Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x5f3759df-i | Hacker News Reader

This is the reason I use Obsidian. https://obsidian.md/

All of your data is locally stored markdown text files with no lock in.

All of the amazing benefits of linked note taking without the downsides.

I absolutely love Obsidian except for one crucial flaw: no tabs. They've made every editor view a "pane", which means that on a laptop you can effectively only work on one or two files at a time. There's a plugin that adds tabs, but it's pretty awkward and not what you normally think of when you think of tabs. Otherwise, Obsidian is truly incredible.

It doesn’t work well for a team though, with a bunch of local markdown files - does it?

Admittedly harder when there is frequent concurrent modification required, but Syncthing works well for me to share between nodes.

Obsidian is not a replacement for Notion tho, no databases, a lot of custom configuration, no nice templates, etc... I can't take how slow Notion is, and I'm looking for a self-hosted replacement, but Obsidian is just not there yet, except for the note taking part, that I dont care about.

> no databases

You can query Markdown files with the (third-party) Dataview plugin. Wrote about it here[0], very simple query syntax. Only tables and lists, but tables is the one I've used by far the most in Notion.

> no nice templates

Well you can always create your own. There's a first-party templates plugin[1] and a similar third-party one that also allows custom variables and has a showcase[2] (think: you can curl the weather and add it to your journal).

Having wrote that, your "a lot of custom configuration" definitely applies.

[0] https://input.sh/replicating-notions-tables-with-obsidian-pl...

[1] https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Templates

[2] https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater/discussions/catego...

except,in Notion, you don't need 3rd party plugins, or "create your own" templates, you already have it out of the box, don't get me wrong tho, I don't love Notion, is very slow. The biggest problem I see with obsidian is, requires a lot of configuration, like you mentioned. I just want something that works.

I've also recently migrated to Obsidian and it's been fantastic.

+1 on Obsidian. It requires a different way of taking notes to be really useful but it's all part of learning to take better notes.

I personally like Joplin[0] the best - it can sync via Dropbox or any other host of options.

[0] https://joplinapp.org

Reply on news.ycombinator.com