Comment by TRcontrarian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TRcontrarian | Hacker News Reader

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Obsidian is the closest thing I've found to the Pensive from Harry Potter. It's a data recording format good enough for me to extract thoughts from my mind, represent them with enough fidelity to reconstruct later, connect them to the concepts that they are related to in my head, and then forget the thought completely so I can move on and process it later.

I was only willing to try it out because I had heard it mentioned [0] on CGP Grey's cohosted podcast, Cortex, in the episode they did on productivity software subcultures. Specifically I think CGP Grey was saying he didn't "get" Obsidian but had observed a fanatic fanbase around it of people who thought it was god's gift to note-taking because it represented the links between knowledge in a unique way. Apparently I'm one of those people because I went from installing it for the first time to writing all my new thoughts down in it in the space of 3 days.

I suspect the real reason I liked Obsidian right away is that long ago I used Microsoft Onenote as a freeform notetaking app to just spew unrelated thoughts into that I could organize later. Onenote's interface was good, but there was no way to port those notes in an exportable format to a new computer when the one with a Onenote license died.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/CGPGrey/comments/ihkqjp/cortex_105_...

You’re right it was on Cortex, clarification though:

Grey loves Obsidian, Mike doesn’t really get it though. Neither like Notion, even though it has a massive fan base.

There is a whole episode (maybe the one in question) where it comes to light that Grey has spent most of his life NOT making notes like most people do and instead just highlighting areas in source material and referring back to it.

Very funny episode given they were over 100 episodes into a productivity podcast at this point and had spoken about note taking extensively - without realising that one of them has a very different concept of the practice/process.

I spent a while trying Notion, seeing if it could be a good replacement for Evernote, and I had trouble with it as well. I can certainly see its use-case for teams, where the whole notion of homepages and things makes sense. But for the individual, it seemed too much. You're basically making a website.

My biggest gripe with it may have simply been the endless hyping and gushing that all the "productivity gurus" on YouTube and elsewhere did over it. Indeed, it seemed custom-made for YouTube productivity gurus, since you could make everything look so clean and beautiful and polished. It seemed the sort of note-taking tool for people who cared more about how the final result looked, than for people who wanted to quickly add or go over notes.

That said, I recognize that there was much there I probably never really used to its fullest-extent, databases being the fundamental differentiator between Notion and most other note-taking apps, and potentially very powerful.

I think this is the episode you are reffering to? https://www.relay.fm/cortex/105

Yes! That’s the episode. To hear two people realise they’ve been effectively having two different conversations with each other about the same topic without realising it is a special kind of amazing.

The comparison to the Pensieve is so so so good. I had previously used Tim Ferriss' metaphor for writing: that it was to freeze thoughts into a solid so that you could sculpt it into whatever shape you wanted. But as you've already noticed, there isn't really a final form a thought takes, and a lot of it's value is in bouncing amongst other thoughts.

I know this isn't a very hacker newsy comment, but wanted to highlight how amazing your comparison is :D

> when the one with a Onenote license died

OneNote has been free for the last few years.

> port those notes in an exportable format

You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.

> OneNote has been free for the last few years.

Not in my experience. The online, UWP, feature-reduced version that comes with windows is gratis, but ... .

The proper desktop version requires an office license. It then is "gratis" on top of the cost you already paid for office.

> The proper desktop version requires an office license

That's not true in my experience. I'm running a proper "OneNote 2016" version without any license or subscription. This is also stated on a Microsoft support site [0]:

> OneNote (formerly called “OneNote 2016”), the _free_ desktop app which runs on all supported versions of Microsoft Windows and which is part of Office 2019 and Microsoft 365.

Further down, it's stated:

> Download OneNote as a free standalone Windows desktop app (some features may be limited).

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-the-differ...

The link to the "free standalone app" just gives me OfficeSetup.exe (7.0MB), which did not give me a standalone app when I last tried it, but if that works now. Great!

No?

> You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.

You can export as a .pdf, .xps or into most MS office doc formats like .docx

OneNote isn't great if you want to regularly export to a different format. Especially if you want to make your notebooks accessible to other non-MS software. Right now, I sync my notebooks between several different devices which is kind of a pain.

> OneNote has been free for the last few years.

Only if you store your notes in OneDrive.

> Only if you store your notes in OneDrive.

Do you have a source for that? I don't believe this is true. When creating a notebook, I can specify if I want a OneDrive-synched notebook or a local one (OneNote 2016). Such a limitation _might_ be part of the Store version of OneNote, but that's just a guess. Also a Reddit thread I found discussing this topic stated there's no such limitation in OneNote 2016.

I can't edit my post, but my guess was correct:

> [OneNote 2016/Desktop] is the only version of OneNote that supports local notebook storage on your PC’s hard drive in addition to cloud storage.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-the-differ...

Starts at ~37 min mark

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