Comment by saltymimir | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saltymimir | Hacker News Reader

Like (almost) everyone here, I've gone through a lot of note-taking apps in the market. I ended up with a setup of alternating between Obsidian and Logseq, just like the OP at one point.

I like Obsidian a lot. The text editor-like, but not quite a text editor experience seemed like the sweet spot for me. Among all of the apps I tried, it probably has the best reading experience, especially for long-form writings. But then I realized that it didn't really get me to write more notes, and it now acts more like a catalogue for things that I found online. It's just not that different from writing notes in your go-to text editor, and if VSCode couldn't make me write more notes, then neither would Obsidian.

I tried out Logseq later on, and the experience was the complete opposite. The app got me to dump my brain very quickly; writing notes actually became quite addicting. The problem is I hardly ever got back to re-reading my notes. I just never got used to the workflow of jumping through links and reading blocks that look hastily patched up together.

Wish I could find a way to make a reading experience as pleasant as Obsidian, and the writing experience that's as engaging as Logseq. A this point, though, I'm sort of stuck with these two.

Curious what was stopping you from writing more notes in Obsidian?

I use a daily note as a starting point and then extract those into lots of other notes - maybe 20-30 each day.

I'm personally finding discovery in Obsidian isn't great. I could look through directory structure, or do global search, but neither is quick.

I might be "using it wrong", but in that case I don't feel it's doing well at pointing me towards the right way!

> but neither is quick.

I had the same experience, so I assigned a keyboard shortcuts Cmd+Shift+F and Cmd+Shift+H for global search and home, and that mitigated it a little bit. These should have had shortcuts out-of-the-box.

It's still a little awkward to get out of the search mode and back to editing mode. What would be ideal is hitting "Esc" should take you back to the listing mode and move cursor back to the last edit location.

I'm a dedicated Obsidian user at this point, but totally agree that discovery could be improved significantly. Maybe a context-sensitive search, like how when you're entering a new question in StackOverflow it gives you suggestions of questions that have already been asked that might be what you mean. So I'm reading a note, and in a side panel it would show me other notes that seem related, regardless of whether they're linked to this one. And when I'm typing, it might populate a window or feed in the sidebar with suggestions of notes that have similar content. I think that'd help a lot in discoverability, and in promoting better knowledge management as a whole by prompting me to curate related docs instead of editing them in isolation.

That idea of a sidepanel showing a feed of potentially related notes via fuzzy search or something would be such a game changer. Tempted to learn some clojure just to implement this in logseq…

IMO: Obsidian does a good job in making me reflect and review notes, but not enough to prompt me to write more of them. Logseq does the exact opposite.

There's nothing wrong with Obsidian per se, but that's probably the crux of my issue with it. I'm not very naturally inclined to taking notes in the first place, and Obsidian just hasn't made me take that many more notes than I used to.

Logseq on the other hand has an editor that makes it hard for you to even write longer / multi-line blocks. In some ways, I suspect that writing in bullet points or smaller blocks encourages shorter but more frequent note writing, and my brain seems to respond well to that. Obsidian can technically do that to some degree, but the editor doesn't do enough to make me write shorter and more atomic notes, even with the Outliner[0] plugin installed.

[0]: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

Insane how you as well as OP have the same setup as me. I also initially tried Dendron but did not find the experience that pleasant as it was basically the same app in which I was programming in (VSCode). So now, I have decided to take notes in these two apps (I had commented the same thing a while back) for a longer period and then compare these two.

I just cannot decide :(

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