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Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

obsidian.md

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Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#91

Post by pseudoramble »

bambax wrote: post #71

I built a simple journal solution for myself two years ago. It sends an email every day and I can reply to it, and the response is stored in an SQLite database, in plain text. The db is on a remote server but copied to Dropbox every day (and in any case all the emails also exist in my sent folder). It is surprisingly effective at storing not just what I did with my day, but random thoughts and ideas, solutions to bug…

> It sends an email every day and I can reply to it, and the response is stored in an SQLite database, in plain text.

Maybe this is obvious to other readers, but I love this portion of it. I think it's one of the critical details to making things like this work. It's easy to built a tool that you "just remember to use" but the issue then the tool is implicitly asking the user to modify their workflow, which isn't always trivial. So well done.

Another simple example: one of my favorite features in Slack is /remind. It can do recurring reminders, reminders way out into the future, and is as simple as typing `/remind me "do the thing" in 6 months`. Critically, it's in Slack which I'm using all the time anyway. It's not tucked away into a calendar I won't look at, or in a place I have to remember to get to. It's right there, and it's really easy to set another one up. I've thought about building a separate tool to replicate this, but I know it will never have the same utility without being in an existing workflow.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#92

Post by capableweb »

krzyk wrote: post #81

I just downloaded deb and was a bit worried that it has 60MB, quick check on forums and it us unfortunately Electron :( Oh well, back to vim and cd.

Always fun to see these original comments in a HN thread. If you write this on Twitter you can get hundreds of retweets, hurry before someone else writes the tweet!

Jokes aside, Obsidian being a Electron application is not a issue. The app starts in under 3 seconds for me, barely uses any RAM and CPU usage remains stable and low.

If you want to actually contribute anything to this thread, feel free to give feedback on specific issues you find, that it's using too much CPU or whatever. But as it stands, you're not really adding much here.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#93

Post by capableweb »

kazinator wrote: post #77

> With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder. Never leave your life's work held hostage in the cloud again. ... says a brochure page for proprietary software.

Did you completely misunderstand the text segment you quoted? It doesn't say that the software itself is open-source/free software, it's just talking about the data it produces/maintains/uses, so your comment seems to be way offside.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#94

Post by rvieira »

kzrdude wrote: post #24
rvieira wrote: post #9

Obsidian is great. I'm a paying supporter (catalyst and sync). Weirdly I started playing with Emacs + org-mode recently (never been an Emacs user before!) and I'm seriously considering making it my exclusive "second brain". Something about org-mode, org-babel, org-jupyter, org-agenda and org-roam that just clicks with me.

What's org-jupyter? Search engines didn't help me there. I'm interested in any jupyter related tools.

Typo, sorry. I meant org-babel + emacs-jupyter.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#95

Post by ncarroll »

d4rkp4ttern wrote: post #49

Last I checked there was no good way to do quick capture of articles from mobile iOS to obsidian. Scenario — I come across an article on my iPhone, and I just want to dump title + URL (maybe even the text content) into obsidian. This is a must have for any note taking tool. Anyone have a good workflow for this, please share. Ideally an iOS shortcut.

Have you tried Markdownload? It's a browser extension that saves and downloads web content as markdown. I use it all the time on my desktop but it's a browser extension and supports Safari, so maybe it's helpful for you too.

https://github.com/deathau/markdownload

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#96

Post by nonamechicken »

opan wrote: post #37

The comments here made it sound exciting, but it seems like it's proprietary, which is a no-go for me. I'll stick to plain text file notes and the occasional org-mode for now.

While Obsidian may be proprietary, as long as the files follow standard markdown syntax, it can be opened in any markdown editor. I am currently using both Obsidian & Typora on the same workspace folder(I like Typora better for editing since its WYSIWIG). Not being locked down to any specific software was the primary reason I moved away from OneNote.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#97

Post by nonamechicken »

Joeboy wrote: post #12

What I'd like is an easy way to keep my notes synced on my laptop and my android phone. I suppose I could install git on my phone and do it that way, but maybe there's a less faffy way I'm missing?

Obsidian in laptop -> OneDrive -> FolderSync in Android works fine as long as periodic sync is ok.

Syncthing may be even easier, but I didn't try it since I am not sure if I can restrict it to LAN only.

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#98

Post by yokoprime »

kazinator wrote: post #77

> With Obsidian, your data sits in a local folder. Never leave your life's work held hostage in the cloud again. ... says a brochure page for proprietary software.

What is your point? I've moved my obsidian notes to vscode and back without any issues. Is closed source software somehow incapable of having true statements?

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#99

Post by dude4you »

stonepresto wrote: post #87
bambax wrote: post #71

I built a simple journal solution for myself two years ago. It sends an email every day and I can reply to it, and the response is stored in an SQLite database, in plain text. The db is on a remote server but copied to Dropbox every day (and in any case all the emails also exist in my sent folder). It is surprisingly effective at storing not just what I did with my day, but random thoughts and ideas, solutions to bug…

I just wrapped up writing my own. I’ve been following a lot of projects such as Archivy and Obsidian for a while, but neither of them were what I needed. Wrote a flask app that does exactly what I need. Obsidian’s business model is really smart: creating a knowledge management system that applies to the vast majority of use cases, add room for a little modularity, and monetize it. However for those edge use cases, wh…

obsidian, linking files cost extra?

Re: Obsidian – A knowledge base from a local folder of plain text Markdown files

#100

Post by JumpCrisscross »

capableweb wrote: post #89
Socketier wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.md is the markdown file extension, so having a .md TLD is a clever and amusing idea imo as Obsidian is, after all, a markdown editor.

It's clever until you hit issues with uptime, or breaking the specific rules of the TLD. I'm also a supporter of Obsidian, but it scares me that the domain is under the whim of the Moldovian government and could get shut down/redirected if someone who uses Obsidian Publish decides to write "bad" stuff about government officials since the TLD doesn't allow that. > Registration restrictions: Prohibited domain names wit…

> could get shut down/redirected

The latter is my concern. Until 2020, Moldova had a pro-Russian government. They could easily return to power. I would see Moscow having zero qualms about requesting e.g. certain visitors be re-directed to a Kremlin-controlled server.

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