I hope Obsidian has a headless SDK running outside Obsidian that allows devs to read the vault and do various analysis and automation. With this kind of structured data there are a lot of potential use cases. The obsidian binary limitation is a roadblock there.
Obsidian Bases
51–60 of 259 posts
Re: Obsidian Bases
#52I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it. For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be. A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch". Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy…
The default search is not great and the syntax of the dataview plugin is not amazingly well designed. Even the author of dataview admitted to that.
The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik
Re: Obsidian Bases
#53I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it. For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be. A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch". Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy…
No “hey idiot” but for what it’s worth: are you making things too complicated? It almost feels like you’re a bit distracted by all the dimensions of data you want to track. Could this all be one page with a bulleted list, each one might have sub bullets if you care to record things like who shared it and other notes? You can just Ctrl+F for “wife” when you need that sub query.
Re: Obsidian Bases
#54This is slick. Does anyone know what JS library (presumably) they are using to display, filter, sort the table?
This is beyond slick. I'm finally able to kill Notion (good riddance - I never liked it!), and if it can handle larger tables then I'll stop using Google Suite as well. My last request of the Obsidian team is a better git plugin. Their official built-in sync product is fine, but I'd still like to manage my own versioning so I can use automations. The currently available git plugin is extremely dangerous (!!!) if set…
Speaking as a superficial git user, can you say why not simply git init on the vault is enough to use it?
Why is a plugin necessary?
Re: Obsidian Bases
#55For those curious, this feature is just now publicly launching and before it was only available to people who paid for early access. The Reddit thread has some good discussion about the feature https://old.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1mtxh52/obsidia...
On a side note, the docs don't seem to mention if this is possible but does anyone know how to use a template or set a default frontmatter (like created date) when using the "new" button in a Base?
The solution I used before bases is eh... pretty hacky.
```meta-bind-js-view {memory^inputText} as title --- const toShow = context.bound.title || "TKTK"; const str = `\`\`\`meta-bind-button label: New Project Idea - ${toShow} icon: "" hidden: false class: "" tooltip: "" id: "" style: primary actions: - type: templaterCreateNote templateFile: Templates/Project.md folderPath: Project Ideas fileName: ${toShow} openNote: true \`\`\``; return engine.markdown.create(str) ```
Re: Obsidian Bases
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rows are individual Markdown files and the columns are YAML frontmatter properties in those files. There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension. The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to…
Hmm... so I can't use this to render and filter a table with 10k rows without having 10k markdown files? If I understand correctly, the intention seems to be "curated list of links" which the user can sort, filter, etc when viewing. I guess that's cool, if you use Obsidian lots and have many notes/links - but when I clicked the article and saw the table I was hoping for a "dataframe" plugin for .md (much like how mer…
Have you ever tried the Dataview plugin?
It allows inline blocks in the `key:: value` format, as well as frontmatter-based data (sort of what Bases are doing) and probably even more.
Re: Obsidian Bases
#57Wow, I remember when this feature was planned/announced. It's great to see first class support for the Dataview-type workflows. I hope the API has support to allow extensions---I see that it is on the Roadmap[0]. I'm particularly interested to see how this integrates with Canvas and other note types. [0]: https://obsidian.md/roadmap/
You can embed a base in a canvas, and you can list canvases in a base.
Hey, thanks for the reply. Big fan of your work! Cheers.
Re: Obsidian Bases
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rows are individual Markdown files and the columns are YAML frontmatter properties in those files. There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension. The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to…
Hmm... so I can't use this to render and filter a table with 10k rows without having 10k markdown files? If I understand correctly, the intention seems to be "curated list of links" which the user can sort, filter, etc when viewing. I guess that's cool, if you use Obsidian lots and have many notes/links - but when I clicked the article and saw the table I was hoping for a "dataframe" plugin for .md (much like how mer…
I think what you're trying to describe is a Jupyter notebook but in a slimmer package. Maybe marimo or quarto? Maybe there are already notebook viewers out there (on GitHub?) that only allow view or edit without code execution, if that suits your needs.
Re: Obsidian Bases
#59I hope Obsidian has a headless SDK running outside Obsidian that allows devs to read the vault and do various analysis and automation. With this kind of structured data there are a lot of potential use cases. The obsidian binary limitation is a roadblock there.
Because the data is front matter you can get it into other systems pretty easily but an sdk for executing the views seems really key
Re: Obsidian Bases
#60I've been using bases (in beta) for a month or so for the vault I keep for the notes for each of the (many) D&D/ttrpg campaigns I play in, and it's really made it a ton easier to get an overview of e.g. the many different NPCs we meet and interact with, and the relevant info (name/pronouns/pic/race/class/etc) all in one place. The Obsidian dev team has been really responsive to feedback from those of us in the beta,…
I also made pretty heavy use of plugins to manage PCs, NPCs, encounters, items (!!), custom tables, maps, and setting details in a single campaign. Led to a lot of bug reports for the D&D-specific plugins, but Dataview worked like a charm.
Having a more Obsidian-native interface for managing all of that is. Like other commenters, would definitely watch a video of you sharing your Obsidian "build" for that use-case.