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

Obsidian Bases

help.obsidian.md

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 259 posts

Re: Obsidian Bases

#201

Post by criddell »

theappsecguy wrote: post #194
criddell wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is. You can disable it from core plugins. Obsidian has done more than anyone else for the PKM community without lock in, it’s quite disheartening to see so many complaints.

I'm disheartened too because they have done so much and I'm happy to pay my annual fee, but it seems obvious that they are headed in a direction that isn't for me.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#202

Post by halJordan »

raybb wrote: post #126
safety1st wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a good AI plugin for Obsidian yet?

There are plenty of AI plugins. I guess "good" just depends what your use case is. Let us know if you find one that works well though. https://obsidian.md/plugins?search=openai

Good is a little more proscriptive than that. Its not hard to see the difference between the, we can call them gen1, ai functions and gen2/3 functions we have now. The difference between gpt-3.5 and NotebookLM.

But HN has spent the last 3 years with it's head in the sand wrt stochastic parrots so it tracks that how far we've come is not apparent

Re: Obsidian Bases

#203

Post by gangstead »

Is there a way in Obsidian to have a virtual file separator like `---` in yaml documents?

For bases to work I need to split my stuff up into tiny documents but I'd prefer to have one big document with separate sections. For example I keep one document `book-recommendations.md` with many small sections for books I'd like to read. I can't search through that with bases unless I split those out into many small files in with one recommendation each.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#204

Post by TechPlasma »

gangstead wrote: post #203

Is there a way in Obsidian to have a virtual file separator like `---` in yaml documents? For bases to work I need to split my stuff up into tiny documents but I'd prefer to have one big document with separate sections. For example I keep one document `book-recommendations.md` with many small sections for books I'd like to read. I can't search through that with bases unless I split those out into many small files in…

This is my main complaint for Bases. It forces you to split your data into many many small files.

I don't need entire files for each individual book/movie/task I want to manage.

They'll have maybe 4-5 properties at most with not much content in them.

File system, and syncing operations will take a massive hit if I have to manage that many files.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#205

Post by stronglikedan »

abrookewood wrote: post #62

I don't think they do that good a job of explaining what it is, but the Reddit post linked below included this comment which is helptful: "You know how when you search your notes for something, say a phrase? Well, Bases can basically hold a static search that automatically updates. And, instead of searching all over again, you just click into the Bases file and new notes are just there in the default table format. On…

> And, instead of searching all over again, you just click into the Bases file and new notes are just there in the default table format.

Sounds like a View.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#207

Post by er4hn »

TechPlasma wrote: post #204
gangstead wrote: post #203

Is there a way in Obsidian to have a virtual file separator like `---` in yaml documents? For bases to work I need to split my stuff up into tiny documents but I'd prefer to have one big document with separate sections. For example I keep one document `book-recommendations.md` with many small sections for books I'd like to read. I can't search through that with bases unless I split those out into many small files in…

This is my main complaint for Bases. It forces you to split your data into many many small files. I don't need entire files for each individual book/movie/task I want to manage. They'll have maybe 4-5 properties at most with not much content in them. File system, and syncing operations will take a massive hit if I have to manage that many files.

How many files do you have? At what scale did you see this being a problem?

I'm a fan of Obsidian, not affiliated with them, but my experience with basic file syncing like syncthing or git is that you should be able to easily get up into the ten's of thousands of files without an issue.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#208

Post by diggan »

er4hn wrote: post #207
TechPlasma wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my main complaint for Bases. It forces you to split your data into many many small files. I don't need entire files for each individual book/movie/task I want to manage. They'll have maybe 4-5 properties at most with not much content in them. File system, and syncing operations will take a massive hit if I have to manage that many files.

How many files do you have? At what scale did you see this being a problem? I'm a fan of Obsidian, not affiliated with them, but my experience with basic file syncing like syncthing or git is that you should be able to easily get up into the ten's of thousands of files without an issue.

The Obsidian Sync (official) plugin isn't very clever with its syncing, it does one file at a time, seemingly new requests for each file.

I recently had to sync a new Obsidian vault from scratch, a vault with thousands of files, and it took minutes to complete because of this, even though most files are a couple of KB at most.

Easy to fix and low hanging fruit, but still an issue for us with many files in our vaults.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#209

Post by gradientsrneat »

Obsidian is great, but it's no substitute for a text editor. It's more like a power user's Microsoft Office suite which operates on folders rather than files. Case and point: you can't even open plaintext files (.txt).

Also, I'm still waiting for the org mode comment from a seasoned emacs user. :)

Re: Obsidian Bases

#210

Post by slightwinder »

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.

> It’s a markdown editor, but they can’t modify the markdown standard,

They have several modifications of Markdown, everyone has. But not everything makes sense to implement in a flavour of Markdown. YAML is for structured data significant better than a freeform-format, especially when you're in the phase of building the foundation of a new feature-family.

The complain is valid, Markdown is for documents, free form, free flow, structured data are a very different use case, and while YAML is better for the job, it's still a different language with different smell.

But Obsidian is a tool for managing knowledge, always has been; it's not just a plain Markdown-editor. All those features which are going beyond simple flavoured text, have always been part of it's Core-Mission, just not materialized yet.

Post reply on HN