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How I use Obsidian (2023)

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Re: How I use Obsidian (2023)

#71

Post by risingsubmarine »

Many thanks to Obsidian for reinforcing the strength of file-over-apps in daily computer use. Consider this as a baseline for your entire setup, and you will spend much less energy fussing over finding the optimal programs, operating systems, or ecosystems. Just manage your files, and everything else can come and go.

Re: How I use Obsidian (2023)

#72

Post by PurpleRamen »

infecto wrote: post #69
PurpleRamen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search becomes useless if you drown in results. A good organization should assist in shortening paths, but if you start the path manually or through a search doesn't matter much.

But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N? Using a hybrid of traditional and semantic is so trivial to implement these days that I think we have past the point of needing good organization.

> But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N?

Maybe if you are Google, having well paid teams and excessive data on what people with your profile are usually searching at the moment. Obsidian is lacking all this, so the search-quality is very depending on the amount of files and results.

Re: How I use Obsidian (2023)

#74

Post by PurpleRamen »

Simboo wrote: post #10

Don’t over complicate this everyone. This is the best file-explorer GUI ever made hands down. All your files map 1-to-1 with the OS filesystem. No double clicking files over and over again. No getting lost in endless unsorted directories. Launch any file extension type straight from the same explorer GUI. I use this app less as a second brain and more as a personal document vault. (Markdown is ugly sorry about it) I…

Any good filemanager is better. Out of the box, it's also very lacking in necessary abilities. There are also some errors around the edges, like hiding vault-internal links, which makes it a bit questionable for good filehandling.

But sure, when all you have are supported filetypes, then it can be useful.

Re: How I use Obsidian (2023)

#76

Post by evo_9 »

I've been using Cursor / Claude Code to open my Vault folder, or a sub-folder in the vault; since Obsidian is stored in .MD files you can chat with your LLM about whatever info is in there. I used this to review and prepare for interviews, and it was extremely effective in helping me land my new job.

Re: How I use Obsidian (2023)

#77

Post by borh375 »

mold_aid wrote: post #63
borh375 wrote: post #38

Back when I was looking for a new PKM system, I remember a "competitor" (now irrelevant) of obsidian making fun via Quote tweet of the Files over app manifesto, saying something like "nobody cares about the way the notes are stored". Ironically, that mean-spirited tweet made me discover Obsidian, and I've adopted it since then as I strongly agree with the philosophy of sovereignty over the content by them being plain…

>And with the new LLM powered The what now? Did I miss an update

Missed a word: LLM powered tools (CLIs, etc.) that can work over files easily. Nothing in Obsidian itself, though I'm sure some nice plugins will exist

Re: How I use Obsidian (2023)

#78

Post by afcool83 »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #72
infecto wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N? Using a hybrid of traditional and semantic is so trivial to implement these days that I think we have past the point of needing good organization.

> But shouldn’t search be responsible for reducing or at least ranking the results in such a way that no matter how many results you find what you are looking for in the top N? Maybe if you are Google, having well paid teams and excessive data on what people with your profile are usually searching at the moment. Obsidian is lacking all this, so the search-quality is very depending on the amount of files and results.

The basic search one gets out of the box is closer to regex matching than search. IMHO something like omnisearch should be sherlocked next.

Re: How I use Obsidian (2023)

#79

Post by true_religion »

seivan wrote: post #68
nivcmo wrote: post #66

[dead]

I've been doing this as well, but using regular editors. What benefit does Obsidian give here that a text editor doesn't give? You just want to write/paste something for storing but I never understood why I needed a different editor for it.

Well, it has a bunch of plugins for making your notes folder into a database, or cataloguing meta data, or adding graphs, spreadsheets, mind maps, or flow charts, but I don’t really use any of those.

The only thing I use is the Mathjax plug-in for keeping notes about interesting publications.

Aside from its plugins, Obsidian is a great markdown editor and has a folder view and search integrated. I like it for that. My alternative is Apple notes, but long notes are hard to read there, so having markdown view is a positive experience.

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