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Why I Like Obsidian

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Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#231

Post by tristor »

I've tried to use Obsidian three different times, and I always end up going back to Standard Notes. I love Markdown, I love note-taking with Markdown, but I really just want something that's clean, simple, and fairly basic. I'm very fluent in Markdown and am not trying to do something crazy to munge into a Markdown representation, and I also don't want to deal with a complex plugin architecture to get things done.

Before I used Standard Notes, I was mostly satisfied with a private Github repo, containing Markdown files and NeoVim.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#232

Post by justnotworthit »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #227

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 :)

I've been waiting for and nvAlt/Resophnotes with image file support for 10 years.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#233

Post by smusamashah »

mey wrote: post #221
smusamashah wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Tried it and this canvas is nowhere close to OneNote at the moment. It is very janky if you do try to use it like OneNote.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#234

Post by kstrauser »

JoeJonathan wrote: post #225
kstrauser wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh, interesting! That makes sense, though.

We're all suckers for processes that promise to solve all your problems, aren't we?

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#235

Post by KolenCh »

Jakob wrote: post #177
KolenCh wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One tip I’d have is to go easy on plugins. One can try to explores what are available, but when committing (to have it enabled and relying on it) be cautious about its implications on performance and startup time (there is a setting that can show you plugin load time at every startup.) And as you scales the number of plugins and files, test it on multiple platforms. P.S. I learn this the hard way that each time I ope…

iCloud removes files from local storage randomly and downloading them again is very slow and gets stuck often. I think that is the main reason why obsidian hangs at the start on the iPhone. I have not yet figured out, how to keep iCloud files reliably on local storage on iOS. It seems independent of free storage and file size and is driving me mad. Very sad that Apple does not succeed in syncing files. The same issue…

People using Obsidian Sync said it solves these issues (I guess by using a database rather than directly via file I/Os.)

There are other solutions via plugins too. E.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, or GitHub. There was a post earlier in HN which is a reimplementation of Obsidian Sync, but it seems their reversed engineering uncovered something not secure there and Obsidian soon made a patch breaking that. There might be workarounds to fix it, but I haven't closely follow it.

When I have the time to do the refactoring and cleaning, I will probably choose one of these alternatives (or even an alternative of Obsidian if there are better solutions for me.)

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#236

Post by MichaelNolan »

hiq wrote: post #151

A few weeks ago I started splitting knowledge between that which is worthy enough (for me) to remember via flashcards and spaced repetition, and that which I don't need to even write down anywhere. Meaning, in practice, that I don't feel the need to have a proper note-taking system. I just need proper flashcards, which I already have in Anki. I just started this split so maybe I'll come back to it, realizing limitati…

You’re not alone. My “note taking” is essentially what you described. I do have a single google doc where I paste temporary notes though. This gives me a space where I can properly decide to either delete the content, or ankify it.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#237

Post by hskf »

justnotworthit wrote: post #232
crossroadsguy wrote: post #227

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 :)

I've been waiting for and nvAlt/Resophnotes with image file support for 10 years.

[dead]

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#239

Post by fzil »

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…

> And, please, don't buy one of these $500 Obsidian courses.

It's weird how there's even a large enough market for all of these in the first place.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#240

Post by vondur »

smusamashah wrote: post #166
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…

As a OneNote person for two years now, how do you deal with the added friction of linear notes in Obsidian (or any other plaintext based tool)? In OneNote I can just dump down anything literally anywhere (because each page is an infinite canvas). It feels as easy as having a pen and random free papers. But with my notes increasing, I do want to have some way to manage this data which OneNote fails at. I can do basic…

I use OneNote at work, but it's just for mostly plain text and a few images pasted here and there. However, OneNote seems to get really flaky when the Notebooks themselves become too big or have too many PDF attachments inserted.
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