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Comment by rg111 | Hacker News Reader

I have switched to Obsidian and I use multiple vaults for multiple purposes.

One is for work, one is for personal projects and notes.

One for Books and Movies I watched or want to watch.

And one for Zettelkasten[0].

Obsidian is extremely customizable and user-friendly. And to make things even better, which is a must for many people including me, it saves the files as .md in the local storage.

You can even sync it among n devices for free using Box, Sync, Mega, OneDrive, Dropbox or whatever floats your boat.

Just as a quick exercise, I spun up a fully functional Obsidian clone that runs in the browser that works locally, in four hours using React- just in case the company goes under in future. It works great.

[0]: https://zettelkasten.de

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Could you share your clone (w/ source code)? I've been wanting to build an open source Obsidian Publish alternative w/ the ability to authenticate and edit - Yjs + ProseMirror would allow for high quality collaborative Markdown editing on the frontend.

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.

The one thing I found weird when I looked into Zettelkasten is the focus on having relatively hard to read IDs as the primary part of the title. It could certainly help in the original use case of having to categorise and store physical paper notes, but it just feels obsolete in a world where you have digital notes, hyperlinking, and search.

I've found that to be exactly the case. Once you are able to freely hypelink your notes, the ID isn't really helpful. It's the first thing I dropped from mine.

The funny ID thing was necessary when zettelkastens were physical cards in a box that you need to keep in order so that you can look them up. Digital zettelkasten apps have largely dropped the ID systems, you link cards just by their name, and you can use folders or internal headers for ordered structure when you want it.

You don’t need crazy IDs any more. In Obsidian I just make sure each of my notes has a descriptive title and that’s enough to ensure it’s unique.

Some of my notes are literally just a bunch of links to other notes because the title of the notes is descriptive enough that stringing a bunch together I can form entirely new sentences.

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