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Introduction to Obsidian

bryanhogan.com

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Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#51

Post by bryanhogan »

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…

Not defending some of the not that amazing Obsidian courses or similar out there, but it sounds like you already have a lot of pre-existing knowledge and an approach that works for you, so as I said in the post, keep using that!

You know about markdown syntax, about #tags, about [[linking]], but a lot of people who first hear of Obsidian don't.

Part of what inspired my post was to help people who don't need the extra complexity of a bottom-up note system, Zettelkasten, ever-green notes, atomic notes or other areas of Obsidian, but also to give direction to someone wants to explore these.

For example I'm very happy with my bottom-up approach for knowledge notes, I have been using it for multiple years now and I can still find the things I need, and it doesn't feel messy or anything.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#52

Post by raincole »

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.

Because before LLMs you couldn't use neovim? Emacs's search feature was vide coded in 2024? How is the first half of your comment even related to the second half.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#53

Post by philips »

I love Obsidian, have written a popular plugin, and my wife and I use it for TODO lists and various planning.

However, every few weeks the official Obsidian sync makes an absolute mess of our shopping list (which has fairly frequent edits and deletions across our laptops and phones). I have no idea how to fix it.

This thread shows other users having the exact same issue as us: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-sync-incorrectly-duplic...

If it wasn't for this one issue I would be able to strongly recommend the tool but as it is now I just tell people it sort of works and I am mildly happy.

To be fair I don't think any of the popular alternatives like logseq or joplin even attempt to do automatic file merges and just dump files into a conflict mode.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#54

Post by packetlost »

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.

This was the case before Obsidian existed, see Org-mode, vimwiki, etc.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#55

Post by browningstreet »

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.

Interfaces matter.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#56

Post by bryanhogan »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #31
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…

> Add a #tag for better organization. Honestly, you kind of lose me here. I want to spend exactly zero time organizing things like tags. Literally zero.

I also much rather use [[links]] for organization instead of #tags.

I touched a bit on this in the bottom-up / smart notes section.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#57

Post by philips »

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.

Does joplin cloud have a merge algorithm for multi-user edits or does it just punt and do conflict files?

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#58

Post by quibono »

highphive wrote: post #42
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.

Google Drive Desktop will only help if you're on macOS or Windows. I know it's technically possible to mount GDrive on Linux but it's neither pretty nor user-friendly.

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#59

Post by BeetleB »

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…

> Like I know you can add plugins, tweak css to your liking, and basically turn obsidian into an all-encompassing monstrosity to match your particular software kink, but the 80/20 of it all is really pretty basic to anybody who has ever used a personal computer.

Probably org-mode envy ;-)

(To be clear, it's the same story - using simple plain org-mode is easy, but some people love to customize like crazy)

Re: Introduction to Obsidian

#60

Post by BeetleB »

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.

pandoc?
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