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Obsidian Bases

help.obsidian.md

211–220 of 259 posts

Re: Obsidian Bases

#211

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. :)

One of the nice things about Obsidian is its extensive plugin ecosystem for people who want additional features. Case and point, there's been an extension to do this almost as long as Obsidian has been around:

https://github.com/Falcion/UNITADE.md

Re: Obsidian Bases

#212
post #207

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.

I don't want to manage that many files. I'll fully admit that I'll hit my limits before the computer cares.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#213

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 don't think it is because it just requires that you write frontmatter in YAML which is pretty human readable and common in certain markdown formats.

Your notes are still in markdown.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them. It is a simple markdown editor yes but it's the addons that make it so different. There's tons and tons of markdown notetaking app…

> it would be great if the app offered an option to hide its files from other apps by locating them in the app's private storage area For what it's worth, you can do just that now. Not sure when it was introduced, but on the current Android version, you are prompted to select either "Device storage" or "App storage" when creating a new vault. You can also change the location of existing vaults from app to device and…

Oh great! I didn't know that was an option <3 I'll have a look. I originally installed it a couple years ago when I bought my phone.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#216
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a side note, the docs don't seem to mention if this is possible but does anyone know how to use a template or set a default frontmatter (like created date) when using the "new" button in a Base? The solution I used before bases is eh... pretty hacky. ```meta-bind-js-view {memory^inputText} as title --- const toShow = context.bound.title || "TKTK"; const str = `\`\`\`meta-bind-button label: New Project Idea - ${toS…

FYI On HackerNews you can use indentation (by 2 spaces) to indicate code snippets, not ```.

Not OP, but I didn't know that. Thank you.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them. It is a simple markdown editor yes but it's the addons that make it so different. There's tons and tons of markdown notetaking app…

> it would be great if the app offered an option to hide its files from other apps by locating them in the app's private storage area For what it's worth, you can do just that now. Not sure when it was introduced, but on the current Android version, you are prompted to select either "Device storage" or "App storage" when creating a new vault. You can also change the location of existing vaults from app to device and…

On iOS any app can be set to a biometric lock by long-pressing the app icon. I believe some Android flavors have this feature, but not all. However I think it can also be done on Android using the "spaces" feature.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's _also_ a notepad that runs on android and synchronises mostly successfully with machines elsewhere. I'm ignoring the plugins entirely but getting lots of use out of the text synchronisation across multiple machines.

I just have a notes folder in Syncthing and it seems to accomplish the same thing. Or is there more to Obsidian Sync that I don't know about?

This kind of file sync works but you can run into problems. Switching from one device to the other too fast and editing the same file can get you into trouble, for example. And all the other tradition file sync and conflict resolution issues in general. Also: If one of your devices runs iOS, you will probably have a bad/annoying day with any "sync your files outside the app you edit them in" solution.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#219

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?

Obsidian has a git plugin that works on all platforms I tried it on (Windows, Linux, Mac and iOS). So I just have a private repo that syncs all the devices through git.

For iOS, the "hard" part is getting the initial git clone, but after that whenever you open the app you can pull/push any changes or set it to automatically do that on a schedule.

To setup a git repo on an iOS device you need iSH[1] but you can delete it the initial `git clone`. The plugin can handle it from there. Make sure to use https and a token that doesn't expire as part of your git clone url. Here is a guide[2]

The only thing to keep in mind is to have a .gitignore that excludes some of .json config files in .obsidian folder as they often cause conflicts. I exclude workspace.json and workspace-mobile.json which just define what tabs you have open on a given device so I think it makes sense to keep that device specific and not commit it.

[1] https://ish.app/

[2] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mobile-sync-with-git-on-ios-for-...

Re: Obsidian Bases

#220

I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it. For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.

If all you need is just daily/one-off notes/jottings then Obsidian is not at all something you might want to use. Because, as excellent and a powerful tool it is for right purposes , even w/o its horde of plugins, it will be an overkill for just note taking . My assumption is based on just this comment of yours but you might want to try simpler note taking apps - that just does one thing - note taking, nothing else.…

Debatable. I use Obsidian specifically because it can be relatively minimalist and it's easy to get the view I want and use 99% of the time: List of files on the left, main note window (sometimes with tabs and/or split) in the middle and a calendar that can jump me to a daily note on click on the right. You can't make such relatively small UI adjustments in the more minimalist note-taking apps, so even if you may not use all of the functions and plugins, Obsidian can still be a relevant choice.
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