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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#481

Post by iLemming »

deafpolygon wrote: post #479
grep_name wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People definitely sleep on emacs, which is a shame, but I do get it. I switched to emacs fulltime for coding for my work a few years ago, and really had it tailored to my preferences but drift (that took just slightly too long for me to keep up with while on the job) combined with AI features in other editors led me to land on Zed for code, which saddened me but is probably the best fit for coding. However, Org-Mode…

Which is why I've settled on neovim; I've written my code to be as modular as possible, so I can pull it in an CLI program if needs be.

Neovim is a text editor. You can't compare Emacs with just a text editor. Just like you can't compare Emacs with a browser, music player, note-taking app, email client, etc. Emacs, first and foremost, is a Lisp REPL, with an embedded text editor. Without deeply understanding and respecting this aspect it is difficult to appreciate what Emacs could be, what you can do with it.

Imagine this — one morning I was watching my colleague showing me a bunch of things over a Zoom video, and I didn't feel comfortable interrupting him with "wait, don't scroll away, I didn't get that, allow me to read it", "hold on, I'm taking notes", etc. I sacrificed my lunch break to write a small Elisp command that runs tesseract to OCR the image in the clipboard. Now, I don't even have to ask my colleagues for explanations or tell them to share the url they are currently browsing — I can just grab it with a couple of keystrokes to make a note. And that's just one, single, isolated example. It cost me twenty minutes of my time. Twenty minutes of investment that paid itself many times over already. And I have tons of similar examples.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#482

Post by deafpolygon »

iLemming wrote: post #481
deafpolygon wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why I've settled on neovim; I've written my code to be as modular as possible, so I can pull it in an CLI program if needs be.

Neovim is a text editor. You can't compare Emacs with just a text editor. Just like you can't compare Emacs with a browser, music player, note-taking app, email client, etc. Emacs, first and foremost, is a Lisp REPL, with an embedded text editor. Without deeply understanding and respecting this aspect it is difficult to appreciate what Emacs could be, what you can do with it. Imagine this — one morning I was watching…

And this is why I stay away from eMacs.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#483

Post by Arch-TK »

thequux wrote: post #188
Arch-TK wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you automate it to start on networks which are not yours? This is like the only piece of the puzzle for me.

Set the AllowedIPs wireguard setting (and/or the route, if you can set that separately) to one larger than your home network (i.e., if your home network is 192.168.1.0/24, use 192.168.0.0/23). Then, block wireguard packets from the internal network on your router. Then the tunnel will always be running; it just won't be used when you're at home because there's a more specific route

But this will also break whenever there's any more specific route, no?

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#484

Post by Arch-TK »

runjake wrote: post #187
Arch-TK wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you automate it to start on networks which are not yours? This is like the only piece of the puzzle for me.

For the Tailscale app on Apple platforms it’s called VPN On Demand. Here's how you can configure it. https://tailscale.com/kb/1291/ios-vpn-on-demand

Tailscale is built on wireguard but it is not just wireguard. I want a wireguard only solution.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#485

Post by Arch-TK »

Arch-TK wrote: post #170
caconym_ wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1. I have Wireguard set up on all my mobile devices and configured to automatically start when connecting to any wifi that isn't mine, so I can take my devices anywhere and I'm still on my home LAN. It works seamlessly and flawlessly. I self-host a lot of services, and without Wireguard (or equivalent), remote access just wouldn't be realistic.

How did you automate it to start on networks which are not yours? This is like the only piece of the puzzle for me.

To answer my own question, looks like there's WG Tunnel[0] on android which does what I need.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zaneschepk...

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#486

Post by agambrahma »

I'm assuming a lot of interest in Obsidian stems from (1) having underlying plaintext docs, and (2) preferring the doc-as-note unit

If you ever relax these constraints, Tana is a great mix.

I'd call it a mix of Roam + Notion.

Now that it's in GA, easy to recommend too.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#487

Post by rubymamis »

I also built my own note-taking app[1] out of frustration of existing apps, so I can relate to the author.

I wanted:

- A flexible block editor like Notion.

- That runs natively and FAST (unlike Notion).

- Where the underlying data is always plain text (Markdown formatted).

I wrote about its development on my blog[2].

[1] http://get-notes.com

[2] https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#488

Post by dtkav »

bryanhogan wrote: post #195
williamsss wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! Agreed Git can be used to sync your notes. Its a great solution for those comfortable putting their notes into a Git repo like Github. I wasn't comfortable with that however. Currently vetting a way to sync my database files with my markdown files on my laptop, so it functions similar to Obsidian. I enjoy Vim too much to work constrained to Directus' markdown editor!

Common ways to sync Obsidian are through cloud tools (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.), SyncThing Fork or Git. I'd recommend you to look into SyncThing Fork or a similar tool if you never want your notes to leave your own server. I wrote about ways to sync Obsidian here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian

If you need multiplayer sync, I've been working on a plugin that makes Obsidian real-time multiplayer (like google docs) called Relay [0]. A lot of our users use it in combination with SyncThing to keep it entirely free for up to 3 users (we also offer a paid plan with attachment storage and more seats).

[0] https://relay.md

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#489

Post by iLemming »

deafpolygon wrote: post #482
iLemming wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neovim is a text editor. You can't compare Emacs with just a text editor. Just like you can't compare Emacs with a browser, music player, note-taking app, email client, etc. Emacs, first and foremost, is a Lisp REPL, with an embedded text editor. Without deeply understanding and respecting this aspect it is difficult to appreciate what Emacs could be, what you can do with it. Imagine this — one morning I was watching…

And this is why I stay away from eMacs.

"Staying away" implies understanding the perils or benefits, I don't think you ever fully understood either. My point is not to bash on your choice of an editor — I use Neovim myself (it serves me well occasionally).

You "stay away" from Emacs most likely because you don't know any better. Do you use your editor to read and annotate pdfs? Or watch videos? Or manage the library of your ebooks? Or track your expenses? Or control project management like Jira? Or keep your knowledge base and note-taking? Or interact with LLMs? Or explore APIs like Postman? Or keep your spaced repetition flash cards like Anki? Or use it for chat over platforms like Telegram and Slack? Or find and read RFCs and manpages? Or to perform web-search, search through your browser history, Wikipedia, Youtube? Do you have etymology lookup, thesaurus, dictionaries, translation? Or to order pizza? Or measure distances between coordinates on a map? Automate things based on solar calendar or moon phases? Manage all your configs, aka dotfiles? List, browse and code review Pull Requests, etc., etc.

Now tell me, what a sane person ever exposed to all this usefulness would ever reject it? Only those who never had patience to reach it, or those who are oblivious to the possibilities.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#490

Post by iLemming »

grep_name wrote: post #305
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…

People definitely sleep on emacs, which is a shame, but I do get it. I switched to emacs fulltime for coding for my work a few years ago, and really had it tailored to my preferences but drift (that took just slightly too long for me to keep up with while on the job) combined with AI features in other editors led me to land on Zed for code, which saddened me but is probably the best fit for coding. However, Org-Mode…

> I really wish org-mode and org-roam's functions were callable outside of emacs

What are you even talking about? It's like wishing for java programs to be able to execute without JVM, or Erlang-code without BEAM. While that's theoretically possible to a certain degree (using Graal and Lumen), it's not easily achievable.

Org-mode is written in Elisp, of course it needs Emacs to run. You just need Emacs executable and you can absolutely run scripts in batch mode. I have done it many times, running tests on GitHub Actions, etc.

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