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

obsidian.md

51–60 of 373 posts

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

#51
post #29
post #11

Please tell me this is compatible with Johnny decimals https://johnnydecimal.com/

Why have I never heard of this before? And I'd really like to see some example top-level hierarchies. And I'd ask, still, is is unnecessarily hierarchical? If you only have 10 categories below "20 Finance", why not just stick the (maximum) 10 categories under 20-29 in the top level? You'd still have the conceptual grouping under 2x, but without the indirection.

It does sound very interesting, but designing the system well at the beginning looks quite important (moving categories around later on probably causes large overhead) and difficult to do without experience.

I would also like to see more examples. I'm an academic, if anyone here is also one and has implemented this system I'd be very interested in seeing what your tree looks like!

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

#52
post #45

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

That's a typo. See URL.

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

#54

This looks great. Downloaded. Jotted down some Sunday morning idiocy. Paid for Catalyst. Question: who decided Moldova [1] was a good idea? Was Obsidian.kp taken? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.md

md = markdown

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

#55
post #54

This looks great. Downloaded. Jotted down some Sunday morning idiocy. Paid for Catalyst. Question: who decided Moldova [1] was a good idea? Was Obsidian.kp taken? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.md

md = markdown

> md = markdown

Makes sense. Is (EDIT: the use of the TLD) .md a convention in the markdown community?

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

#56

This looks great. Downloaded. Jotted down some Sunday morning idiocy. Paid for Catalyst. Question: who decided Moldova [1] was a good idea? Was Obsidian.kp taken? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.md

.md is the markdown file extension, so having a .md TLD is a clever and amusing idea imo as Obsidian is, after all, a markdown editor.

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

#57
post #28

I think I've seen this as a vscode extension, right? (For now I personally use vimwiki, instead. I just can't quite leave the vim keybindings for typing.)

No, they have no specific vscode-extension. That would kinda defeat the whole purpose of it. But there are a bunch of markdown-extension doing more or less similar things. But IMHO a dedicated app serves the purpose better so far. VS Code is good, as an editor. But it's not (yet) an app-platform.

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

#58
I have switched to Obsidian and I use multiple vaults for multiple purposes.

One is for work, one is for personal projects and notes.

One for Books and Movies I watched or want to watch.

And one for Zettelkasten[0].

Obsidian is extremely customizable and user-friendly. And to make things even better, which is a must for many people including me, it saves the files as .md in the local storage.

You can even sync it among n devices for free using Box, Sync, Mega, OneDrive, Dropbox or whatever floats your boat.

Just as a quick exercise, I spun up a fully functional Obsidian clone that runs in the browser that works locally, in four hours using React- just in case the company goes under in future. It works great.

[0]: https://zettelkasten.de

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

#59
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.

Joplin is my choice too. I deplore the complicated codebase, unfortunately. I would have made the changes to get better linking, at least in a personal fork, but I could not find the time to commit myself to it.

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

#60
My biggest protip for Obsidian would be to never look at the connections graph. If you've got any kind of "completionist" mindset, it's easy to waste a bunch of time trying to perfectly format your notes so every node has a bunch of connections to other nodes. Once I got out of the habit trying to maximize the amount of backlinks in each note, it became a useful tool instead of a chore.
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