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Introduction to Obsidian

bryanhogan.com

31–40 of 160 posts

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#31
post #18

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly i…

> Add a #tag for better organization.

Honestly, you kind of lose me here. I want to spend exactly zero time organizing things like tags. Literally zero.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#32
I've used Flatnotes for about a year or so and if all you want is to write notes in markdown and search them it doesn't get much simpler. It has tags and decent search, but other than that nothing. Easy to sync or backup though with a single folder of text files.

https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#33
post #18

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly i…

> Add a #tag for better organization. Honestly, you kind of lose me here. I want to spend exactly zero time organizing things like tags. Literally zero.

Then don't. Obsidian's search is plenty good enough to find that note after.

Obsidian is the simplest thing in the world. Write text.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#34

Shout out to Joplin ( https://joplinapp.org/ ), which I use on a daily basis. It does most of what Obsidian does but has a free sync version where you just use your cloud drive as the storage. The main thing missing, from what I've found, is that it does do the "notes mind map". But I never really found that useful.

Isn't it also missing nested folders? I tried Joplin, but no nested folders was a huge disappointment for me.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#35
I recently setup Obsidian thinking of it as an easy note taking system with self-hosted sync that Claude can read from.

I'm still building the habit for using it instead of scattering notes in text documents or self-DMs on various platforms, but during setup, the complexity was concerning, since I associate complexity in this kind of system with fragility. For now I am still in the exploring phase, so not ruling it out yet.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#36
post #18

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly i…

There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines. Nothing against it, you just need the warning early on to avoid the timesink if you want things done and follow the wrong guide.

It really baffles me that a forum full of people who casually deep dive into all corners of tech regardless of its “usefulness” can’t understand people might want to do the same with their personal notetaking or organization.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#37
I first struggled with it, gave it another try couple of years later and now using it on a daily basis as a key work tool to organize my knowledge, like code snippets, documentation, roadmaps...

For me, the 2 most powerful aspects are: - as mentioned in the article, there is no pricing plan, no limits, no enshittification or feature creep... Fully usable from now to eternity

- md format! So damn easy to export it to a proper pdf file, to copy it into a html page converter etc.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#38
post #34

Shout out to Joplin ( https://joplinapp.org/ ), which I use on a daily basis. It does most of what Obsidian does but has a free sync version where you just use your cloud drive as the storage. The main thing missing, from what I've found, is that it does do the "notes mind map". But I never really found that useful.

Isn't it also missing nested folders? I tried Joplin, but no nested folders was a huge disappointment for me.

It has nested folders. But it will continue to have the problem of not being exactly whatever you are using now.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#40
post #18

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly i…

Honestly with LLMs you don't need an Obsidian anymore. You can just use neovim or emacs. Every feature you need, like search, or linking can be done via plugins or shell commands.
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