I would love to see Obsidian for teams. There is no knowledge app as elegant as obsidian, it could change team wikis forever.
Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
321–330 of 578 posts
Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm very very very disorganized by nature. Some people I know seem to be organized at birth. All the systems I put are really just mechanisms are really aspiration, ways for me to emulate their behavior, keep me accountable, and gamify it a bit.
That's awesome. Personally I found that I end up spending too much time on configurations and tinkering with the notes, so I end up going for the simplest system I can.
There it is! I am with you 100%. All of these massive plugin systems are a giant time suck. You spend soooo much time just setting things up only to forget the little stuff you need to do when something breaks. Every plugin I have installed requires some level of configuration. The more feature rich plugins (with no surprise there) are basically apps in and of themselves.
I keep hearing praise about this being a simple app, but I found it to be very fiddly if you want more than just markdown rendered in your editor. Lots and lots of time to get things working/configured.
Sync has been a massive PITA for me with Obsidian. Unless you are willing to pay, there is going to be pain there eventually. I had similar problems with OneNote, but those sync problems have mostly disappeared. Further, OneNote's handwriting experience is really good. It is very easy to export all notes from OneNote to Markdown with Pandoc, so while I may be "locked" in, I can "get out" if I want.
Edit: So thank you Obsidian for helping me convert my notes in OneNote to markdown to try you out! I now have a verified escape hatch if I should ever need it. However, I am not sticking around. Too much trouble for little stuff and OneNote is just a really good all arounder.
Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
#323I found that in my role I was task switching into different domains and have a lot of trouble remembering the details a various deep dives and at first tried OneNote, Evernote, etc but had issues with each, mostly the concern that the storage formats were incompatible and so I would be held hostage by whichever app I chose.
I went searching for something I could store in the cloud and locally and could understand markdown. Lo and behold Obsidian kept coming up in recommendations. I've been using it for 3 months now and I love that it uses simple filesystem heirarchies to store the .md files. I can put it into a git repo and fit it neatly into my existing workflow. It is basically the perfect note taking app for me. Well done and keep up the good work!
Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thoughts exactly. It sounds cool and I will try it, but even at this moment I'm not sure how is this different then for example OneNote. Again, don't want to sound disrespectful and I will definitely try the tool.
As a former OneNote user who moved to Obsidian, I would say it's like comparing a go kart and luxury sedan. They both technically get you where you're going if you try hard enough. And if you're not going very far maybe all you need is a go kart. My obsidian has turned into a personal Wikipedia and it's crazy how much it's improved my efficiency.
Can you explain what it has that onenote, evernote, notion etc doesn't?
Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
#325I stopped using it due to the fact that it is like Vim for Microsoft Word, it takes more time to use, has less features than the original and hurts your sanity
Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
#326Between Obsidian, Roam, Amplenote, and Reflect it has certainly been a golden age for note taking over the last few years. It's hard to remember that it was only 5 years ago that second generation note apps like Evernote, Notion and Bear were the only viable options unless you wanted a 1st gen app like OneNote or Workflowy. What might be most interesting about the new set of fast moving note apps is that all seem to…
Seems more like a dark age. Obsidian makes the fans on my 4 ghz laptop go crazy. And in some ways (integration with email and tasks) it has less functionality than One Note 2010. And Obsidian has a PDF view and PDF annotations, but you can’t search in it? I’m using Org mode with emacs just so I can have cross references into PDFs and emails in my notes.
There is very little criticism of Obsidian here, but you definitely pointed a few out. I am a OneNote user and Obsidian doesn't really compare to OneNote. If you read a lot of papers, you can have OneNote OCR the text and make it searchable.
Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have tried Joplin a little bit and found the UI of Obsidian much friendlier, also the plugin ecosystem is very active. Another main difference is how Obsidian works using the 'bunch of Markdown files' vs. the database approach Joplin uses. Also see this earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808003 .
Joplin stores files as separate markdown files, and the database is just an index for search and metadata. I'm not a huge fan of Joplin's UX, but not having to pay for sync (and being able to choose the backend for sync) is important enough to me that it is a differentiator greater than the overall UX. I can point all of my Joplin installs to the same S3 bucket and boom done. I'm hearing that with Obsidian you can us…
I have just setup Obsidian with syncthing and works like magic.
Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you prefer Obsidian over Logseq for?
Also not OP, but personally I have a few gripes with Logseq: - No export to PDF. There's a community plugin, but it's not great. The workaround is to export to HTML and print to PDF, but there's no real iOS option there. - Managing images and other attachments are a mess. Using the "upload an asset" method gives it a random filename that if the app fails to save the page correctly, you either dig through the folder s…
Fellow AsciiDoc supporter. I want an AsciiDoc note taking app so badly too. So many awesome features in AsciiDoc that blow markdown out of the water. I use asciidoc-pdf for doc/report generation and the workflow is so smooth.
- Includes/embeds (reference your source code by line range(s)
- Complex table support + the ability to embed CSV (automatic headers)
- Frontmatter as a first class citizen
- Macros (Variables) that can be referenced across documents
- Numerous Diagram parsing libraries (embed pretty much any diagram-as-code language)
I've had the same thoughts on building a Dendron type extension for AsciiDoc (AsciiDoc vscode plugin is fairly robust). Really would just need to hammer out some front matter parsing to get basic functionality.
Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
#329Love the 1.0 on iPad! The tabbed interface (and weird history behavior when working with splits) was one of my biggest hiccups with the old version. The new one interface has smoother animations and behaves better. Wish you added multiple window support on iPad, but that's super minor. I know that Obsidian has roots as "database is a directory of markdown files", but I will say that the last remaining feature request…
You can do something like this with Obsidian Git. If your vault is synced to Git then you can roll back to any commit in the history and return to that overall state of your vault.
Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app
#330Looks like the help docs [1] are an example of what Obsidian looks like when published?
I found it strange that what I would consider to be the help site's table of contents (on the left) is in alphabetical order, somewhat like an index, instead of being arranged in a logical outline like a book's table of contents.
Meanwhile, what's labelled as the "table of contents" on the right is actually just the headings in the current page.