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Ditching Obsidian and building my own

amberwilliams.io

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Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#511

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

tasuki wrote: post #169
williamsss wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. I'll have a play with Gitea My concern with this approach would be I've read through Directus' codebase and can understand it. With a self-hosted Git server like this I'd be worried if shit hit the fan and corrupted my Git files or stopped being maintained I'd be a duck out of water

You don't need Gitea (nor Forgejo, nor GitLab, ...). You just need `git` installed on whatever server you already have. And just use that as one of the git remotes.

Good call out. Most of the time people actually want one of the "wrapper" softwares because they want the collaboration components and they aren't old greybeards that want to ship around mailserv lists. But that use case doesn't apply here. There is probably no one to collaborate with in this use case, so barebones git is probably totally fine.

Though I'd say, if you're going through all of the effort to self host something, git or otherwise, doing the "wrapper" is probably worthwhile anyway due to the convenience if you ever do need those features. It's not that much harder to do that than host a vanilla git server.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#512

Post by themadturk »

memming wrote: post #327
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…

iCloud sync is too unreliable and opaque for me.

Obsidian Sync is great (it helps that I got in on early-bird pricing...but it really is reliable).

In addition, the Git plugin, coupled with Working Copy on my iPhone and iPad, also work extremely well, with a bit of added overhead. Though iCloud works reasonably well for just about everything else, I haven't used it for syncing Obsidian data.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#513

Post by themadturk »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #428
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 usi…

Plugins aren't required to use Obsidian. I have just a few, none of which make consequential modifications to my files. I've never had a need to use anything like Dataview, for instance.

To me, the "dialects" of Markdown have never made any difference in using it, even between applications. I think the only non-standard (for whatever "standard" means in Markdown) markup I use in Obsidian is "%%" to indicate comments. That's certainly something easy enough to search for should it be necessary in a text editor.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#514

Post by themadturk »

Gerardo1 wrote: post #436
someguydave wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t use plug ins

then you lose a large amount of functionality and value. That's the point they were making.

You may lost a large amount of functionality and value. If you never become dependent on plugins, as is true of some Obsidian users, you lose nothing. Obsidian has considerable functionality and value right out of the box, at least as much as many other Markdown editors, and costs nothing.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#515

Post by xenodium »

williamsss wrote: post #418
xenodium wrote: post #377

For quick notes on the go, I also did go my own way and eventually built the app I wished I had. Journelly: kinda like tweeting but for your eyes only (in plain text) https://xenodium.com/journelly-like-tweeting-but-for-your-ey... While you don't need to know anything about its serialized format, it happens to be powered by Org plain text. For Markdown fans, I am recording Markdown interest. Do reach out: journelly +…

Where are the text/pictures stored?

On your phone (offline), unless you choose to enable iCloud Drive.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#516

Post by KetoManx64 »

coolcase wrote: post #394
KetoManx64 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes down to how much is your time worth. If you're a developer making $100K+ a year, a $1,000 over a decade is nothing if it increases your productivity 2-3X compared to your collegues, which considering the fact that some of my colleagues store their notes in Windows Notepad is a complete underestimation.

So obsidian let's me get 40 hours of work had I used notepad for notes done in 13-20 hours?

I store my code snippets, config templates, daily changelogs, todo lists, and note templates in Obsidian and use them probably dozens of times a day. I have keyboard shortcuts that open up specific notes that I copy code snippets and filepaths from. If you were to put me next to someone that was storing their notes in notepad I would bet you money that they take 2-3x as long as I do.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#517

Post by KetoManx64 »

danparsonson wrote: post #362
KetoManx64 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the inverse, even as a FOSS advocate, my life is too short to only use open source software all the time and to reinvent the wheel and tools that have been put together into one fantastic product by the combined effort of hundreds of people. I used Joplin for years, I even self hosted the Joplin Sync server, but Obsidian + Community addons runs literal miles around it from a performance and user cusomizability sta…

Out of interest what add-ons do you use that make a big difference for your needs?

- Advanced URI: create advanced URI's to run actions like create new note, open daily note, or run Obsidian commands. I then add system wide hotkeys to activate these URI's to quickly either open a new note or create a new note.

- Excalidraw. Create drawings and link/insert notes within your drawings without ever leaving the application.

- omnisearch. Run circles around the native Obsidian search and also has an API that you can interact with through your terminal if you want to add scripts to quickly search your notes for specific things.

- Confluence Integration: My company uses Confluence behind a VPN, so I write all my notes in the very snappy Obsidian interface and then sync them up to Confluence when I'm done.

- Style Settings + Minimal Theme Settings: gives you a GUI to edit all the settings and colors of your theme without having to learn about CSS or parse CSS files.

- Edit History: I sync a subsection of my personal notes with my work computer using Syncthing and setting up ignored folders. This gives me a edit history of my notes that I imagine is similar to what Obsidian's official sync gives you.

- Dataview: still learning this, but let's you treat your Vault as a database and write queries to pull in information from other notes. I use it mostly for scraping my entire Vault for unchecked todo items (Grouped by their parent note name) and showing them in 1 place.

Hope these are helpful :)

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#518

Post by adastra22 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #469
adastra22 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect, I doubt it. Have you tried pulling out a 20 year old tarball and compiling it, without modification, on a modern distro?

I recently unearthed something that I thought was 20 years old when someone asked me about it. I checked and it was only 14 years old based on mtime (thought I suspect I started the project nearly 20 years ago). Another project I unearthed for a different reason was only 13 years old by mtime (again, it was started before that). I must concede that I haven't actually recently compiled and used anything that was untou…

A lot of these things can be made to work. That isn't being contested. But if you take a random piece of code of the internet from 20 years ago, it very likely won't compile out of the box on a modern system.

For example, I just took the oldest version of openssl I could find with a quick search (2015, so only 10 years old), and it fails to compile on my Mac. It detects macOS/darwin, and then proceeds to compile for 32-bit Intel, which obviously doesn't work. OpenSSL has fallbacks for straight C implementation to support platforms that haven't been customized, but their build scripts assume that macOS = Intel.

Ok sure, changing the whole freaking CPU architecture will bork a build script. So to prove a point I just downloaded v2.6.11 of the Linux kernel (released in 2005), unpacked (this time on Ubuntu 24.04 on real Intel), and did a `make menuconfig && make`. Of course I don't expect a 20 year old kernel to run on modern hardware, but could I compile it? No, I could not: modern GCC forces PIC by default, which parts of the Linux kernel do not support. I was able to fix that by editing the makefile to pass `-fno-pic` in CFLAGS. Then I get hit with another error due to "multiple definitions" of functions that are declared slightly differently. Turns out old GCC didn't warn about this, but modern GCC handles these declarations differently. This is after pages upon pages of warnings, btw, with only a few source files compiled so far.

I gave up. This is what is meant by archeology required: for anything nontrivial you often have to build the environment in which the code was originally compiled in order to get it to compile again.

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#519

Post by rtrgrd »

GCUMstlyHarmls wrote: post #263
rtrgrd wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, for those who are paranoid about relying on a company, setting up headscake is relatively quick and painless too - currently using it to sync between devices across multiple cities.

head scale * https://headscale.net/stable/ https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

Thanks for picking that up - fat fingers

Re: Ditching Obsidian and building my own

#520

Post by rtrgrd »

simplesocieties wrote: post #294
krick wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I be paranoid? I never tried Tailscale, and the idea of trusting 3rd party with managing access to my network does give me chills. But IDK, honestly, maybe it's silly? Is it in all honesty less likely that I'll fuck things up setting my own Headscale server, than that Tailscale™ will (consciously or otherwise) fuck me up?

Tailscale has made all of their client source code available for anyone to view so if you want to confirm that you’re not sending unencrypted data or keys through their servers you’re more than free to do so. https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale I think there is some merit to setting up wireguard (e.g. you want more devices than what Tailscale offers for free, or their servers become unreliable for some reason) But…

afaik if you set up your own headscale server, i don't think there is a device count limit (?)
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