

I built a simple journal solution for myself two years ago. It sends an email every day and I can reply to it, and the response is stored in an SQLite database, in plain text. The db is on a remote server but copied to Dropbox every day (and in any case all the emails also exist in my sent folder). It is surprisingly effective at storing not just what I did with my day, but random thoughts and ideas, solutions to bug…

>the response is stored in an SQLite database, I tried using a database for personal notes many years ago and the problem I discovered was that I can't do a quick Ctrl+F to find previous scraps of knowledge. Instead, I use plain "notes.txt" and use the editor's text search functions (including regex functionality) to locate things. These 2 ways of finding text have very different ergonomics: - SQL: select * from note…

> most people would find the friction of a SQL database too high for freeform notes

Something that I find not only true, but inherent in relational databases: they require some kind of schema, and schemas for freeform text and ideas are notoriously difficult.

I created my own software, which doesn't have a fancy gui or anything, but organizes my notes sufficiently for me, using plain markdown files and dumping the contents into an ElasticSearch index configured for text analysis. I can easily do a very good full text search on the body of the notes, plus I've indexed the keywords for each note in their own mapping.

In addition to having good linking together of related ideas, wiki-like, it's good to have the ability to fruitfully search without the restrictions of exact term matches. Even relatively simple things like stemming and common synonym matching* can improve the usability of a large collection of notes measurably.

*No, I don't think we've really solved the searching by synonym problem. More work is needed.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#205

Post by desireco42 »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #129

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't want to downvote you but I do disagree with most of what you said. Tech writers should be able to learn things and not just be stuck in whatever single tool they are familiar with.

To me, it is clear you don't want to spend minimal effort to understand simple tools because it is not the tool you are familiar with and like to use.

Obsidian is not perfect, but not for reason of using Markdown.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#206

Post by [deleted] »

marbletiles wrote: post #167
TimTheTinker wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of tradeoffs to using non-plaintext formats beyond not being able to edit them on old-school green CRTs: - Have you ever tried using git on a docx file? The best you have is file history, but good luck trying to merge branches, create/apply patches, cherry-pick commits, rebase, or view line-by-line history. - You lose the interoperability of plaintext. Any editor can open a plaintext file, and consumi…

You are begging the question. Git works well with plaintext because it is a product of the 1970s thinking that OP is bemoaning. If we built tools to do Git-like things on rich text file formats, they’d work just as well. (And Track Changes does a subset of those things surprisingly well inside Word, fwiw) And OP didn’t specify binary output. The output format could be anything we standardised on, just so long as it s…

[deleted]

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#207

Post by [deleted] »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #200
marbletiles wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are begging the question. Git works well with plaintext because it is a product of the 1970s thinking that OP is bemoaning. If we built tools to do Git-like things on rich text file formats, they’d work just as well. (And Track Changes does a subset of those things surprisingly well inside Word, fwiw) And OP didn’t specify binary output. The output format could be anything we standardised on, just so long as it s…

What you call question-begging is really just an assumption I'm making - that git's feature set isn't available (or practically feasible) for any binary format. You might disagree with that assumption, but if so I'd challenge you to show me (or build) a piece of software that (a) uses a binary storage file format and (b) has a feature set comparable to that of git for files in that format. I know an argument from lac…

[deleted]

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#208

Post by TuringTest »

marbletiles wrote: post #167
TimTheTinker wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of tradeoffs to using non-plaintext formats beyond not being able to edit them on old-school green CRTs: - Have you ever tried using git on a docx file? The best you have is file history, but good luck trying to merge branches, create/apply patches, cherry-pick commits, rebase, or view line-by-line history. - You lose the interoperability of plaintext. Any editor can open a plaintext file, and consumi…

You are begging the question. Git works well with plaintext because it is a product of the 1970s thinking that OP is bemoaning. If we built tools to do Git-like things on rich text file formats, they’d work just as well. (And Track Changes does a subset of those things surprisingly well inside Word, fwiw) And OP didn’t specify binary output. The output format could be anything we standardised on, just so long as it s…

I've been using MS Word with a heavy reliance on Track Changes for years, and I'm converting my technical writing department to use Markdown as fast as I can. I have moved them to the WYSIWYG-on-Markdown editor Zettlr[1], and my non-technical writers have praised it for being "almost-not-techie at all".

I can't stand one more MS magic trick to auto-formatting on copy-paste (while mangling half of the styles) or figuring out why some objects simply disappeared or why Word rejects applying some format or layout.

When your job is to keep working on expanding the same hundred-pages-long document year after year, you learn every trick to fix the random MS Word bugs and protect your document from being destroyed by the software 20 times a day, and it ain't pretty.

[1] https://zettlr.com/

* I would have preferred to use Asciidoc instead of Markdown, as it comes with the full Docbook feature set; unfortunately, native support on well-maintained editors is much worse with that format.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#209

Post by kazinator »

groby_b wrote: post #191
kazinator wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approximately: "It's funny to be criticizing user freedom and lock-in issues with other programs, above a link to buy your stuff from an app store."

Closer: "I am incapable of reasoning, except in broad generalities". Having an open and simple file format that is easily imported/exported is all many of us want from software. We are actually perfectly OK with paying people for work. Separating data freedom from access to source code is a perfectly meaningful thing to do, even if you personally don't like it.

I assure you that I'm personally good with the separation, which makes sense.

I made a remark about a remark, and nothing more.

Speaking of personal, I don't mind attacks; do go on. Well, not that I want to encourage it here, where it is not allowed, but you can PM them to me, if you have more.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#210

Post by krzyk »

capableweb wrote: post #92
krzyk wrote: post #81

I just downloaded deb and was a bit worried that it has 60MB, quick check on forums and it us unfortunately Electron :( Oh well, back to vim and cd.

Always fun to see these original comments in a HN thread. If you write this on Twitter you can get hundreds of retweets, hurry before someone else writes the tweet! Jokes aside, Obsidian being a Electron application is not a issue. The app starts in under 3 seconds for me, barely uses any RAM and CPU usage remains stable and low. If you want to actually contribute anything to this thread, feel free to give feedback o…

My issue is that I want to run just one browser on my system. And one that I choose, Chrome/chromium is not the one.

Aside from that I refuse to support writing desktop apps in Javascript, because it is slower than equivalent app written in C/C++.

Compare telegram client to slack client. Which one is more snappy?

Users are boiled like frogs, millisecond wait here and there. And suddenly any action on ui takes 1 or 20 seconds. And you get frustrated.

If obsidian is a webapp I prefer to use it as such, not hide it in electron.

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