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Why I Like Obsidian

ddanieltan.com

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Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#341

Post by ezst »

eternityforest wrote: post #334
ezst wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Looks really cool, aside from the lack of Android support or a managed cloud option. For Android, you can use trilium as a PWA currently, I do that and it's not bad at all, but offline isn't supported yet. I would say that the UX through the PWA isn't worse than that of Obsidian. If offline on your phone is a requirement, you should be able to run trilium server there (haven't tried): https://github.com/Nriver/awes…

That is a really good price for sure! Android Server+Hosted Cloud Server+PWA seems a bit hacky though. And it's hard to beat free when you're on a low budget. Keep also has some fairly unmatched deep integrations with Assistant and Wear OS. It looks really nice for people who already mostly take notes on the computer and don't use any Google spy features anyway.

> Android Server+Hosted Cloud Server+PWA seems a bit hacky though. And it's hard to beat free when you're on a low budget.

I self-host, so for me the practical free, sustainable option with all features included is Trilium. I'm generally wary of the freemium core + (no so) optional paid features + early access plans paid towards companies which haven't turned a profit yet. After all, that's how many people are now discovering Obsidian, while escaping an ever enshitifying Evernote.

> Keep also has some fairly unmatched deep integrations with Assistant and Wear OS.

Absolutely, if I want reminders and things showing up in GMail, Google makes sure that I can't adventure very far away from its walled garden. The type of notes I take in Trilium are personal thoughts, family matters, logs of memorable activities (meetings, meals, outings, …), work notes, summaries, elements to later compose in deliverables or emails, that kind of stuff. And because this is all relational and "typed" in nature ("meetings" implies "places" and "persons", "deliverables" implies "projects" or even "milestones"), Obsidian just doesn't cut it.

Apparently, SiYuan, which is very much a competitor of Obsidian with an opensource core is in the process of implementing a basic version of Notion's "databases" [0]. It still falls short for my needs (no polymorphism to extend types, no cardinality to specify the type and directionality of relations), but it might be a big step forward for many people here having started on Obsidian and bumped into its limitations.

[0] https://liuyun.io/article/1697859885503

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#342

Post by PurpleRamen »

D13Fd wrote: post #337
PurpleRamen wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's how these apps have worked for over a decade. No, because Obsidian is not one of "these apps". It's not using a database, nor an organisational layer to abstract away the data. It's directly reflecting the filesystem and changes in it, and they are even advertising it with this. There is no technical reason for those limitations and bugs at all.

> It's not using a database, nor an organisational layer to abstract away the data. Neither do the other apps I mentioned. They use folders of text files (sometimes with a proprietary database option). They are not general purpose editors meant to just open whatever random file you want on the drive.

> Neither do the other apps I mentioned.

Not true. I don't know about nvalt, but Notational Velocity Bear and Ulysses are all saving things in a local database and sync them to the cloud. And all have their own special view on the data too. There is no direct filesystem-access.

> They are not general purpose editors meant to just open whatever random file

I was talking about folders, not files. And not just any random file or folder, but obviously folders with files supported by Obsidian. Which BTW is also not limited to Markdown, thanks to the plugin-system.

And Obsidian is even supporting this, but only through the clunky Interface.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#343

Post by xescure »

Zambyte wrote: post #158
spinningarrow wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Obsidian may not be FOSS at all, my understanding is that in general needing to purchase a license is orthogonal to whether something is FOSS - correct?

If you cannot use the software however you wish (including for profit) then it is not Free Software. The developers can choose to not distribute the software to you unless you pay, and they can choose to provide support if you pay (which if you're making a profit from their software is a reasonable thing to pay for), but with Free Software the developers cannot decide how you use it once they have distributed it to y…

However, this becomes less significant when the applications are interoperable. If you ever stop using Obsidian, you can just grab your files and use another Markdown editor on top.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#344

Post by rabbitofdeath »

jmhammond wrote: post #315
rabbitofdeath wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the one - it works great. I also use it in iOS, but I needed to use the Working Copy workaround to get the initial sync complete. https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mobile-setting-up-ios-git-based-...

Does the obsidian-git plugin run reliably on iOS? I have a license for Working Copy, so I use that alone with shortcuts, but I’m always interested in a solution with fewer parts.

It does so far - I have not had more than 3 or 4 commits in a single push though so it hasn't broken for me yet. The notes said that if you do have many changes it can run out of memory due to the git plugin it is using.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#346

Post by hiq »

machomaster wrote: post #329
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…

Why not combine both? Make notes in Obsidian, but add the information worth memorizing as Anki cards inside the Obsidian?

What's the point of Obsidian in this case, since all the useful information is already in Anki by definition of "useful" (see previous comment), thus eventually (after a few reviews) in my brain?

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#347

Post by theshrike79 »

al_borland wrote: post #339
theshrike79 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obsidian has the sama problem as Bullet Journaling does. It's really simple and not complicated unless you want it to be, but then you watch a video about one Mega User who is really into the System and get demoralised by the amount of crap and whizbangs you see.

One thing I appreciate about Ryder Carroll‘s original explanation about bullet journals, was that it was pretty simple. It seems it was the Pinterest and other such social media folks who complicated it. I use a semi-bullet journal method in my Obsidian notebook for work, but it’s even more basic than what Ryder Carroll outlined and I don’t care that much. Not caring is extremely helpful.

I have a similar thing, I was a semi-regular BuJoer some years ago but then I noticed that even though I did enjoy the physical action of writing stuff down - I forgot to write things down eventually. The time from idea to finding my notebook and the correct place to write something down was too long.

Now my system is geared towards minimal friction from "crap, I need to remember this" to actually storing it in Obsidian.

Currently I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that activates when I double tap the key on the left side of 1 on my keyboard, which then will activate Obsidian (or start it if needed) and brings it to the front with a QuickAdd dialog where I can write down whatever I was thinking about.

QuickAdd will then append it to an Inbox file with a timestamp. I might take a look at it later or maybe not, but at least it's written down _somewhere_ =)

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#348

Post by rubymamis »

Zambyte wrote: post #283
rubymamis wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so disturbing? The incentives are aligned -> If a specific car model won't be safe, people won't buy it. Also, there is regulation in place. I think we need exactly the right combo in software too. Obsidian is not open source, but you can gauge what they track in their privacy policy. You can try to confirm it using apps like Little Snitch. Also, all their notes are just plaintext so your data is portable.

> If a specific car model won't be safe, people won't buy it. The world is not this black and white. This assumes the customer actually knows all of the pros and cons of available options and is able to take the time to make a decision that best aligns with their values. In practice (at least in the US) we have and infrastructure that makes it practically impossible for many people to live their lives without a car,…

Safety-wise, the chance of choosing a non-safe new car today is very low since they're not on the market (a lot due to current regulation).

> A privacy policy is a pinkie promise. Why depend on something so fragile for such an important function in your life, when there are much more trustworthy options? Logseq, Org Roam, and Joplin immediately come to mind.

Yep, I agree. This is why my own previous note-taking app is completely open source[1]. But this comes with many difficulties, and often times subpar experience compared to closed source apps. That's why I decided to close source my next note taking app[2].

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38584960

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#349

Post by Otternonsenz »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #295
Otternonsenz wrote: post #275

While not my personal knowledge base yet, my personal use case for Obsidian is probably what gives me the most joy for it: as a Dungeon Master’s Worldbuilding Notes / Interactive DM Screen Where I have used pen and paper in the past to track everything, Obsidian has supercharged my ability to sit down and flesh out my homebrew world in a way that was hard to do for myself prior. On top of the ease of writing and link…

A lady that gives a lot of tutorials about Obsidian on YouTube users it as a DM as well. I think she posted a few videos about that usage. Edit: found her: https://youtube.com/@nicolevdh

Nicole is great, and someone who is a fantastic resource for all the cool ways people use the software!

Her and a bunch of others are active on the Obsidian discord, and from the TTRPG specific Obsidian group, they released a fantastic resource in: https://obsidianttrpgtutorials.com/Obsidian+TTRPG+Tutorials/...

It has a lot there, and not every DM needs everything in here. However, I love this resource as another way to understand all the different things you could do with and without plugins.

Re: Why I Like Obsidian

#350

Post by aaarrm »

hughesjj wrote: post #319
Multicomp wrote: post #47

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on your favorite notetaking app OP, it's more than I've done for mine. I'm glad it works for you, the in-between applications trying to do notetaking is a pain. I settled on OneNote because I'm always trying to capture context with my notes, codify my knowledge. Usually that means screenshots, handwriting, file copies, rarely video or audio embeddings. I'm not going to try to convince…

I mean, obsidian has support for audio and video out of the box, you can paste a screenshot into the note, and this all gets synced or published like normal I wrote some generator to scrape a mandarin learning site to download all the audio files, sentences, etc into a markdown table for obsidian. My biggest complaint is that the "master vocab sheet" I made with hundreds (thousands?) Of words+sentences lags like hell…

I believe it's a UX issue for most. Being able to float images to the side of text versus only being able to paste them linearly is a bigger deal than it sounds, organization-wise. And I know there's the canvases but I'm actually not a fan of those either. I don't want infinite in every direction, I just want the ability to move things around in the way that I want within a page-like document.

Honestly I like everything about obsidian except the markdown, but I know for many people that is it's big selling point.

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