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

i too feel like the more open-potential endlessly extensible form of computing is what's interesting & compelling. it's ehy computing appealed to me & still is. contrasting to computing as mechanization, big systems, & mass market software, where focus is on control & usually core, well planned user flows. this is boring rigidware. yet it's share of computing has radically risen. good to hear of syccessful flexible software in the world.

His theme played a huge part in getting me to make the jump from Bear Notes to Obsidian as I try to move away from Mac-specific apps to cross-platform (macOS and Linux) options.

PS. WebClipper is super helpful!

I do love Obsidian mobile though, undefeated on mobile!

- Tree-shake your notes each time you iterate them. You'll leverage your excitement and it won't be a chore.

- Maintain part of your notes public, it will be a catalyst to polish them. A git repository is perfect for that. Serendipitously, I started a related thread a couple hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28895647

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, which on HN might be closer to a majority, it’s important to first hash out exactly what sort of features you need.

Do you need to link files as well as notes in a knowledge graph?

Do you need to use advanced search filters?

How much data are you dealing with?

Just some food for thought.

Obsidian is a knowledge base, what you are describing is a note taking solution. Might work for most people who just want to scribble things down, but once you start having information you want to inter-connect, it'll break down.

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.

This seems unnecessarily complex - have you considered replacing this with rsync + cron job?

I tried using a database for personal notes many years ago and the problem I discovered was that I can't do a quick Ctrl+F to find previous scraps of knowledge.

Instead, I use plain "notes.txt" and use the editor's text search functions (including regex functionality) to locate things.

These 2 ways of finding text have very different ergonomics:

- SQL: select * from notes where description like '%ubuntu config%';

- text editor: Ctrl+F "ubuntu config" <press Enter>

Yes, one can write a program to "dump" the SQL database to a text file for subsequent search by a text editor. The problem is that it creates a read-only file that you can't edit-in-place. And one can also write a custom wrapper program in whatever language as a GUI for the database but now we're way past your simply "reply to email" paradigm and expending a lot of effort in "yak shaving" instead of just taking notes.

Not saying your system is bad for you but I'm guessing that most people would find the friction of a SQL database too high for freeform notes.

I used to use a SaaS that did exactly the but unfortunately they shut down after a few years. I still have my notes in Gmail since they were just emails but I miss getting the reminders.

P.S. I like your description of this as your log of your brain.

It's actually been 3 years, not 2! Lockdown messed with our perception of time...

The Jiggl extension gives a local network view that is actually useful and not overwhelming. You can custom style nodes by folder or tags. This makes it intuitive and worth keeping open in a frame.

[0]: https://logseq.com/

[0]: https://notabase.io

[0] https://gitjournal.io

I went to subreddit to check this and apparently it's a dozen trolls who like writing that founder is nazi. Ughm, ok.

I mention this because I, too, fell in love with org-mode and magit, and for a while I kept using Emacs only for those tools. Org quickly became a cornerstone of my workflow and made it easy to separate notes and tasks for different clients. I think Obsidian leaves maybe a bit much up to our imagination, but that's part of the beauty of it, imo

Currently sticking Obsidian (because it's discoverable, fast and extensible) and Neovim (only because Emacs is too antiquated)

1. Useful practical information or checklists on disease topics (I'm a physician). Sometimes they are reminders, or useful knowledge that is generally gleaned from experience / colleagues. Things that can be hard to google.

2. Notes on general business stuff - i.e. "called such and such agency and Wendy said I need to speak to other person next Monday on tel xxxx". Or dates my car needs servicing, or who I'm insured with.

At the moment I use vimwiki, and it works well.

5. creating your own ideas and making your own connections

The act of note taking itself may help structure and focus thoughts, regardless of intent to review or transfer the note.

It may also be cathartic. It gives peace of mind to know I own the detailed information on X, just in case. Or perhaps making a pretty list about something random lets me take my mind of work for a few minutes.

Basically my brain doesn't remember things fully, it's more of a set of index cards with tiny summaries.

When I need some data I'll remember that I read an article around spring and it might've been on either X, Y or Z site. My notes are tagged and configured so that I can actually go find that stuff.

Also I use pinboard to store the stuff other people hoard in tabs. That Very Important Article that has been sitting on a faraway tab for a week? Add it to pinboard with a few tags and close it. It's just as easy not to read it from there too =)

Some thoughts and responses to what you've said:

1. I try to make sure anything I enter into my notes are intended to last, filtering/processing is a key step to that. This often means I won't enter notes unless they can contribute to my understanding of some lasting higher level concept. For example, I don't have any notes on tech library X, Y, Z. But I do have notes on concepts, like "Required accidental complexity should be avoided or separated" and if a library Z has a unique way of doing so, I may incorporate my understanding of the strategy to further my understanding of the concept.

2. My goal is less to simply collect links/articles, it's to process and assimilate. I write everything in my own words to clarify my understanding. I link it to other topics in my notes to help build stronger associations, which helps me ground and recall the knowledge. I'm also exploring whether I want to put some spaced repetition in with my notes to help keep pieces of information fresh.

3. I treat my notes as separate from my todo lists. The extra bit that these tools give you is the linking and clustering of information. I find the associations useful for encouraging identification/contextualization of where that knowledge sits in my current understanding and, periodically, discovering serendipitous connections.

4. I rarely revisit old books as well, but I also find that my recall of those books are terrible. Part of my note taking is to make sure that I have a better chance of understanding and taking away valuable information from those books. It's also worth mentioning that that I don't aim to have notes on the book, I aim to have new concept notes or updating existing concepts with new information.

So what domains do I find these apps useful? It's unclear to me how much I can attribute to the linking the app encourages. But, I do find myself recalling what I've noted much more frequently in my day to day as an software engineer. The identification and concretization of patterns/concepts has helped me be more articulate and have more clarity in my work, particularly when giving feedback to others.

All that said, everybody is different. This process might not work for you, or you may find you don't need it to get the same effects. I know plenty of successful people that don't. And if it doesn't work for you, I wouldn't worry too much about it.

That's an interesting name for an open source project. :P

I was a big user of TiddlyWiki but Obsidian has so many UI quality of life improvements, and the plugin ecosystem is evolving at such a rapid pace that I decided to jump ship.

I wrote a guide on my migration process: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/import-from-tiddlywiki-5-to-obsi...

More broadly, I want a general Markdown notes "backend". Obsidian currently operates on local vaults which we can sync w/ general cloud providers, but no providers have all the features I'd want. Using Git lets me have great versioning of notes, but makes realtime syncing impossible, and using OneDrive is the opposite, so for the moment I'm using a Git repository in my OneDrive to get both.

It would be great to have a universal self-hostable note vault backend that interfaces with Obsidian, Dendron, etc. and allows for real syncing and publishing without requiring something hacky.

I don't see why that would be problematic. You can name each folder/note what ever you want.

I guess you could also write a plugin for Obsidian that would do this for you.

I don't really see the need for numbering though. Obsidian has a very robust system for tagging and linking together notes. Coupled with proper search, I can always find what I need.

I do store my notes in a hierarchical context centric way (Finances > Loans > Calculations) which also helps.

And I'd ask, still, is is unnecessarily hierarchical? If you only have 10 categories below "20 Finance", why not just stick the (maximum) 10 categories under 20-29 in the top level? You'd still have the conceptual grouping under 2x, but without the indirection.

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.

(That said, there are non-Electron alternatives like Tauri coming along that use the native webview to accomplish essentially the same thing.)

Last I heard it was built entirely by two people (and two cats). What’s a better way to build a high quality native-ish application targeting 5 platforms with a team of 2?

Obsidian is a lot more static. It's basic strengthis having offline capabilities, simplicity, and markdown. I use it exclusively for my Zettelkasten, which I also have on Notion (I started my ZK and migrated it over to Obsidian). Obsidian is great for ZK in part due to its simultaneous multiple panel openings. So, you can see multiple notes at once. Notion can do this too, and I've use its Gallery fxn for exactly that, but there's something less claggy about Obsidian in this regard.

Notion is great for GTD and project management (again, when used dynamically with filters etc). Obsidian is great for note storage and retrieval, as well as processing ideas and arguments for use later in writing articles, scripts, etc.

My relationship with my phone is the best it has been in a decade, because I fucking despise using that thing. It's cramped, limited, inflexible, addictive and disposable. It's an awful machine to do anything non trivial. So, now my phone just serves as a calendar reminder for upcoming meetings, maps, and messaging. It is no longer a "constant companion". I use it for less than an hour a day on average. I don't even have a browser on it. I love this. I love my superior smug face when I'm on the bus and every other pleb is buried deep into his/her screen, while I ride astride with my zen halo glowing brightly, taking in the world, paying attention to squirrels being chased by cats and so on.

There is more to life than increasing it's speed. Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. Do fewer things, but cherish them more. Throw the phone into the trash, and wait till you're in front of a laptop or a desktop.

https://github.com/deathau/markdownload

I'm currently saving into a dropbox folder, which gives me automatic syncing.

It's just a directory of markdown files. Nothing preventing that directory from being a Git repo. Lots of people use it that way (or with Syncthing, Dropbox, or whatever).

I setup a cron job to git add ., git commit, and git push everyday at 3am, so that I don’t have to think about it at all. It works great.

You could use/write an extension for that! Obsidian is very extensible. I think there's template extensions you can use to put the datetime in the title, or in the filename.

As something that’s built and branded for quick release of information, I think there’s some more work to be done. Worth following, but isn’t immediately useful for me.

[0]: https://notabase.io

So I use both: Obsidian for ideas, beliefs, concepts, explanations, class notes, etc. Notion for Goals, freelance client project info, job hunt tracking, to watch/read lists, images and links for internet arguments, plans for video games, travel plans, technical solutions, exercise and practice routines.

One of the better advertisements for Neuron is the author's own notes being posted online as exported HTML.

As for traversing the notes, I picked VSCode (I would have picked Obsidian but it does funny things with front matter that I didn't like, and it lagged a lot on my computer). Primarily because it has extensions that update links automatically when the filepath to a note changes, and for graph view. You can use vim inside VSCode as a text editor. That's all I need really - VSCode to traverse, vim to edit.

What's great about this system is it really does stick strictly to commonmark and YAML usage isn't restricted at all (you don't even have to use the frontmatter if you don't want to), so your notes are completely portable.

Edit: typo

The immovable rule for good names is: they should be easy to pronounce and easy to type if you hear it from someone else.

Obsidian is a good name. Workflowy is a good name.

Acreom - I wouldn't know how to pronounce it. If someone told me "use acreom" I wouldn't know what to typo into google to find it.

Also, a non-dark theme is a must.

Overall this setup Just Works for me.

I'll admit it's not as UXy as pressing a sync button

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

I had previously been hosting TiddlyWiki from my phone, but offline editing + opportunistic syncing when on WiFi seems to fit a personal wiki better for me.