Comment by slightwinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slightwinder | Hacker News Reader

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Obsidian is really nice, and quite powerful, especially thanks to plugins. It's also moving fast, the developers are very active. I used it for a while to move on from org-mode, but kinda lost interesst because of certain excentrics it has.

One specific problem that killed it for me temporary is the lack of support for multiple vaults, to the point that there is not even a truely centralized global configuation. Everything is saved in the vault itself, including plugins. Vault is the name of the data-directory, basically your workspace. For someone using multiple vaults (work, and private stuff) on multiple systems, this really kills any motivation to use it. Did this change in the meanwhile? I losly follow the changelog and haven't seen anything yet regarding this things, but maybe I just missed it.

Other than thoise specific problems, it's awesome how activate and vibrant the community itself is. There is a very active forum and discord-server, and many awesome plugins coming from the community are available. Obsidian has really the potential to leave org-mode behind and become a serious alternative for the rest of the world.

> One specific problem that killed it for me temporary is the lack of support for multiple vaults, to the point > that there is not even a truely centralized global configuation. Everything is saved in the vault itself, > including plugins. [...] Did this change in the meanwhile?

You can invoke an overview, that lists the last five, or so, Vaults, you used. From there you can switch. But that is all. The configuration, and, yes, the plugins (yeez!), sadly, are still installed on a per Vault base. What I have done is to set up an empty Vault as a template, configure it the way, I would have my master preferences, and when I create a new Vault, I start by cloning that. It's not perfect, but better than nothing.

Another thing I dislike is, that the Vault can not go into a (programming) project's folder as a sub folder, but considers the project folder as the Vault.

Perhaps-interestingly, I like this about its config and would view that feature as a bonus. It makes it easy to really tailor a given vault to a purpose, without having to consider layered configuration and how that might propagate.

I want to use Obsidian but the only thing that keep me off is the lack of encryption support. That is why I am staying with Joplin since it offers a full encryption. Obsidian does have a plugin for the encryption but only partial of it.

Joplin does not encrypt notes at rest. Only data being synced is encrypted; when it gets to its destination it’s available unencrypted in an SQLite database. Any program running on your computer can read your Joplin notes at any time. The developer has come out against implementing encryption-at-rest many times throughout the years. Their suggestion is that you use another form of encryption, like veracrypt. Notably, this makes using Joplin with encryption-at-rest impossible on iOS.

https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/requesting-encryption-of-l...

For information, iOS is not an issue because all data is encrypted by default anyway. So app-level encryption would be unnecessary.

Those who ask for encryption at rest mainly want it on desktop, as they share their computer with people they (apparently) don't trust.

I love org-mode, and use it in all sorts of areas, but I haven't found a mobile (iOS) solution I'm happy with.

Org being so feature-rich, I decided to tackle a subset on iOS, so I built https://flathabits.com.

I'm itching to build a similar thing for personal task management, since I currently rely on Shortcuts emailing myself org-formatted TODOs.

Have you checked beorgapp?

I find that it supports surprisingly large parts of org mode.

You could link or copy the config file and plugin folder in the `.obsidian` directory in one vault to other vaults.

I tried this early on, but it seems there are vault-specific parts that become weird when used outside their original vault.

I'm also not so eager to regulary waste time for hacking tools. Updating the settings in all vaults each time I update some setting or plugin in one vault would be quite a pain.

It’s not perfect but it did take me about 5 minutes to resolve when I created 3 clones of my main vault.

The main issue was changing the relative path references to the templates and and assets directories.

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