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Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

obsidian.md

361–370 of 578 posts

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#361

A few tips for those new to Obsidian: - Don't rush to install a bunch of plugins. Start with the defaults, learn Obisidian and add only what you need. It is easy for some to spend more time tweaking Obsidian than actually using it. - If you're a macOS user, check out the Minimal theme, which will make Obsidian feel more native. -> https://minimal.guide/Home - When you are ready for plugins, you may want Omnisearch[1]…

"Start with the defaults, learn _______ and add only what you need."

This should be universal advice for everything.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another metric idea for you: "Time taken after creation to search for and open this note again" This can show how useful your notes are and which are most useful.

> how useful your notes are While I think it's an interesting metric, it wouldn't capture the utility of my notes for me (emphasis on "for me", since everyone's probably different when it comes to notes). Often, the act of writing the note helps better commit what I'm writing to memory. At a super rough estimate I'd say that 80% of the utility of note-taking is the act of producing the note itself, and only 20% of th…

That's definitely an exponential distribution. I'm a data scientist and I keep going back to a few key notes over and over and adding little bits. I tried to track things like ideas, tasks, and just journaling, but it just didn't fit right. It's unbeatable for my work related stuff though, and the key things for me were mathjax support and being able to paste screenshots directly onto the page. Fantastic product.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#363

Between 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.

One note 2010 is the holy grail for me, nothing can beat that simplicity. Tho … the purple color stil bothers me

The fact runs super fast on any computer makes me wonder why did they downgrade into the current version which is absolute crap

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#364
post #343

I installed Obsidian and did some initial testing, but two things completely threw me off: 1) Basic synchronization is a paid feature and you cannot (or at least could not) set up a private synchronization server. 2) Synchronization depends on the cloud. I simply cannot trust all important information of my life going to an unspecified location in the cloud for synchronization, even if it promises end-to-end encrypti…

Wait I can synchronize with nextcloud just fine. It's just a folder on my drive after all. That said, it's janky on mobile.

That's an understatement. The mobile app is... frankly, kind of a garbage can of usability issues imo, but I love the desktop app, it's pretty great. But until they fix the mobile app I just can't use it.

I'd like to see the mobile app bridge the gap between typical mobile note taking apps and the desktop Obsidian app. Make it easy to create a new note like you would in any other note app, save it where it makes sense to save it, make sync easy to setup, etc. Probably asking too much, but ugh... the mobile app is so bad.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#365
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you try https://logseq.com/ ? I've had not reason to pick freemium Obsidian over open source Logseq.

I tried both and am using Obsidian now. I wanted to use logseq (I felt good about "Obsidian, but open source") but when I tried to find some text in a page I was writing it didn't work. I'm a total logseq noob but as far as I could tell I needed to install an extension/plugin to search through the page, which was weird. Plus, the plugin didn't work for me (I typed in the thing to search for, clicked "go find it" and…

Ctrl+K or the macOS equivalent provides a universal search dialog with a toggle for page-only search.

The UX is extremely lacking, but it's open source, gaining steam, and they recently closed $4mil in funding so I expect it to massively improve over the next two years. Notably, page search should function without needing a dialog+overlay, and should support highlighting/navigating every match.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ELI5 What ever happened to Evernote? because I have a thoughts been killing me in the back of my head: Need a family version but self hosted + cloud which allows for an auto push of notes, pics and calander to your own thing.. basically a family planner.

TLDR- the founder quit, a bunch of suits took over, they gutted the dev team and put the app on life support for years. Bugs piled up and nobody could fix them so they outsourced to a new offshore team who rewrote the whole thing in Electron... which of course was waaay too little, way too late.

You sound like someone i need to talk to email via profile.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#367
post #341

Love love love obsidian. The tool is aesthetically pleasing, built-in vim mode surprisingly well (a few minor glitches with the cursor blinking) — but above all else, the plug-in community takes the cake. Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "sec…

Did you try https://logseq.com/ ? I've had not reason to pick freemium Obsidian over open source Logseq.

I loved Obsidian to death, but felt a bit of friction. As nice as it was, I wasn't getting sucked in and resorted to writing my own bespoke bash program for organized note-taking.

Enter Logseq, and after a 20 minute learning curve, ideas just fly off of my fingertips. I reach for it daily. Can't recommend Logseq enough.

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#368

A few tips for those new to Obsidian: - Don't rush to install a bunch of plugins. Start with the defaults, learn Obisidian and add only what you need. It is easy for some to spend more time tweaking Obsidian than actually using it. - If you're a macOS user, check out the Minimal theme, which will make Obsidian feel more native. -> https://minimal.guide/Home - When you are ready for plugins, you may want Omnisearch[1]…

I wish the minimal theme didn't get rid of switching to the finger cursor when hovering over links.

The cursor is a pointer for links. Do you mean buttons?

Also, you can change the cursor by going to Style Settings > Minimal Advanced Options

Re: Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Thanks for the reminder to check out asciidoctor-pdf! I forgot about it because I was using macOS's default, out-of-date Ruby version for the longest time and the gem required a newer version. I've since figured out how to install and change the default Ruby installation though, so I need to check it out. It's certainly a pain getting my current workflow set up on a new machine (e.g. installing TexLive takes forever for the latex-pdf support in pandoc).
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