To me, the fatal weakness of obsidian, after trying it for 5 min to realize it, is sync functionality. It only supports icloud sync and its paid sync.
This is turn down 100%.
Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
231–240 of 373 posts
Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
#232Obsidian is so great. I switched from RoamResearch and have hardly looked back.
Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
#233This 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…
Wow, thanks for sharing these. Didn't even know Obsidian has plugins/themes community before your comment :)
PS. WebClipper is super helpful!
Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
#234Earlier 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…
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 figu…
Why not try FrameMaker or something actually built for the job, instead of forcing your poor team into a “still-actually-techie” format written to get around the limitations of MovableType for formatting weblogs? You’ll get DocBook support and still be free of the undeniable horror that is Word
Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
#235To me, the fatal weakness of obsidian, after trying it for 5 min to realize it, is sync functionality. It only supports icloud sync and its paid sync. This is turn down 100%.
Just get the git plugin and create private repo somewhere. Problem solved
Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
(Again, rich text doesn’t need a binary file format but you ignored that) Word’s Track Changes literally does this - you can compare/merge/etc. Quark also had extensions in the 90s that allowed it. It’s entirely feasible for any binary format (assuming you understand the format); why wouldn’t it be? And it makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint, eg for lawyers, which is why they implemented it. Is it as rich…
> (Again, rich text doesn’t need a binary file format but you ignored that)
I'm not arguing against rich text. I think it's a great idea. (My earlier comment suggests using it, actually.)
> Word’s Track Changes literally does this - you can compare/merge/etc.
Nice, but it doesn't support cherry-picking, creating and applying patch files, or any distributed VCS features. I'd also venture that it likely doesn't have anything like the 4-pane merge UI that tools like kdiff3 have.
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If Word covers your needs, great! I'm not sure why you're arguing against markdown in favor of it, though. The two solve different problems.
I'm not arguing against word, just pointing out the practical differences between binary and plaintext files. Use what suits your particular needs!
Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
#237I 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…
SQLite has full-text search built-in (including tokenization of english words with similar roots). It takes just a few statements to enable, and it can even do spelling corrections with an optional extension.
Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
#238The comments here made it sound exciting, but it seems like it's proprietary, which is a no-go for me. I'll stick to plain text file notes and the occasional org-mode for now.
I’d check out logseq [0]. Closer to roam than obsidian, but GPL, operates on plaintext files, and supports Org-mode style formatting as well as markdown. It’s getting to be fairly fully featured by now, and the development team moves fast. It’s a joy to use. [0]: https://logseq.com/
Dang, this looks amazing! It's like someone took org-roam and org-mode and made them into a fast, slick, electron app.
and it supports saving files as org-mode! pretty freaking sweet.
Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
#239Obsidian is great. I'm a paying supporter (catalyst and sync). Weirdly I started playing with Emacs + org-mode recently (never been an Emacs user before!) and I'm seriously considering making it my exclusive "second brain". Something about org-mode, org-babel, org-jupyter, org-agenda and org-roam that just clicks with me.
Emacs is so customisable that as soon as I want to customise anything, I get lost searching for solutions online and inevitably give up on using Emacs altogether.
Emacs is fantastic for Yak Shaving. You can spend hours or days tweaking and modifying its configuration files if you're not careful.
My advice for those seeking to get into Emacs: start from scratch. Learn how to split your custom.el from your init.el, and make sure you're using git to manage those files. Then start slowly and install org-mode from source and go from there:
8 │ ;; Save customizations in a different file. Prevents this file being
9 │ ;; modified by Emacs.
10 │ ;;; Code:
11 │ (setq custom-file (expand-file-name "custom.el" user-emacs-directory))
12 │ (when (file-exists-p custom-file)
13 │ (load custom-file))
14 │
15 │ ;; Before anything else, orgmode:
16 │ (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.orgsrc/org-9.4/lisp")
17 │ (require 'org-loaddefs)
18 │
19 │ ;; First off, we need MELPA and the org-mode repo:
20 │ (require 'package)
21 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t)
22 │ (add-to-list 'package-archives '("org" . "https://orgmode.org/elpa/") t)
23 │ (package-initialize)Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files
#240What I am missing most in Obsidian is this: It does not show the date created of the document. I need to hover over a note to see that info.
This is such a basic and super important info, I am wondering why it‘s neglected so much.
Every note taking app always shows the creation and/or modification date: Evernote, Bear, Ulysses, and every other app I know.
Also the aesthetics is not on par with Bear or Ulysses.
Finally, I tried to import my Roam Research notes into it. Ended up with thousands of empty pages that were just tags in Roam.
By the way: Obsidian users aggressively try to convince users of other tools how superior it is, on Reddit forums for various note taking apps and even on twitter. Haven’t seen this behaviour, even from vim or Emacs lovers.