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Why I Like Obsidian

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Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#221

Post by mey »

smusamashah wrote: post #214
behnamoh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the appeal of infinite canvas. Something about it makes me feel like I'm not in full control of my notes/documents. I like it when the information is clearly structured.

I don't use the width of the canvas, but what I do love/appreciate is the way I can click anywhere and start writing. It feels as easy as pen and paper. I can go in any direction. It doesn't have to be infinite canvas in practice, just allow enough width and length to let you put down your cursor anywhere and start writing/pasting images or whatever you wish.

Obsidian added a Canvas document type in the last year that you may be interested in.

https://obsidian.md/canvas

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#222

Post by inferense »

outlore wrote: post #192
inferense wrote: post #12

obsidian is awesome. I'll go ahead and do a shameless plug for an alternative built with similar philosophy around privacy & data ownership aimed at developers https://acreom.com

I love the design of acreom! When I tried it, I was impressed with marking notes as Active/Done etc. Do you support collecting individual checkbox items into a unified view as well? Would you also consider adding an outline view/toc? Tysm!

> Do you support collecting individual checkbox items into a unified view as well? yes, acreom is pretty flexible when it comes to creating views over your pages, you can create views with pages with tasks and save it with all tasks surfaced.

> Would you also consider adding an outline view/toc? already supported!

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#223

Post by avgcorrection »

Obsidian is that thing in the back of my mind which is Markdown+Synch. Service.

I’ve never really gotten into synch. since I tend to monocompute a lot.

I write things in Org Mode. Not a power user of that thing, just the markup I use. I don’t use links in Org but I would like to. I sometimes make very informal and tedious links. So that would be a welcome feature.

> Obsidian’s choice to work with plain text files make it future-proof

Future-proof yes. It is. But as a customer this doesn’t sound that exciting. A company could offer to print all my data and mail it to me when I terminate the plan. That’s also future-proof.

Ditto with

> Obsidian allows structure to grow organically

I haven’t read the links but 95% of the time this means “because there isn’t any structure (YOLO)”. Yeah okay I am free as a bird, cool. But I can’t make a decades-spanning personal wiki based on completely unstructured data and links alone.

All in all: most MD tools kind of fade into the background for me. People want all kinds of bells and whistles with that semi-language like a dedicated editor so that they can write headers and unordered bullet lists with a preview. Overall the marketplace feels excessive.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#224

Post by iamjkt »

kstrauser wrote: post #207
kisamoto wrote: post #29

Obsidian is great. For those looking for an open source alternative (or don't want to pay the Obsidian fees for professional usage) check out Logseq: https://logseq.com/

Search for “Logseq data loss $current_year” and you’ll see horror stories of people who did everything exactly right and still lost a bunch of data from it. The most recent one I saw involved someone getting on a plane and thus losing Internet access to the paid syncing service. They did a bunch of work as they flew across the country. When they landed and the connection resumed, it synced everything back to the pre-…

Logseq's native sync now has smart merge which I have found prevents issues like this.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#225

Post by JoeJonathan »

kstrauser wrote: post #193
bloopernova wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried zettlekasten and found I just didn't use it enough to justify the effort involved. Instead I just have an org-mode folder that I dump documents in. I search across them with Deft in Emacs. Sure, the links between documents can be incredibly useful to some people, but I've found I'm more chaotic than that.

I’ve written off Zettelkasten. It’s not for me. It seems to be optimized for turning notes into publications, but that’s not my own goal behind taking notes. For me, good ol’ wiki style interlinking is much more useful (and vastly easier). I use the “Map of Content” ideas to have a few quick indexes, like “Current work projects” or “orders from restaurants we like”, but that’s about the most formal organization I do.…

I do write for a living, and I found Zettelkasten too high friction to be worth using. Plus, as Cal Newport has argued, it solves the wrong problem. The whole pitch of ZK is that you can jump into your notes and quickly generate new ideas. But experienced writers and researchers rarely struggle to come up with ideas—rather, the real challenge is execution.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#226

Post by muwtyhg »

behnamoh wrote: post #122
dustincoates wrote: post #41

I like Obsidian, too, having recently switched over from 9 years of OneNote (the fact that there's a tool to import my OneNote notes helped a lot). The most important tip for getting started with Obsidian, in my mind, is to absolutely ignore all of the Obsidian "power users." I'm 99% convinced that no one actually uses zettelkasten seriously, but even if so, it's overkill for when you're just checking out the app. An…

I tried it a few times but had to stop because: 1. Obsidian imposes its own take on Markdown. For instance, why can't we disable "indent using the tab key"? It's so annoying to accidentally indent/quote text while pressing tab to do something like "accept autocomplete suggestion". Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/... 2.…

> Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring

This is my main worry about choosing Obsidian for the long run. The devs seem very opinionated about a system that is meant to be customizable to each user's workflow.

Their Vim implementation does not support setting hard line breaks, making modal editing a little funky (every paragraph is just one long line and any action working on a line will work on the entire paragraph, such as "dd").

Came from Vim-Wiki (and Org-mode and some other short-lived note-taking systems) and I think the plugin hell of Vim/Emacs (or VS Code) is much worse than Obsidian. You can get by without any addons in Obsidian as it's built to be a notetaking system first, not a general text editor. You can't do the same with Vim (hence needing "Vim-Wiki" plugin).

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#227

Post by crossroadsguy »

Whenever there's an Obsidian fanfare going on here on HN (and it happens quite often :P) I wonder around among the comments looking for a simple, minimal, and clean knife (or maybe a light bow and arrow) while people are discussing their AWPs, customised Dragunovs, and bespoke Abrams. Good fun :)

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#228

Post by JoeJonathan »

packetlost wrote: post #80
dustincoates wrote: post #41

I like Obsidian, too, having recently switched over from 9 years of OneNote (the fact that there's a tool to import my OneNote notes helped a lot). The most important tip for getting started with Obsidian, in my mind, is to absolutely ignore all of the Obsidian "power users." I'm 99% convinced that no one actually uses zettelkasten seriously, but even if so, it's overkill for when you're just checking out the app. An…

You definitely can't just jump into zettelkasten, but it is actually used in various modified forms. I've been doing so for years and know of a number of others that do as well.

On the other hand, I'm a professional academic, and I haven't ever met a highly productive scholar who uses ZK.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#230

Post by jodrellblank »

FredPret wrote: post #78
Multicomp wrote: post #47

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on your favorite notetaking app OP, it's more than I've done for mine. I'm glad it works for you, the in-between applications trying to do notetaking is a pain. I settled on OneNote because I'm always trying to capture context with my notes, codify my knowledge. Usually that means screenshots, handwriting, file copies, rarely video or audio embeddings. I'm not going to try to convince…

I once had a job where I needed tons of notes on hundreds of clients and dozens of subjects. Detailed technical notes with screenshots and code snippets and names and birthdays and to-do lists. I used OneNote. It worked brilliantly. Until my notebook file corrupted. Obsidian does the same job, but I miss the tabs. At least it’s all text files - no proprietary files to corrupt.

Lovehate OneNote; the easy paste and type and draw, all WSYWIG, is great. But it feels like a place to lose notes and never find them again. "OneNote for Windows 10" gives a weird hierarchy view of notebooks on the left, which slides into folders and pages; "OneNote" shows the same data as a dropdown list of notebooks at the top, tabs along the top for folders and tabs down the right for pages; why so different?

And it's obsessed with slurping your data up to Microsoft. If you want to stick with an older (unsupported) classic Desktop OneNote, you get a modal dialog box every. single. time. you. open. it. saying "Get more out of OneNote. A newer version of OneNote is now available for free. Go to www.onenote.com to download."

On the plus side, if you do use Microsoft Cloud storage then you can query and work with the OneNote data through the MS Graph REST API: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/integrate-with-oneno...

So you can programatically add and update content in pages in a shared team notebook, for example. And because it "runs" in MS cloud it supports things like asking the cloud services to "screenshot this webpage for me and add it as a note" and "extract content from this website and add it".

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