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Writing down what I do in Obsidian

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Re: Writing down what I do in Obsidian

#82
post #19
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is imo how most people should start and use it. All these "structure first" approaches are like using someone else's preferred way of learning and memorizing, if it works its an happy accident. You'll get your structure out of your mind once you learn to know it.

I am constantly finding myself deliberating whether I should or shouldn't use folders in my Obsidian vault. Most of the times folders feel artificial. I prefer tags nowadays as the single source. The times I separate to a folder is for very-specific Dataview data-only pages, and for storing assets such as images.

I don't understand the concept of using tags or even avoiding them.

Everything in my brain is highly categorized and those categories are hierarchical.

Computer / Kubernetes / Helm / Something.md

Computer / Java / JVM / Garbage Collection Tuning.md

Construction / Foundation / Shallow Strip Foundation.md

Hobby / 3D Printing / On Shape.md

And so on.

I don't even think that I need links. May be some. What I need is the ability to show multiple files at once. For example show all files in Computer / Kubernetes / Helm directory, separated with horizontal lines with the ability to edit this in one editor window. I hate when I need to constantly switch around in traditional editors.

Re: Writing down what I do in Obsidian

#83
post #42
post #9

I'm an ardent Emacs user for the past 20+ years. But I am considering writing a book, and the "throw things in anyhow, get things back" facility of Obsidian is quite useful for catching disparate thoughts to later incorporate into a flow in the final text.. Of course there is a mode in Emacs supporting obsidian-like facility, but does not feel as convenient - autocomplete never quite works as smooth as it does in Obs…

What Emacs mode might that be? And are there more reasons it falls short, besides the autocomplete?

There is a simple mode available on melpa, called obsidian. The issue with it which I am facing is that if you link using markdown in actual Obsidian, it is able to find the link in whichever subfolder of the vault the target is in. But this does not seem to work with the emacs mode. It searches only the top vault path - so creates a new file when the file actually already exists in some subfolder. Maybe it is something I am doing wrong, I will read the source code and figure out/change the code.

Re: Writing down what I do in Obsidian

#84
post #9

I'm an ardent Emacs user for the past 20+ years. But I am considering writing a book, and the "throw things in anyhow, get things back" facility of Obsidian is quite useful for catching disparate thoughts to later incorporate into a flow in the final text.. Of course there is a mode in Emacs supporting obsidian-like facility, but does not feel as convenient - autocomplete never quite works as smooth as it does in Obs…

As a wildly alternative workflow for writing a book, have a look at Scrivener.

Scrivener is pretty impressive, but its Latex capabilities are not as good as those of other formats. I found indexing and bibliography lookup to be spotty. Another reason I found it lacking was when having labelled equations to be later referenced, Scrivener does not seem to have an autocomplete for this.

Re: Writing down what I do in Obsidian

#86

I honestly tried to love obsidian because of how easy it is to set up and how user friendly the UI is (plus there are tutorials and tons of articles), but I just can't get over it being offline and only means to sync are looking for a plugin that will use git/dropbox etc plus there are no mobile app anyways. Right now I found that notion is perfect for me. It does not have a mind mapping functionality but its very go…

FWIW I use Obsidian, and just a private GitHub account and git for syncing, it works well no costs, I just need to remember to use git :)

Re: Writing down what I do in Obsidian

#87

Does anyone have any experience with Joplin[0] as an alternative? I'm looking into using SyncThing + Joplin to create a sort of 'networked personal brain'. I was originally looking at Obsidian, but the arguments on why they chose not to go FOSS are pretty weak[2] imo, so I'm looking at using Joplin instead. [0] https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/ [1] https://syncthing.net/ [2] https://obsidian.rocks/why-isnt-obsidia…

I used Joplin for some time. It is really good and it has been very stable.

Using Joplin Web Clipper from Firefox I could also snip pages (or parts of pages) into Joplin.

But the most amazing thing is that

- it works on mobile devices as well.

- No lock in: it syncs flawlessly (AFAIK) over WebDAV so I can sync all my data using a really inexpensive Hetzner instance.

Personally I happily used it for a long time but always felt something was missing and never felt completely at home with it.

So now I use Logseq which is a little rough around the edges but which I, for now at least feel very at home with.

Re: Writing down what I do in Obsidian

#89
post #3

no shade, but just reading this I was sure this was written by someone who works in BigTech. Because this was very reminiscent of ceremony required for BigTech performance reviews.

In fairness this is probably an answer to "how to pass promotion" in such an environment. I don't have the patience so will stay with git log immediately before the deadline but have some envy for people who enjoy this sort of logging.

Re: Writing down what I do in Obsidian

#90

And there I was all excited, expecting long-term preservation of writing by 3D-printing molten rock. I'm a strong believer that names of software packages should be chosen to be something that doesn't yet return any results from a Google search.

Tell that to Microsoft, ehm… Windows.
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