Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been waiting for and nvAlt/Resophnotes with image file support for 10 years.
[dead]
That has been "coming soon" for years now.
Why I Like Obsidian
351–360 of 376 posts
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t use Obsidian, but I use wikilinks in markdown. Recently I wrote a lightweight alternative to Dataview, which renders directly into the markdown itself. It’s a lightweight standalone script that embeds any references and builds those “recaps” in a more portable way. In case anyone is interested, let me know: https://twitter.com/matteing/status/1746598313745371263
Yea, throw the link to it out here. I was about to write something similar, so you’d save me the trouble! ;)
What's your email?
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#353I 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…
Zettelkasten was created for a world which didn't have computers. People are cargo-culting it today without thinking if it still makes sense. Zettelkasten author would not have created it today, because it makes no sense when you have much more efficient ways to index/search information with a computer.
What many people ignore from Ahrens description of Luhmann's Zettelkasten, is that it isn't an indexing system to find pre-existing knowledge/texts. It is the place where he stored his own insight, his own summaries, his own formulation of ideas he found somewhere. The book quotes Luhmann even before the table of contents with "One cannot think without writing." Strictly speaking, this is obviously not true. Metaphorically speaking it is something that many proficient authors have concluded as well. They need to write in order to make progress. And then Luhmann used this one space of notes, the Zettelkasten to work on all his publications. This allowed him to find shared ideas between different projects of him.
I've got the impression that many tried Zettelkasten as the one true note taking system just dumped stuff they found in blog articles into pages in their storage system for later retrieval. Nothing is wrong about that, but that is not Luhmanns idea of Zettelkasten.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#354Thanks 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 love the way OneNote handles images - and the ability to include ink annotations. I wish there was a FOSS equivalent on Linux with a similar UI experience (Obsidian image handling is incredibly clunky), although the improved availability of various exporters from OneNote makes me less leery about committing to a proprietary database format and the risks associated with potential dataloss from a random bug or databa…
Sabre Notes is aiming to get there sooner rather than later. incredible progress last year from basically nothing https://github.com/saber-notes/saber
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#355Obsidian is great. For those looking for an open source alternative (or don't want to pay the Obsidian fees for professional usage) check out Logseq: https://logseq.com/
You can also use Foam, a FOSS VSCode extension that is compatible with the basic markdown files from Obsidian. You can just open your vault in it and it will probably work if you're not using the fancy features in Obsidian.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Not all information needa to be remembered. Most of useful information should just be easily available. It's good to have a single place for all of that with the ability to easily move stuff from one place to another. It saves a lot of time and effort as well as makes everything work in the first place (you are making notes, actively thinking what to write, what is generally important and what is super important to be memorized; that process alone makes your thinking and memory clearer and better).
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Obsid…
I was doing something similar for a particular work function where I had to log things constantly throughout the day. However, since Obsidian simply uses text files, I used a keyboard shortcut to bring up a text prompt, which then appended the text to the correct file (which was based on the current date. This way it didn't matter if Obsidian was open or not, it would all get logged. In theory, I could have switched to a different text editor to manage the notes and kept by automation in place, I like that flexibility.
On the Mac I was using Hammerspoon for this. On Windows it would have been something like AutoHotKey.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#358I 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…
I tried zettlekasten and found I just didn't use it enough to justify the effort involved. Instead I just have an org-mode folder that I dump documents in. I search across them with Deft in Emacs. Sure, the links between documents can be incredibly useful to some people, but I've found I'm more chaotic than that.
I just use "search" on my Obsidian notes, and that's enough for me. Instead of zettelkasten, I would prefer to have AI hooked to my notes, which I can query like "Find my notes about Symfony request life cycle". I don't think it would be a life changer, just a nice addition.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
This one? https://dynalist.io/ Looks like it's still alive and kicking. I guess you're probably upset by a lack of updates or something - luckily upgrading to a paid plan would be a good way to incentivize whoever is developing it to continue working on it, at least at the margin.
I‘ve never been a customer, I‘m using Workflowy. What you missed is that the paid offer didn‘t stop the developers to lose interest and… start Obsidian!
Long-term heavy Workflowy and later Dynalist user here. I am not upset that the developers started working on Obsidian instead, since I see Obsidian as the superior product, which has replaced both Workflowy and Dynalist for me.
Re: Why I Like Obsidian
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Not all information needa to be remembered. Most of useful information should just be easily available. It's good to have a single place for all of that with the ability to easily move stuff from one place to another. It saves a lot of time and effort as well as makes everything work in the first place (you are making notes, actively thinking what to write, what is generally important and what is super important to b…
> Not all information needs to be remembered.
So that's where I'm experimenting with this stance: it's either useful and I'm better off remembering it, or it's useless and I don't even need to write that down (see my first comment in this thread).
> It's good to have a single place for all of that with the ability to easily move stuff from one place to another.
Why aren't our brains better places for this, provided we can retain the information? With SRS such as Anki, the cost of remembering the information on top of writing it down is negligible, and once I remember it, why would I write it down in some other system?