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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#421

Post by ezst »

out_of_protocol wrote: post #387
ezst wrote: post #121

I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward. In my mind and experience, Trili…

Also, Trilium don't have mobile app which is very important for having notes available 24/7. Browser version don't allow offline access and not as convenient as an app

That's correct, there is no official mobile app with full offline sync at the moment, but there are independent efforts underway¹ and more or less involving workarounds².

If you have internet and don't need full offline sync, you should be able to use Trilium decently well today, with the recent responsive theming efforts that went into Trilium Next.

¹: https://github.com/FliegendeWurst/TriliumDroid ²: https://github.com/orgs/TriliumNext/discussions/827

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#423

Post by dunefox »

coolcase wrote: post #395
poulpy123 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People have a mental barrier when it comes to recurring, low-cost payments; It's because they add up. In this specific case, considering OP job and it's heavy use of obsidian, it makes no sense to not pay for the synchro, if only to support the company[1], but if I was paying 8€/month for all software and service I'm using I would be bankrupted immediately. Ironically this hurt open source and companies proposing g…

Also it is competing with a free editor and USB stick that has been around since 2000. That's the anchor. Then now you have Google docs, Dropbox, O365, Notion, Confluence, etc.

I mean, by this definition it's competing with a small paper noteblock and a graphite pencil. Lose the USB and everything is gone, forgo all features of Obsidian, etc.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#425

Post by ezst »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #344
ezst wrote: post #121

I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward. In my mind and experience, Trili…

I think trillium is stashing the notes in a database. Certainly it thinks there is a migration step needed to move files around. The everything markdown feature of obsidian is the dominant one. I can edit the files in emacs when I want to and the sync sorts it out just fine. They're stashed in a fossil repo by one of the machines as a backup because I'm paranoid and that also works fine because it's all ascii files.

Trilium works alongside a SQLite DB. It backs-up your db.sqlite on a regular basis, lets you create manual backups, version-controls each and every note with checkpoints, supports full-encryption, and as soon as you set-up sync between clients/servers, you practically end-up with master-master replicas of your entire notes collection (I have my notes replicated at all time on 3 devices or more). All of this are native, supported features and transparent for the end-user (no offloading to a VCS, no scripting, etc).

Trilium also lets you import/export your whole database as folders of markdown files if you are really into that, I just don't see the point: this is free open-source software, there is no vendor lock-in and no reason to dumb-down the storage layer to text files. But to each their own :-)

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#426

Post by ezst »

flakeoil wrote: post #346
ezst wrote: post #121

I went deep into to the PKMS rabbit hole a year and a half ago, benchmarked Obsidian and many many others, and settled with Trilium¹ which I can only highly recommend. It addresses all the hosting/deployment requirements of OP² without the quirky workarounds mentioned here (syncthing & al), and makes the kind of "lifestyle scripting" this article about very simple and straightforward. In my mind and experience, Trili…

But it doesn't seem to store the notes in text-files on your file system.

I reponded to that in this tread, FYI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44027331

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#427

Post by joseda-hg »

ErrorNoBrain wrote: post #371
microtonal wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, a little bit odd considering that the author is technically savvy enough to write an entire PKMS but didn't seem to consider that you can just check your markdown notes into a git repository and sync with the native android/iOS Obsidian app on a mobile device. Also, Obsidian supports free iCloud sync if you are a Mac and iOS user. I know that's only a subset of users, but a nice option to get Obsidian to sync…

Syncthing... It can do it too handles syncing my pictures too

Wasn't the syncthing android app deprecated relatively recently?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#428

Post by PurpleRamen »

vunderba wrote: post #3

Good article but as a heavy user of Obsidian (and previously Evernote), I would offer some counterpoints: > After some mental gymnastics weighing if I should continue with Obsidian, I found solace when asking myself "Can I see myself using this in 20 years?". I couldn't. The thought of cyclically migrating notes from one PKMS to another every 5 years, as I had done from Evernote to Notion to Obsidian, made me feel ti…

> In point of fact this is actually an argument IN FAVOR of Obsidian. While the editor might be proprietary - the notes themselves are just standard markdown. If somehow all the copies of Obsidian magically disappeared off the earth tomorrow, I could easily switch over to Emacs org mode, VS Code, or literally anything else.

Not really.. This problem runs far deeper than most are willing to see. First, Obsidian is using a personalized flavour of markdown, and seconds, for many heavy features it's leaning strongly on plugins which are prone to break or even die. Obsidian has a vibrant plugin-community, which also seems to die really fast. This becomes even more critical by plugins dying from changes in Obsidian itself. So while Obsidian is in theory a nice open app, it's longevity-aspect is really awful. I already had many features and plugins dying in the last years, and who know how much more will break in the next 20 years. Simply switching to another text-editor will not do, because they won't offer the missing features. So at best, you are just not losing your data, but you still won't have the tooling to use them.

Someone creating their own system, where they have full control over everything, even if they will have to sacrifice some benefit in the short run, just makes sense in a bigger picture.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#429

Post by datadrivenangel »

krick wrote: post #279
braden-lk wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big obsidian fan, but I will say: notes being “just markdown” is not entirely true depending on how you use obsidian. If you are a plug-in heavy user, and those plugins introduce new syntax and lots of JavaScript functionality, you are accumulating a bespoke custom syntax that only works on your copy of obsidian with your set of plugins. Obsidian and those plugins are still free and are a huge benefit, but just somet…

Very much this. I cannot even fully agree with "plug-in heavy" remark: I mean, how heavy must it be, to be considered "plug-in heavy"? I consciously tried to limit plugin usage. But it really gets pretty wild soon. I was relatively lean for maybe the first 6 months, but when some patterns of how I use it become clear enough, it becomes pretty evident how inefficient many super-common situations are and how I can fix…

I've been using Obsidian for years now and besides some experiments use zero plugins. What inefficient patterns are you running into?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#430

Post by Daril »

I think an PKMS is strictly related to how each of us thinks. It's similar to project management/organizer tools. I also created my own (https://brainminder.it/) based on how I think: I prefer to organize items by type with different fields that I can add and search. Instead of simply collecting ideas and thoughts, I'm trying to build a system that can help me evaluate leveraging what I've entered.
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