Obsidian 1.4.10 Desktop (Public)

Yeah, slow news day.

To this point, if you're releasing minor-version changelogs, expect them to be posted on sites like HN, and make sure you link at the top of the post to the announcement of the latest major release, for those who might have missed it! It's an easy marketing win!

In fact, 1.4.12 is already out: https://obsidian.md/changelog/2023-09-11-desktop-v1.4.12/

Personally I appreciate the fix for "Reveal in Finder" hanging a system app (Finder). I also wanted to see how people think of the Properties feature, which has not been discussed yet on HN.

It sparks a discussion around knowledge management, that's kinda nice :)

Fun fact:

- The author of the popular Minimal theme is now the CEO.

- The author of Kanban, Style Settings, and a couple more plugins has been hired.

- The author of Advanced Tables, Breadcrumbs, and Leaflet plugins has been hired.

Fingers crossed they also hire the Dataview developer, which is in my opinion by far the most powerful plugin available!

Yeah and the Excalidraw Extension is just incredibly good

Also check out the Tasks plugin and the query language it comes with. Obsidian has become my one tool for so many things at this point!

I tried it on Android and within the first few minutes I hit the following annoyances:

  - Changing the title of a note and then backing out of the note does not save the title change; I had
    to switch focus to the body of the note before the title change would save
  - Backing out of a note exited the app instead of bringing me to the previous view
  - Backing out of a sub-setting view exited the settings instead of bringing me to the parent settings
    view, so even looking for a setting that might help the first two annoyances was also annoying

I'm hoping to give it another go, and perhaps even suggest or improve the app when I have some time, but it was definitely an underwhelming first impression.

Copying and pasting my a previous comment on obsidian syncing:

Some options for syncing on mobile: Obsidian sells a first party syncing solution, which I hear works well:

https://obsidian.md/sync

I do git syncing on Android via termux (It works most of the time, except when git decides to shit itself every now and then on my tablet):

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/guide-using-git-to-sync-your-obs...

I can't vouch for it because I don't have any iOS devices new enough to support it, but supposedly you can use Working Copy to sync via git on iOS:

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mobile-setting-up-ios-git-based-...

1. Create notes. Use tags and descriptive titles.

2. Don't care about organization.

3. Install the Omnisearch plugin and it's dependencies.

4. Find stuff with Omnisearch.

I've struggled a lot with this too. I still feel like others' advice seems to fly over my head, and sometimes different note taking systems have wildly contrasting ideas.

I am approaching 3 years with Obsidian!

What I have found works best is to basically forget about putting strong priors on the structure of your notes. Just let everything be flat - or at most, create one level of hierarchy for a specific project.

When you have a new thought, use search. I have a command that pulls up the advanced search tool plugin and fuzzy searches my term. I then quickly scan (visually as cards) the notes I created already. If there is something related to my idea I open that note and continue that thread. If it's new, I create a new note.

This can be improved even more by using tags liberally, but I find that just having a powerful search and taking the time to "check" before creating a new note works very well for my style of note taking!

Zettlekasten seems popular with the Obsidian crowd. I think it's interesting but only partially following some of the ideas.

I use a single large note (log) with timestamps for each entry. Each entry is default h2 I use tags per entry Sometimes I split out a category in a dedicated log/note or even directory (e.g. math)

Having a better search is great, but the process of organizing notes is for your brain (i.e. structure your knowledge).

TAG EVERYTHING - I'm with the sibling comment. I highly recommend the templater plugin.

Just choose a template immediately that has the creation date, and tags.

Tag your notes, just attempt to be consistent with the tags. Obsidian has some crazy powerful plugins that let you build it to your workflow - but if you start by tagging everything you'll be set moving forward.

I personally like the unique note creator to prepend dates.

Quickadd+Commander lets you make buttons for individual templates. Dataview is also very useful.

It took me two years before I really started personalizing it, I currently have templates for "regular notes", "weekly meeting", and "q/a notes". I'm adding notes to list my #wip as well

I tag a lot. Some notes still fall between the cracks though so recently I’ve been setting aside certain tags for dataview. I have so far a “review” tag and a “relevant” tag for notes that I need to reread to see if they’re relevant and notes that I think are relevant to my current thought processes. Then I created a folder that just has notes that use dataview to list certain tags like a note that lists all my notes tagged review and tagged relevant.

I have issues with memory/retainment due to a traumatic brain injury from a car accident in high school, and am incredibly dependent on using Obsidian as sort of a "second brain."

While I've only adopted about half of the methods outlined in Tiago Forte's book, Building a Second Brain [1], it's been very effective for me. I prefer hierarchical folder structure for organization, but I do use his overall PARA structure.

I also use an "inbox" or intake folder inspired by Zettelkasten for newly created notes. I really believe significant cognitive overhead of sorting/tagging/organizing gets in the way of getting your thoughts/notes written down. I generally spend ~10-15 minutes after getting the kids to bed to organize any notes created throughout the day. This is part of my wind-down routine, involving quickly journaling an overall summary of the day on my daily notes and migrating any outstanding TODO's to the next day.

IMO though, the most important thing is to use whatever method of structure/routine/organization works for you. Approach it as an iterative process and play with interesting ideas or methodologies.

One thing in Tiago Forte's BASB that I _strongly_ agree with is that regardless of how much organization you put into your digital notes, search is often the fastest way to find something you're looking for, so spending immense time on organization is counter-intuitive to the reason to take notes. Spending some time to organize your thoughts can inspire connections between notes that you hadn't initially thought of, but it is a slippery slope: it is easy to get lost in the process of structuring your notes and end up with that as your sole purpose of your documented thoughts.

1: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/book

Tags help, but I am also used to folder structure, so I came up with this..

Create a template for new notes, with an auto-populated frontmatter.

I use the templater plugin with a script that adds tags based on the folders the file is in.

Add this to the top of the template:

```

--- type: note created: <% tp.date.now("MMMM DD, YYYY") %>

updated: <% tp.date.now("MMMM DD, YYYY") %>

collapsed: true

tags:

- <% tp.file.path(true).toLowerCase().split("/").slice(0, -1).join("\n- ")%> ---

```

Also to lighten the decision making process of categorizing the notes, I use daily notes where I would throw all the random / current thoughts / information. The `Rollover Daily Todos` helps with persistence of daily notes. The only catch is that i need to structure the notes as a to-do list

- [ ] but i do it more or less like that anyways.

I will do a daily list cleanup once a month to keep things sane. Delete irrelevant stuff or move things into corresponding folders.

I think I'm on my third Obsidian year. I can now say that I probably put too much effort in "organization" in the beginning and in effect, I notice that usually when I'm looking for something, I either check the file directly or I use search. And I figured that for me tags were not that useful, for now. Still, I keep tagging but I don't lose too much time bothering about that as I used to in the past.

I would suggest not to worry about organizing too much.

I don’t know about “good” processes, but I definitely have processes… mainly just templates for daily notes & call/meeting notes & a plugin called QuickAdd. Though tbf, I’ve been using more-or-less the same templates since 2018 but in Typora… It’s nice being able to search back across several years of essentially plain-text notes for stuff :-)

Read your notes. Search your notes before the trying internet. Using your notes will highlight what is missing, and you can then fill in those blanks.

Since you are the one writing them, you can make them in a format that is easier for you than a random blog post (that you will not be able to find again).

Start each note's name with the date. I use a system-wide auto-expanding shortcut with this format:

2023-09-13

So, for example:

2023-09-13 Thoughts on HN Post

2023-09-13 Call from F. Lastname

2023-09-12 Scratch

2023-09-11 To Do

Otherwise, just write what you want to remember and don't worry about structure or tagging. That's what search is for. The date is only important so you can sort them by the creation date (which otherwise is lost across file systems).

I've been doing it that way for over 10 years now, starting with nvAlt and similar editors. It works great and it's easy to find things.

> https://obsidian.md/changelog/2023-09-11-desktop-v1.4.12/

it just makes markdown files

Obsidian is similar to Notion, except it's plaintext (mostly markdown, but there are plugins for other formats as well) and is an electron app it's, which admittedly some people are not a big fan of because of the performance reasons. In this case though I would argue it's a great strength, because you can use JavaScript to write plugins and ot has a good ecosystem already.

Notion is better in most things it's doing, while obsidian is better in the things Notion is not offering or where it's weak. So it depends on your priorities and abilities. And on the long run, the gap will become smaller and smaller, in favor of obsidian I would say.

The Obsidian team uses a shared Sync vault[1] to collaborate on making Obsidian. Since Obsidian runs on local files you could use any shared file storage like Dropbox. If you want more granular version history, you can use Git, there's a nice plugin for it[2].

[1]: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Share+remote+vaults

[2]: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git

Obsidian Sync may provide a partial solution but it's mainly targeted at a single user synchronizing vaults between devices. There's also the Obsidian Git[1] plugin if you're working with developers that are familiar with Git, with all of the pros and cons you'd expect. Finally, there's obsidian-livesync[2] which in theory would provide some very powerful functionality; it seems very cool but given that doing such livesync is complex and easy to get wrong exercising a great deal of caution (frequent backups and care when rolling out for production uses) seems prudent.

Keep in mind that Obsidian requires a license for business use[3]. They're a very small shop that's entirely funded by licensing/sync/publishing income and are making a pretty fantastic product and they deserve some cash to keep developing Obsidian.

[1]: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git [2]: https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync [3]: https://obsidian.md/pricing

Properties are a UI for YAML frontmatter, with nice autocomplete and search syntax. Allows you to add structured metadata to your notes, e.g. dates, numbers, text, checkboxes, as well as links to other notes. It's compatible with other tools that use frontmatter, such as SSGs (Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, etc).

https://help.obsidian.md/Editing+and+formatting/Properties

In programming terms they're variables you add to the top of a note. Or if you ever used a static site generator, they're the same as YAML metadata. In fact, they are YAML metadata with a prettier interface.

You can't really do anything useful with them within Obsidian without some plugins (like Dataview) just yet, but dynamic databases are on the roadmap. So, eventually you'll be able to query, filter, sort notes without a third-party plugin, get the results as a table, and insert that table into some of your notes.

Think "every book note whose author = John Doe, sorted by release date", "every note that contains #tag1 and #tag2, but not #tag3", things like that. And the result will be auto-updated whenever you change some metadata.

Properties are not really new, it's just a more dedicated name for frontmatter, which already exists since the beginning, and where tags are saved. But it also comes with a nice interface and integrated support for fields outside of tags, which until now was an area where you were depending on plugins like dataview. It seems on the long run, they plan to shift Obsidian more into the direction of Notion Databases, and delivering an improved version of dataview out-of-the-box.

I use syncthing with my phone as the always-on mediator between my other devices, works quite well.