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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#351

Post by Jarwain »

ezst wrote: post #173
Jarwain wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trillium looks great! I'm curious if it has an outliner mode or something similar? I currently use logseq and the two features I love are how each bullet/block is its own thing that can be cross-referenced and embedded in other blocks and pages, and that my workflow is essentially to have daily journal pages I dump everything into and tag and references/crossreferences are automatically handled and linked to build ou…

> I've noticed that trillium has hierarchical notes; is there a view to look at an item higher on the tree and have it also have the contents of all its children? You are right that the "atom" of content is the block in an outliner and the Note in Trilium. If you can tolerate⁰ the coarser-granularity, you can make Trilium behave pretty closely to an outliner: notes can be embedded within notes, either manually, or vi…

Book is exactly what I was thinking of!

I think my only other question is around my preferred "Daily Journal" workflow and unreferenced tags

On one hand I feel some surprise that you're noting a distinction between metadata/tags for collections of notes vs collections of blocks. On the other hand, it's a bit of a peeve of mine that there's a distinction between "pages" and "blocks" in logseq when it comes to linking & referencing.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#352

Post by Helmut10001 »

Most note-taking apps share the same fate: they either become obsolete over time (due to unsupported operating systems, security issues, or discontinued drivers) or end up locking you into a proprietary ecosystem.

My solution was to move to a file-based system — using plain folders, files, symlinks, and relative links. The filesystem is one of the most fundamental and enduring parts of computing infrastructure, which means I can rely on accessing my notes the same way 20+ years from now. It also allows me to plug in containerized tools for viewing or editing notes, without being tied to a specific app. Filesystem APIs are incredibly stable — basic commands like mkdir won’t suddenly be locked behind a subscription.

Plus, there are plenty of options for syncing and real-time collaboration, many of which are self-hostable and vendor-neutral.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#353

Post by esskay »

I long for the days of a note taking / personal "data store" system that isnt a pain in the arse to use. I really couldn't give a damn about apps i need to tweak like craxy or constantly maintain to work how I want. Obsidian is good but its just massive overkill for someone who just wants to wright stuff down and have it securely stored, and accessible anywhere anytime its needed.

The second someone says "oh just set up X server and add Y plugin and tweak Z settings" you've lost the whole point of the thing.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#354

Post by melodyogonna »

Obsidian is so useful to me, I don't mind paying for the sync to support Obsidian dev.

The notes being markdown is also very useful, I spend most of my time in a text editor, so I installed a Neovim plugin that works a bit like Obsidian [1]. So, for simple note-taking, I don't have to open Obsidian at all. It comes in useful when I need to use the massive collection of plugins, especially Excalidraw.

1. https://github.com/epwalsh/obsidian.nvim

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#355

Post by tnolet »

Very curious to hear from avid note takers: is it a habit? (maybe addiction?) is it just a tool to do you work better? Is it for fun? Why the elaborate setups (Git + Wireguard etc.)

Sincerely, not-trolling, from a bare minimum note taker.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#356

Post by yathaid »

> Obsidian charges $8 a month to access the same notes across multiple devices. While not a huge amount for such a useful app, it adds up to an eye-watering amount - almost $1,000 if I planned to use Obsidian for a decade.

This highlights one of my personal bugbears. People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments; even though the net sum is small in comparison to other things that they wouldn't think twice to pay for.

A $5 latte every workday comes to (260 * 5) $1300 annually. Obsidian sync is $96. Why would you not pay this amount for a tool you use everyday?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#358

Post by joshjob42 »

swah wrote: post #175
iLemming wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Younger folk and beginners keep ignoring Emacs (and Lisp in general), without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing. The profound difference lies in ontological fungibility – Emacs isn’t software you use, but cognitive clay that becomes an extension of your mind’s operating system. Where any specialized app is inevitably doomed to constrain you to some kind of constructed…

(Long time Emacs user, abandoned since VSCode became a thing because it hurt my wrists so much.) Do you think what you're talking about is hard to demo? "- The act of writing is programming your environment (Org markup becomes executable functions) - Tools aren't discrete entities but fluid expressions of your current mental state (e.g., I can run a shell command piping it to grep and then pipe the results into a tex…

Did you use evil mode? I am basically just running Spacemacs and I don't often need to use ctrl and option most of the time by leveraging the modal editing.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#360

Post by 8fingerlouie »

trinsic2 wrote: post #320
8fingerlouie wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But lets be realistic, 1000$ over 10 years is nothing Where is the limit ? While $100/year maybe doesn't sound like much, it's hardly the only subscription service you have, and they all add up, from your mail provider, office suite, cloud storage, streaming services, phone bills, internet service, etc. Personally I find $100/year to edit notes on my phone to be a bit much, but then again, I just use iOS Notes. I a…

Yeah I just wanted to chime in here on what i see as a world view problem that might need to be updated with the times. I see your point about everything being subscription based. There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based. But there are some developers that I think should be supported on a regular basis. Especially obsidian because they develop one product and continually wo…

> There are definitely software out there that do not deserve to be subscription based

My personal experience with software switching to a subscription model is that often that means you will now only get "bugfixes", and new features are usually few and far apart.

There's no longer any incentive to produce major versions with new breaking features, and instead it just turns into a maintenance product, if you even get that.

An Example could be Sublime Text, that while not traditionally subscription based, the license expires after 3-4 years, and needs to be renewed, so it's just a 3-4 year subscription. It was released in May 2021, and receives 1-2 updates yearly, and every update since 2021 has been "fixes" or "improvements". Nothing new has been added for 4 years.

Another example could be Arq Backup. Version 7 was released in February 2021, and while the changelog does have some "new feature" entries, those are mostly just "added the possibility to backup to X service". It does however see much more frequent updates than Sublime Text.

Don't get me wrong, bugfixes and improvements are great, but I expect new features as well. I expect the product to be moving forward, keeping up with current "best practice" standards, and not just turn into a money pit for the developer, just pushing out the obligatory "yeah, we fixed a few bugs" releases.

There are of course also various projects that do things "well enough" that new major releases are not required, like NextDNS. NextDNS works well, and is priced cheap enough to rival the electricity consumption price of a Raspberry Pi running at home. They don't have big releases, are mostly doing maitenance releases, but for the cost, and function of the service that is OK.

And no, not all software falls into this category, and there are plenty of great software that i pay for, which is actively maintained.

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