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Introduction to Obsidian

bryanhogan.com

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Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#41

Post by nojito »

torben-friis wrote: post #28
iammjm wrote: post #18

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly i…

There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines. Nothing against it, you just need the warning early on to avoid the timesink if you want things done and follow the wrong guide.

>There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby.

More than a hobby. There's entire businesses that are just moving from one system to another and convincing your followers that they have to move too.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#42

Post by highphive »

saxelsen wrote: post #24

Shout out to Joplin ( https://joplinapp.org/ ), which I use on a daily basis. It does most of what Obsidian does but has a free sync version where you just use your cloud drive as the storage. The main thing missing, from what I've found, is that it does do the "notes mind map". But I never really found that useful.

For folks interested, Obsidian also has a free sync option that just uses your cloud drive, you just have to set it up yourself.

It's pretty simple. Just get Google Drive Desktop to mount your Google Drive to your filesystem, then point obsidian to work within that mounted directory.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#43

Post by bryanhogan »

echelon wrote: post #9

Three asks for Obsidian to make it my #1 tool (and I mean #1 tool): - First-class multi-vault support. It's difficult to keep personal / business / team separate. I want to keep shared notes for my team, but it's really hard. - First-class git support. The git plugin is dangerous and will overwrite changes from other devices. The mobile git plugin (which requires hacks to even use) is deadly bad with blowing away you…

I would also love better Git support, especially syncing content from my Android phone to a GitHub repository, so faar it never worked well, I tried a few solutions here but wasn't satisfied with any of them.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#44

Post by Freedom2 »

kubb wrote: post #40
iammjm wrote: post #18

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly i…

Honestly with LLMs you don't need an Obsidian anymore. You can just use neovim or emacs. Every feature you need, like search, or linking can be done via plugins or shell commands.

Agreed. I definitely also had a few qualms with the app.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#45

Post by bryanhogan »

echelon wrote: post #9

Three asks for Obsidian to make it my #1 tool (and I mean #1 tool): - First-class multi-vault support. It's difficult to keep personal / business / team separate. I want to keep shared notes for my team, but it's really hard. - First-class git support. The git plugin is dangerous and will overwrite changes from other devices. The mobile git plugin (which requires hacks to even use) is deadly bad with blowing away you…

I have been having a similar need for some sheets data in Obsidian, I was gonna look into writing a plugin to represent a JSON file as a Obsidian Base, but didn't get to that yet.

Have you tried some of the plugins that allow you to open CSV / TSV files within Obsidian?

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#46

Post by bryanhogan »

tech_ken wrote: post #2

> Don’t fall for FOMO marketing or feel anxious. Keep it simple. Obsidian should help you work on other things. Great advice, I tried to get into Obsidian a few weeks ago and could immediately feel myself getting pulled into the "Workflow Optimization Spiral". I love nothing more than fruitlessly tooling with workflow stuff, in place of actually, you know, working. I kind of just decided to set it aside, rather than…

Thank you for the kind words and that the post actually helped! It's exactly the kind of inspiration I wanted to achieve.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#47

Post by joemi »

chaosprint wrote: post #26

I really like Obsidian, but its features are still too much for me. Are there any aesthetically pleasing, faster alternatives that simply render Markdown and LaTeX? It would be even better if it also supported mixed inputs like Obsidian.

You don't have to use _all_ the features. I don't.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#48

Post by redsocksfan45 »

kubb wrote: post #40
iammjm wrote: post #18

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly i…

Honestly with LLMs you don't need an Obsidian anymore. You can just use neovim or emacs. Every feature you need, like search, or linking can be done via plugins or shell commands.

[dead]

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#49

Post by j45 »

iammjm wrote: post #18

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly i…

Tools like obsidian are text files, that you can increasingly connect and organize in different ways.

It's easy to start with the detail when users are looking for their story to match the software.

How people can grow into it can be different, sometimes it's good to just start, and then learn about implementing the other concepts.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#50

Post by tomComb »

saxelsen wrote: post #24

Shout out to Joplin ( https://joplinapp.org/ ), which I use on a daily basis. It does most of what Obsidian does but has a free sync version where you just use your cloud drive as the storage. The main thing missing, from what I've found, is that it does do the "notes mind map". But I never really found that useful.

Joplin looks great, and is open source, but it appears to have one problem: the primary data store is SQLite, not files, and in this AI infected era having plain text files on the local filesystem is really important.

So if I am correct the "cloud drive as the storage" option is syncing with a the local SQLite db and to get local files one would need to be syncing the local db with both the cloud drive and the local filesystem.

With Obsidian I sync from local files direct to a cloud drive.

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