Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files • Hacker News Board

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#41

Post by eightails » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 11:56 AM UTC

opan wrote: post #37

The comments here made it sound exciting, but it seems like it's proprietary, which is a no-go for me. I'll stick to plain text file notes and the occasional org-mode for now.

As an open-source alternative, Joplin could be worth a look. It's a little different in terms of features, missing a lot of the linking which is kind of key to Obsidian's appeal, so maybe it's closer to Evernote. Still, they're fundamentally the same in terms of being a note-taking app built on folders of markdown files. It's quite actively maintained and improved too.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#42

Post by marco_craveiro » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 11:59 AM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #10

rvieira wrote: post #9

Obsidian is great. I'm a paying supporter (catalyst and sync). Weirdly I started playing with Emacs + org-mode recently (never been an Emacs user before!) and I'm seriously considering making it my exclusive "second brain". Something about org-mode, org-babel, org-jupyter, org-agenda and org-roam that just clicks with me.

Emacs is so customisable that as soon as I want to customise anything, I get lost searching for solutions online and inevitably give up on using Emacs altogether.

I think the biggest problem with Emacs is that you cannot really make sense of a lot of stuff until you start programming elisp in anger. I tried for many years to copy and paste snippets etc, but now I realised you just need to bite the bullet and learn it like any other programming language and be prepared to do "real development" in Emacs. Its very difficult to be a "tourist" in Emacs, IMHO, a lot of things just don't make sense until you became more of a elisp programmer.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#43

Post by Datagenerator » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 12:01 PM UTC

The Open Source solution which serves me well for years has been TiddyWiki (1). Supports Tags and various modes of output. Each page one file or all in one, very open so recursive changes can be applied on the shell in plain files.

(1) https://tiddlywiki.com/

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#44

Post by dunefox » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 12:01 PM UTC

jiggunjer wrote: post #30

Can someone explain what's the benefit of having markdown files instead of e.g. a mysql database like a conventional wiki?

A database isn't a markdown file.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#45

Post by 1f60c » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 12:03 PM UTC

Datagenerator wrote: post #43

The Open Source solution which serves me well for years has been TiddyWiki (1). Supports Tags and various modes of output. Each page one file or all in one, very open so recursive changes can be applied on the shell in plain files. (1) https://tiddlywiki.com/

> TiddyWiki

That's an interesting name for an open source project. :P

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#46

Post by dangirsh » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 12:05 PM UTC

kzrdude wrote: post #24

rvieira wrote: post #9

Obsidian is great. I'm a paying supporter (catalyst and sync). Weirdly I started playing with Emacs + org-mode recently (never been an Emacs user before!) and I'm seriously considering making it my exclusive "second brain". Something about org-mode, org-babel, org-jupyter, org-agenda and org-roam that just clicks with me.

What's org-jupyter? Search engines didn't help me there. I'm interested in any jupyter related tools.

emacs-jupyter

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#47

Post by yogsototh » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 12:08 PM UTC

opan wrote: post #37

The comments here made it sound exciting, but it seems like it's proprietary, which is a no-go for me. I'll stick to plain text file notes and the occasional org-mode for now.

From the description it looks like org-roam would be a good open-source alternative.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#48

Post by Tomte » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 12:10 PM UTC

conradludgate wrote: post #2

I really do need to get started on a personal wiki. I might give this a try. It would be nice if I can get the files into git that I can save to a private github repo (I'm fine paying the one time payment to support them but $8/month seems too much for a simple sync feature)

Dokuwiki is easy to use, mature, stores its data in plain text files (no database needed, or supported). It also shows backlinks out of the box.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#49

Post by d4rkp4ttern » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 12:13 PM UTC

Last I checked there was no good way to do quick capture of articles from mobile iOS to obsidian. Scenario — I come across an article on my iPhone, and I just want to dump title + URL (maybe even the text content) into obsidian. This is a must have for any note taking tool. Anyone have a good workflow for this, please share. Ideally an iOS shortcut.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#50

Post by gala8y » Sun, Oct 17, 2021, 12:18 PM UTC

__bjoernd wrote: post #39

opan wrote: post #37

The comments here made it sound exciting, but it seems like it's proprietary, which is a no-go for me. I'll stick to plain text file notes and the occasional org-mode for now.

It's a fancy frontend for plain-text markdown files stored in a folder tree. Nothing proprietary about it.

Software _is_ proprietary, ie. closed source. I fully understand that this might be off-putting for someone.

Almost all plugins accessible from the app are OSS, though, and Obsidian has a process of checking them and some kind of control, which I don't know details about.