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Obsidian Bases

help.obsidian.md

221–230 of 259 posts

Re: Obsidian Bases

#221
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the average Obsidian user may or may not know what a database is an why they should care. As an engineer I like precise language, but we should not forget that multiple audiences require multiple levels of explainations. Otherwise it is a bit like saying "all monads are functors" when trying to make your reader care for investing time and energy into understanding the concept of monads. The problem there of…

> Yes, but the average Obsidian user may or may not know what a database You can't constantly optimize your communication for the least educated recipient. Obsidian is full of technical, specialized terms. If you don't know a word, research it. And database as a concept is common knowledge today. Everyone will have the word heard in news at least, most will have a rough understanding of its purpose. And people using…

Yes, of course you can optimize your communications. Humans tend to donthat constantly, this is just a matter (or: a mirror) of your priorities. If you care you optimize your communications and don't do if you won't. Whether you care about a particular target audience or you don't is up to you and nobody else.

However, it isn't exactly rocket science and if one developes such a feature it makes sense to test it with multiple realistic usecases anyways, so why not just use those to show the users how it can be used?

Unless ofc a feature is developed in mental isolation by a recluse with a niche interest in the code without thinking about the potential use at all. But then it is probably more like a extracagant hobby than a serious project that others should rely on.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Obsidian and Tangent. For whatever reason, I've found Tangent's code highlighting brighter, more colorful, and (maybe hence?) more easily readable. Obsidian is more muted. Steve Jobs would have preferred Obsidian.

Surely that's plugin-modifiable in Obsidian.

Doesn't even need a plugin, just some custom CSS iirc.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you concerned about specifically? What bits of Obsidian should they work on polishing instead?

(not trying to be hostile, just curious as another Obsidian user who is excited by this feature because the current meta search functionality is really poor IMO and this is very much needed polish from my perspective)

Re: Obsidian Bases

#224

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…

Ps: Where do you see the feature to move an existing Vault? I don't see this option sadly

Re: Obsidian Bases

#225

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…

Welcome use org-sueprtag, a package with org-mode and Eamacs. It's feature org-sueprtag-view-table provide similar function.

And it design for a big document, with many nodes in it, it will filter this nodes by tags and properties.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ps: Where do you see the feature to move an existing Vault? I don't see this option sadly

Sorry, I was mistaken about that aspect.

The option is available to move a vault from the app to the device storage, but not the other way around. At least not from within Obsidian.

But if you use a PC or a file manager that has full device access, you can manually copy the vault folder to the `/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/md.obsidian/files` directory.

I just tried that and Obsidian recognised it.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#227
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I use a Samsung device which unforunately doesn't have the app lock feature.

But it does have a "secure folder" which is more or less what you mean by "spaces", I guess.

The downside of the secure folder against normal app locking is that the apps are no longer seamlessly integrated with the launcher and other apps. It's definitely more secure but is ultimately overkill for my needs.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#228
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be. A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch". Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy…

No “hey idiot” but for what it’s worth: are you making things too complicated? It almost feels like you’re a bit distracted by all the dimensions of data you want to track. Could this all be one page with a bulleted list, each one might have sub bullets if you care to record things like who shared it and other notes? You can just Ctrl+F for “wife” when you need that sub query.

This is kinda where I get to "then why use obsidian?". Like to me the whole point is to kinda have some linking and clean notes organization, and i'm keeping it fairly simple (just some basic tags). But yeah I suspect a large part is trying to bend it into something it's not.

Re: Obsidian Bases

#229
post #72
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be. A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch". Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy…

Hyperlinks are all you need: https://ezhik.jp/hypertext-maximalism/

I sorta agree, but i feel like i just want the "one more step" of dynamic content for this.

The hubs described are nice, but they don't always reflect larger changes. Updating a hub becomes a dependency that seems silly as I feel like that should be one of the easier things to keep up to date with a basic code overlay. It's one of the first things I wrote when messing with Obsidian, and part of why I really like dendron (easy refactoring, but it's got other issues).

Re: Obsidian Bases

#230
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

I haven't heard of those, thank you.

I think my issue with the smaller players is that I've been burnt too many times where they've just stopped development or cancelled the product because it wasn't profitable. So I've generally steered away from them.

On the other side of course, what happens with the big players is the enshittification of the product which I think is slowly happening to Notion, though it still ticks enough boxes that it's the preferred option.

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