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Obsidian 1.5 Desktop (Public)

obsidian.md

199 pointsl2dy193 comments

For an opensource alternative to Obsidian checkout Logseq (1). I spent a while thinking obsidian was opensource out of my own ignorance and was disappointed when I learned it was not. I mistook the extensive github presence for the actual product being open.

1: https://logseq.com/

Looks cool! I couldn’t tell from the homepage, but it looks like they support cross-device syncing [1]. The big gap left is the rich plugin environment that Obsidian has.

1: https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/how%20to%20sync%20your%20logs...

I think sync is a non-feature, as you can just ride on your existing solution.

(Do one thing and do it well).

For example, I use syncthing [1] with Obsidian to sync files off-cloud.

https://syncthing.net/

You can use git with it. It automatically commits at configurable intervals, and with few hooks[0] you can make pushing automatic and also pull changes made elsewhere (which then get instantly shown on a running Logseq desktop instance).

The default git configuration was kinda weird, but I think I initialized the git myself and then added it in Logseq before adding the hooks and it's been good experience.

[0] https://github.com/CharlesChiuGit/Logseq-Git-Sync-101

with obsidian and IOS - you start a vault on your iphone it creates a vault in your icloud folder - then open the desktop client and open the vault from the icloud folder. perfect sync without subscription or git

I keep hearing about loqseq, is there anyone using it here that can give me their opinion on it?

I use it casually. I really like it, except for the fact that the UI shows empty log days. So if I don't take any note for a week, I get a big blank scroll, instead of whatever my last note was.

Structuring everything into "nodes" is a paradigm that works well for me.

I use it daily for work. The core concept is a single time-sequential outline. Each entry in the outline is referenceable and can be included by reference in other pages. Pages are created wiki-style. Entries can have additional metadata. There is a “todo” system of metadata (that I don’t use.). There is a data log query capability. All content is markdown. The editor inlines images. Outline + markdown + inline images + wiki-ish system is a sweet spot for me.

Reindexing will eliminate empty pages, fwiw.

Features are a bit better than Obsidian at the cost of much more jank.

I use it and mostly like it. It is excellent at being a WYSIWYG, markdown-first, stream-of-consciousness, note-taking application.

The plugin ecosystem is sparse/immature, and the special features like PDF embedding/annotating are not very usable. It is difficult to set up sync properly (I self host Nextcloud and usually have to resolve sync conflicts whenever I switch devices). There is an Android app, which works fine, but the integration with the Android system (e.g. creating a note from a "Share" dialog) is... obtuse.

I ended up on logseq after trying nearly every other notetaking platform and paradigm under the sun. Logseq is the only one I found myself using, and I've used it at nearly ever day at home and work for coming up on two years.

It works for me because I can just start typing. I don't have to worry about creating new pages. If I click on a reference (that is, a tag or page -- fundamentally the same thing), I can see all of the other places I referenced it. And all of the places I used that word but _didn't_ reference it.

I can go on and on about logseq and I'm happy to answer specific questions, but the important thing is: it works for me.

It has nice linking and macros, it is very painful when it comes to code blocks. It's also a bit weird that every paragraph is a bullet point. I prefer being able to write Markdown documents where not every paragraph is a bullet point.

For an example of macros, I have a macro that makes it so when I enter `{{mergerequest JIRA-1000, 2222}}` I get links to the JIRA ticket and the GitHub PR. JIRA-1000 is the ticket ID and 2222 is the GitHub PR number. Macros are really powerful and a lot of fun to customize.

Another nice thing about logseq is that you can use it as a self-hosted web app. Thus, there is no need for Electron, you can use a regular browser. However, this requires the File System API, which is missing in Firefox.

Used both for awhile, and I much prefer Logseq. Haven't missed unstructured text since moving over like I thought I would.

Logseq is nice but to call it an Obsidian alternative is a stretch to the point that I'd call it straight up incorrect.

Logseq started out as a RoamResearch alternative.

Speaking of which, I wonder whatever happened to that project.

One nice thing about Roam is that because it doesn't use files, it has true transclusion, both at the level of documents and at the level of individual symbols (tags & links). Because of this, renaming a tag globally for example is trivially easy. (I don't think global tag renaming is possible in Obsidian natively (without plugin) yet.)

> I don't think global tag renaming is possible in Obsidian natively (without plugin) yet.

It's not tags, but this update brought global renaming of properties out-of-the-box. Properties are the data-fields in frontmatter, the yaml-part which acts as a header in Obsidian-files. Being yaml, makes this rather easy and safe to implement. Tags on the side can occur in freetext, which makes it easy to have false-tags found. Putting some automatism on this is a bit risky I guess.

> Tags on the side can occur in freetext, which makes it easy to have false-tags found. Putting some automatism on this is a bit risky I guess

I agree, especially if you copy paste tweets containing hashtags into your files you could end up with accident collisions.

On the other hand, I refactor my tags a lot so I really needed the feature. I ended up using a simple VSCode language server to piggyback on "rename symbols". It's not ideal but it reduced a lot of friction.

Yup, Logseq is simply too different. It basically wants to go farther than what Obsidian aims to achieve. That said, some features of Logseq are janky, as they are not refined enough. I think Obsidian hit the sweat spot that is easy to implement yet offers enough features.

+1 for jank.

Exactly like what was the case for Athens, the core features don't feel very refined (glitches in block editing and not good at all search) and the focus is on building arguably unnecessary features.

On a cursory look it seems like Obsidian puts more effort into having a solid core, which I appreciate.

But Logseq is actually FOSS and fits my needs better with its paradigms.

I don't know that it is really that much of a stretch. People move from Obsidian to LogSeq and vice versa. While some people use both, they are certainly both Personal Knowledge Management solutions.

Now, they approach the problem differently, to be sure, but so do vi and emacs and visual studio code. People choose between them for software development tasks though each has a wildly different approach such that you might use more than one.

Unless you can now edit long text blocks in logseq it's not an alternative. Last time i checked it was a pure bullet point note taker. If I recall correctly this was for performance reasons which was in itself extremely weird. A markdown editor in 2023 dying on a page long block of text is... not good.

Out of curiosity, why do you prefer open source in this case?

Not OP but for me it's to avoid the following playing out:

1. gradually, more vendor lockin (read: not plain markdown) features are added

2. greater focus on monetization

3. exit

4. go to #2.

In some products this doesn't matter. In a personal knowledgebase it might.

I appreciate that, thanks for sharing! If Obsidian didn't have plain markdown + regular folders, I would also avoid it.

I guess though with Obsidian, even if you get locked out or they dry up tomorrow, you don’t lose anything in your knowledge base because it works on top of your existing directory structure

The only thing you could get locked out of is the convenient curation that Obsidian provides

Im normally opensource-or-bust but the way obsidian is set up is pretty low risk

That's true today, I agree.

Having watched this movie a few times, I like to have the insurance policy of open source licensing so that it stays true tomorrow.

Once something is proprietary it's arguably easier from a developer perspective - and preferred from an investor perspective - to make it steadily more proprietary over time.

Then one day you wake up and even if your notes still aren't saved in some some obtuse format that only loads properly in Obsidian, your experience has gradually degraded but by this stage you've got so much tied up in the proprietary extras that you stick around unhappily.

What are the examples you've seen do this?

Evernote, one of Obsidian’s predecessors.

Earliest example might have been AOL. Some others would be Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish, much of cloud vendors' repackaging of OSS, evernote, to a certain extent the recent Reddit and twitter API changes, IoT devices which get buyin based on open standards and then move increasingly critical features to proprietary unpublished/out of band comms.

I feel like it's quite a well-worn page of the tech playbook and I'm probably only scratching the surface here.

Obsidian is hardly AOL or Microsoft sized :)

And the second they go full evil, I can just point _any_ editor to the same directory structure and stuff will mostly Just Work.

There are ways to get around the lockin just like with Evernote. It's not easy nor clean as with any attempt to migrate but one way to do it is via Pandoc and Lua Filters to transform custom syntax to other forms. For Obsidian, I was able to write a Lua filter for Callouts to convert to Hugo shortcodes/Quarto's callouts based on someone's previous work.

I also want open-source for PKM software but I realized I value getting things done more if there were no near alternatives for my use case. I tried Logseq but it's straying even further from vanilla Markdown than Obsidian and is not as well-polished.

The good thing is that there are several options for similar apps right now. If Obsidian tries to do vendor lock in stuff, I’ll just move to one of the other options.

It’s not open source but it doesn’t have to be because all of your documents are in portable, well organized markdown.

You can easily jump to any other tool that reads markdown thanks to that.

Open source would better, but I’m more concerned with avoiding lock in.

AFAIK it's still a flavor of markdown, with some modifications and extensions. Which is pretty common in markdown-land, but could prevent easy adaption of another markdown-tool, depending on what syntax you use heavily.

Switched back-and-forth as well, and ended up with Logseq long term.

In practice, logseq’s block-oriented system works really good for the daily journal, and with obsidian I always devolved to just prepending points to a single file anyway.

Can anybody comment on Logseq's performance compared to Obsidian?

Obsidian is perfect for my needs but unfortunately a tad too heavy for my poor laptop with 4 GB RAM.

Logseq has worse performance, undoubtedly, and the performance penalty scales proportionally to the size of your knowledge graph. I only notice poor performance if I'm trying to modify a large embedded block. Otherwise, it's typically fine.

That said, I actually _use_ Logseq due to the way it works (i.e., an outliner). Obsidian simply doesn't meet my needs.

Logseq to me is more what Obsidian was supposed to be but I realize not everyone wants an outliner

Thanks! Would you by any chance know of a light weight note taking app?

Emacs org-mode.

Lightweight in terms of system resources, yes. Lightweight in terms of "I have a whole new lifestyle and religion"... no.

Org-mode can be used simply, but the kind of person drawn to org-mode (e.g. me) has a hard time not yak shaving org-mode in the extreme. :-)

Shameless plug: my note-taking app[1] is built using Qt C++ and QML. I’m also working on a new note taking app with a revamped block editor[2].

[1] https://www.get-notes.com/

[2] https://www.get-plume.com/

A few days back I'd signed up for Plume's waiting list. However, I wasn't aware that you were also the creator of an existing app.

I have a few questions for you. I apologize if some (all?) of them are too aggressive.

What were your reasons for creating a new project rather than focussing on the existing project? Technical debt?

What will be the pricing of the new app? Will it be open-source?

Lastly, will Notes be maintained by you to a lesser degree upon the release of Plume? Will you let the community take over? Will nothing change?

These are all great questions.

1. Notes is completely open-source[1]. There are some awesome maintainers who help me fix and update things and sometimes even implement new features. When Plume will be released, of course, I'll put much less time into Notes (as already the case). But since Notes is licensed under MPL and Plume is built on top of it, all files used from Notes will be open source as well, so any improvement from Plume could be potentially incorporated into Notes.

2. The reason for creating Plume is that I always wanted[2] to create an advanced editor (a la Notion) but only recently realized how to be able to do it using C++ (handling the model) and QML (handling the view). I had to implement many things from scratch (undo/redo/copy/paste/multi-block-editing/etc).

3. I recently discussed my reasoning to go close-source[3]. I've been working night and day (every day) converting 4 cups of coffee into code for the last 4 months to create Plume. I don't want to risk not being rewarded sufficiently for it. But, I'm 99% sure that I'll either open source the core block editor or the entire app in the future.

[1] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes

[2] https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes/issues/317

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38584960

Thank you!

Vim, emacs Org mode (if you consider emacs "light weight"), Joplin (from what I recall, it's been a long time), sublime text/vs code.

If I wished to learn vim for note taking rather than programming, what learning resources would I most benefit from? I am a complete beginner to vim.

That’s a good question. The built in tutorial is actually really good, you can launch it with “vimtutor” on the command line. It doesn’t give you everything, but its instructions and text to try things out on in the editor itself, which I find a good way to learn. It isn’t particularly programming focused either.

For getting used to the motions especially https://vim-adventures.com can be a fun way, in its game format.

For getting started I’d say don’t worry about plugins much, but get https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible at least so the defaults meant for vi don’t get in the way. The only other thing you might want is a format syntax if your preferred note syntax isn’t highlighted well by default or something. Polyglot can be good to stave that off but really I’d say learn on a really lean config, and get used to using :help or similar. It’s the best way to learn the parts that work everywhere.

Regarding the game vim adventures; is the free version good enough on its own? $25 for half a year is too much for me to shell out for a vim course...

I forgot they even had a paid version, sorry about that. The benefit IMO is really just playing the first few bits a few times to help get the visual/muscle memory of moving around with vim motion keys. Not just HJKL but beginning/end, Find and Till, I assume the paid part comes after that but it’s been a while since I’ve used it.

Honestly I’d do the vimtutor, maybe try the free version of this, and just use it for a bit. Use the arrow keys, use the mouse (:set mouse=a turns it on just in case) but see how you like being able to use the <count><action><range> syntax to do things. That’s the real win in my opinion, things like reflow this paragraph gqip (reflow is gq, range for a paragraph is “ip” or In Paragraph), delete this sentence including surrounding spaces and period das (literally Delete Around Sentence), and with movements gU} changes the rest of the current paragraph to uppercase.

There are many lists of these things, but I learned it by treating it as notepad with some odd bindings for save and quit for a bit in college then whenever something was annoying looking up how to do it or how to build it. I’ve now been using vim as my main editor for notes, prose with latex or markdown, and programming for 20 years, and literally given courses on it for graduate students. That is to say, you don’t need to learn it all ip front to use it. Learn how to open it, get in insert mode, write and quit and jump in; hopefully it will fit you like it did for me.

If you are a beginner, I highly recommend you start with Helix ( https://helix-editor.com/ ).

It is a modal editor just like vi/vim/neovim, but way better/easier/sensible/helpful than its much older ancestors, especially for new learners. Even if you will later on decide to switch to something like neovim, this switch is going to be a relative piece of cake, after you had experience and understood the basic idea behind modal editing, compared to trying to go vim cold turkey.

According to my experience the vast majority of "vim beginners" actually already have a significant amount of experience with vim; it's just that the experience was negative, they didn't get far and were overwhelmed, unfoundly blaiming themselves and their own stupidity, hoping that all they are missing is a good tutorial. No, it's not you. It's the editor itself, build in 70s with the ideas, UI, hotkeys that are inapropriate for the current time. There is a much better way for modern times.

Install Helix, run it and type ':tutor' to access the tutorial. After that you will be ready to go.

> vast majority of "vim beginners" actually already have a significant amount of experience with vim;

This is the case for me too. I tried vimtutor, paid for many high quality courses directed at beginners but it never really clicked for me.

Thanks for the comment!

I have been in the same exact boat. Trying to learn vim who knows how many times in the last 15 years, but without ever able to get over the clumsiness, illogical hotkeys, constant breaking of plugins, waste of time on configuring.

Simplenote

Another Obsidian alternative which I use every day is Anytype[1]. It's fully open source however under their own license which has some interesting terms to discourage commercial adoption. They seem to be very focused on individual use. The user experience is similar to Notion with some subtle differences, but overall very positive. The biggest plus for me was offline p2p sync and a really solid mobile app.

[1] https://anytype.io/

I really, really want to like Anytype (longtime Obsidian user). I just cannot get through the general cludginess of it. “Similar to Notion” is exactly right, unfortunately.

The attempted switch to Anytype revealed to me how important it is that Obsidian feels like opening up a terminal or simple text editor.

> The user experience is similar to Notion

Honestly, it sounds like a judgment call because Notion is truly a monstrous thing. It slows down terribly and it's just plain uncomfortable. Why does "everyone" love Notion? It's horrible, how can you even use it?

Programs that do simple things should be simple and run fast. It's like a pencil that you simply use and don't think about how to use it, you don't notice it at all.

>everyone loves notion

I don’t, I actually loathe it.

> It slows down terribly and it's just plain uncomfortable.

When was the last time you use it, and what's in your workspace? Notion did receive some improvements on performance over the years, but it still depends strong on which data you dump into your workspace.

> Why does "everyone" love Notion?

Because it's an awesome concept with a well-rounded implementation on the user side. It just sucks hard on the technical side. I mean, it's a good tool, but it has an upper ceiling of what one should do with it. But this is a general problem with all those young fancy tools. Obsidian or Logseq are not different in that regard. They all are scaling poor. They are simply not meant for this.

> Programs that do simple things should be simple and run fast.

It's not simple, it's very far from being simple.

That is not open source.

> Any Association grants you (“Licensee”) a license to use, modify, and redistribute the Software, but only (a) for Non-Commercial Use, or (b) for Commercial Use in Allowed Networks.

https://github.com/anyproto/anytype-ts/blob/main/LICENSE.md

That's open source, it's not free and open source.

https://opensource.org/osd/

> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

Any restrictions on commercial use make a license not open source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software

> The terminology of FOSS was created to be a neutral on these philosophical disagreements between the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Open Source Initiative (OSI) and have a single unified term that could refer to both concepts.

Conflating open source software with free software isn't precise which is why I prefer FOSS/FLOSS as a term. The conflation you put forward is a political stance, not factual.

You seem to be trying to redefine Open Source to mean something different than what it has meant for nearly two decades. Please don't. Open Source very much includes the principle of no discrimination against commercial use, and has done so from its beginnings.

I did try Logseg, but here is my reasoning for choosing Obsidian over it. Logseg is smart and tries to manage the content for me, but I need to know where my content is.

I was pleased with Sublime Text tamed to play nicely when encountering MarkDown. But Obsidian came along and changed that. I still avoid Obsidian plugins that take over my content.

I don't understand what you are saying here. Logseq files are in the logseq folder. I'm not sure how Logseq is hiding where your content is

The comment started out interesting, and then turned into meaningless conclusions.

Logseq is open core if their sync feature is not open.

Agreed. It's frustrating because both Obsidian and Logseq have deliberately removed a crucial feature. So people either have to pay a lot, or do janky workarounds to do their own sync. Why have so many people waste their time with own custom solution.

They have developers to feed, and sync is a fair choice for paywalling a feature.

I guess, but without a good native sync, there's no way that less tech-savvy people will use it.

Personally, I wouldn't mind paying a small fee for a great note-taking app, but I would like to be able to share some notes with my mom and with my partner. But they wouldn't want to pay for it, as they wouldn't use the app as much.

I would mind. This subscription based reality has got to end. I'm drawing a line in the sand.

Of course. But they should make their money in other ways. A note taking app that I can't sync across multiple devices is useless. And you can't try the full version with sync to see if it would work. All I'm saying is they're leaving a lot of money on the table.

I hear syncthing is good for this, but obviously it's messier on iOS.

I just know that $8/mo for sync is too much. You can get Office 365, or Google Drive/Dropbox with a TON of space for that price, and that space is usable by lots of different things.

The $8/month seems completely fair IMO. really good sync is hard to pull off. I ran my own hodgepodge sync service for over a decade out of a home server for exactly these kinds of notes, and it’s really easy for issues/conflicts/general jankiness to crop up.

Plus you constantly run into issues with compatibility between the sync app(s) and the Mac/PC/iOS apps you use to edit the files.

Nothing prevents me from running that exact same setup for Obsidian for free. But I’d much rather pay $8/month and not have to deal with server backups and maintenance, compatibility, or all of the other issues.

Syncthing has been working smoothly for my Obsidian directory.

I love Logseq, would even more if the performance wasn't so bad on my phone. It doesn't feel like an Obsidian alternative, though. I mostly use it for journaling.

I use Joplin as open-source notes app. Haven't really tried Logseq or much of Obsidian, though, as seriously trying a notes app takes some commitment. Joplin is just the first one I tried that fit my needs after fleeing from Evernote, and I'm happy with it, but maybe I'm missing hepful features from elsewhere. It would be helpful if anyone who has tried several could give a comparison.

Joplin uses SQLite DB to store data, not markdown files. Moreover, you can't even change the directory where this database is stored, which is pretty funny for an open source application. Also, there are no internal linking and knowledge graphs in there. Also, there are UI/UX issues, for example annoying modal windows about updates can pop up at inopportune moments. But it should be noted that web clipper is quite usable. But it is not rocket science to make a web clipper. Obsidian is an app of a higher level of quality and usability.

Markdown is a blessing for any operation that needs to be performed across many files. Load up your favorite editor and get going.

I used Joplin for a few years and loved it. I quit evernote as soon as it lost all of my notes years ago.

Switched to Obsidian for faster startup time, which is at the top of my feature list for such apps. Joplin got worse over time with more notes. I considered Roam and Notion, but having to pay AND slow startup made no sense, although Notion features are quite nice.

Now thinking about adding Logseq to work with my Obsidian.

I also think DEVONthink is great closed source app for research especially where you can index and search all of your PDF collection and it will give you closest matching files and content with respect to your current file. Many other great features. But it’s Mac/iOS-only app, lacks of linux/windows support. Startup time is very slow. And UX for note taking is kind of unpleasant to work with. I really want to use it but I can’t for all of these reasons. It’s like an expensive car which you own but never want to drive.

How would you use Logseq together with Obsidian?

I like to drop anything interesting I find throughout my day into daily journal in Obsidian (using iOS “Share via..”) for later review.

It works fine, but:

1. I prefer how logseq displays each day as a timeline so I can review the last few days easily (in Obsidian you check each file for each day one by one)

2. I like that logseq operates more granular on block level (bullet points) as opposed to pages, so I could reference blocks instead of pages.

I think interlinking thoughts and noted on block/bullet level would be helpful in finding content or thoughts I came across in the past. In Obsidian, it’s only possible via searching, manual tagging, and manual content management, which seems like a waste of time. I want to eliminate the friction for inbound information.

Both of these apps actually suffer from the same issue — on iOS, if the app hasn’t been initialized recently, it won’t actually drop the content using “Share via..” widget, it will just open the note for today. Sometimes you have to do it twice.

In terms of configuration, the way it would work is, in Obsidian, you configure the daily journal to use the same directory and naming convention to match Logseq. They both read/write the same markdown files, so it works seamlessly.

> For an opensource alternative to Obsidian

I would say bash, git/git daemon, grep, python http server as needed.

No closed-source application between me and my information.

It all depends on what skills you already have with those tools and how much you value your time.

I find SiYuan Note to be a good open source local-first alternative to Obsidian, as it's like a mix of Notion and Obsidian.

What is the best then?

Logseq or Obsidian?

Goal 1: World class note taking

Goal 2: Not get captured by a corporation, such as what happened to Endnote

Logseq has a more convincing website.

Shout out to Obsidian, my most-used desktop and mobile app of the year. Absolute game changer. Hacker News showed me this and the book “How to Take Smart Notes” and it’s been an immense aid for difficult technical work, and plenty of other things as well.

Aside from using it for all kinds of notes (from work to book reviews to writing blog posts and other stuff I'm writing), I also use it as an RSS reader. Plain text is life.

Shoutout to the query features provided by the Dataview plugin. I have a work note which bundles all my TODOs from various work projects. It's great to be able to get an overview of all my stuff.

    ```dataview
    TASK FROM "Work/Projects"
    WHERE !completed
    GROUP BY file.link
    ```

link for taking smart notes?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60581868-how-to-take-sma...

Multiple books came up when I searched for the book you mentioned, who authored the one you're referring to?

Sönke Ahrens https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60581868-how-to-take-sma...

Thanks!

I recently switched my note taking to Obsidian. I’d floated amongst apps, including Notion, Bear, Simplenote, and most recently Craft. When Craft started acting up, I decided it was time to redo my setup.

The standard advice for Obsidian is either to not touch the plugins, or install 100 of them after watching 50 hours of YouTube videos. It is possible to easily get into an obsidian rabbit hole for sure, but I did find a happy medium and I’m thrilled with my current setup. It’s not perfect but it’s quite workable.

Some of the quirks are tables - and it looks like that’s getting fixed. Thrilled about that. The mobile app is pretty wonky too but that’s not a huge priority.

Despite the quirks I’m more organized with my daily notes and project setup using obsidian than any app prior.

Great to see the team is continually updating an already great app.

Do you do anything re: security of the plugins that you install?

Maybe I learned about the contents of [1] at the wrong time (like after a prominent supply chain compromise was found), but it made me avoid them completely.

1: https://help.obsidian.md/Extending+Obsidian/Plugin+security

what issue did you find with craft? i’m currently trialing that after finding obsidian too complex haha

You don't need any plugins to be productive in Obsidian. But boy does a plugin like Dataview make life easier. Being able to run SQL-like queries on your notes was a game changer for me.

Other than that, the only plugin I use on a daily basis is Templater in combination with Quick Add, which lets me create advanced templates which can be executed with keyboard shortcuts. Starting a new work meeting? Hit a shortcut and I have a populated meeting note in the right folder, with today's dates etc. I have about 20 such templates for various things that I do frequently. It makes for tidy, structured notes which I can easily find later.

I see that the recent releases have focused on tables and properties. The logical next step could be to integrate the two : creating a unified system of tables designed to handle properties — essentially, Notion-style databases. I'm aware of some existing plugins that tackle this, with a particularly ambitious one gestating for quite some time now [1], but I feel this could be a core plugin.

[1] https://github.com/blacksmithgu/datacore

If you look at the roadmap, that’s exactly the plan. https://obsidian.md/roadmap/

The roadmap mentions only Dynamic views, which is not the same as interactive editing of databases, not even on Notions level. But as I remember, this was different at some point. Did this entry change?

No mention of Foam? https://foambubble.github.io/foam/

Fine, I uhh, I'll speak for it.

Foam is to VSCode, what Org (and Org-Roam) are to Emacs.

As a former org-roam user, I ended up preferring it because my end goal was to convert my notes to HTML and blog posts, and org is poor at that as HTML is not valid org code whereas it is in Markdown. There's just a whole host of markdown-it plugins [1] out there to add footnotes and all sorts of things to Markdown, and Foam also understands Jekyll frontmatter YAML, which is perfect for blog post tags/categories.

[1]: https://www.npmjs.com/search?q=keywords:markdown-it-plugin

And because it's just an extension to VSCode, it works with every other extension: https://foambubble.github.io/foam/user/getting-started/recom...

This gives it similar power and flexibility to Org-Roam, as you can extend the model to improve the editing experience.

So why don't I use Obsidian, Logseq, and others? Because they're dedicated apps, and now I have to bring various half-baked plugins into them to give me the power my editor already affords me. With notes, half your time is spent editing, so why wouldn't you want your editing to be as close as possible?

Secondarily, nothing stops me from using everything altogether, since it's all Markdown, I can load up my note repo in Obsidian or Logseq and others, and continue editing in VSCode and Emacs!

Yeah but how do you access your notes on mobile?

They're in a GitHub repo, so I just use that since GH renders Markdown.

I could probably use Obsidian/Logseq mobile if I wanted to. (Again, because it's Markdown... which is about universal now.)

And like, it's Markdown. It's meant to be readable as-is, so I can probably figure out any alternative method. I'd obviously miss out on tag searching and graphing, but I don't have heavy mobile use right now.

Edit: Yeah, the GitHub mobile app ain't the worst. I can probably find a way to get local git on my phone, and then just use Obsidian Mobile if I want to get fancy.

Finally proper table editing! Why has it taken so long? That was my biggest gripe with Obsidian, so glad they've fixed it. The new table editing UI looks great. I guess I won't need the advanced tables plugin anymore.

Tables are tough. Thinking through the desired outcome of keyboard actions is a lot, and then implementing it takes a lot of work. As a simple example, if I have list inside a nested table, I highlight the list, and hit tab, what is supposed to happen? Should the cursor move to the next box in the table? Which one? Should it indent the list? There are _tons_ of these kinds of questions.

The bullet lists and numbered lists don't work inside table cells. Not a deal breaker, but would have been nice to have the same level of formatting as outside the table.

https://www.zettlr.com/ is a really close Open alternative.

For an extremely specific and rigid use case / workflow, sure it's a close alternative.

For most people that want a flexible, extensible product that can do many things in many ways, it's probably not nearly as close an alternative.

It’s an alternative for the “do not touch any plugin” crowd, which I would assume is the majority of Obsidian users. It’s not a replacement for the “install all the plugins” long tail, sure.

For my use I considered both and honestly Zettlr is not that far behind. Decent Zotero interoperability would have sold it for me.

I've tried Obsidian time and again, but the lack of mobile feature parity (even on an iPad) is still a big blocker for me.

Which features in particular?

In my experience mobile feature parity has been pretty good. All of my plugins are compatible, and I don't notice any missing features.

Really? The sole feature/plugin I’ve noticed not available is git, but working copy fills that hole for me.

Not noticed a single other thing, I’ve been super impressed with parity between the platforms in fact.

What do you mean? I switched away from Logseq specifically because Obsidian had almost no differences between the desktop and mobile apps. Logseq on mobile could not run any plugins, Obsidian supports them all.

It’s not just the plugins, the editor experience (toolbars, menus, layout) is too kludgy to be useful.

I find the desktop and mobile experience you be fairly aligned. There are few plugins I've installed that won't work on the mobile version (e g Surfing plugin)

I used to hop from one application to another then I realized almost all of them suited my needs so I settled with Joplin because I like the way the web clipper works.

what made you like joplin?

Many things.

It's open source, which is a big plus to me. It's easy to use. I like to organize my stuff in "folders" and it's perfect for that.

The web clipper is great. I can save a whole page or only what I select as .md and except for a couple lines that I usually delete, the rest is saved perfectly.

Some say that not saving the files in plain .md files like Obsidian is not as good which I agree but I takes me only a couple seconds to export everything as .md.

SiYuan Note is a fantastic open source alternative to Obsidian and Notion, as it's like a mix of both, but open source and local-first.

https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan

"Most features are free, even for commercial use." surprised after your intro.

I tried many, many note taking apps and the one that finally stuck was VS Code. I had been using VSC as my code editor daily for years so when it released "Profiles" I just created a "markdown" profile that contained all the markdown extensions, settings, customisations etc. that I needed and that's it. I realised this is perfect because there are no new keyboard shortcuts, UI or apps I have to learn. I sync all my notes to a private GitHub repo. It's fantastic.

Once I figure how to export my ad-hoc notes I've accumulated in my iPhone Notes app and sync it to the repo I will never need anything else.

Is there a good way to do the graph type views Obsidian can do in VS Code?

The android app wants full access to the file system? With the "trust us, we'll only really access the folder you tell us to..."?

Am I reading that right?

Android has moved to a file system model that generally locks app out of having full control of any folder but the one created for the app. The only way to let your app have read-write-create permissions is to request access to the whole file system. And IIRC, you have to get permission from Google to even request it.

It makes it very difficult to have something like a Git client on Android as well, as the permission to request file system access is not easily granted.

You can find an explanation of the Android permissions on the Obsidian Help site: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Android+app#Storage+permis...

Obsidian can't use scoped storage because:

> 1. Scoped storage doesn't provide a way to watch for external changes, which is critical when using Obsidian with a third-party syncing tool.

> 2. Scoped storage performs many extra permission checks for every single file access, causing significant performance degradation when opening and using Obsidian.

I can't use this because it would feel like I'm cheating on Emacs. But it looks cool!

Well, you can always be thinking about Emacs while you are using Obsidian. That way, you are not cheating cheating.

I use org-roam in emacs.

I've also used obsidian and logseq.

Went back to org-roam, which I use very much like people use logseq.

I've been using Obsidian as my mobile client for Emacs. I have a git repo with all my org documents. I use the obsidian git and org plugin to sync, view, and edit my org documents. It's not perfect but it serves it's purpose of being a quick way to look at stuff and capture on the go.

The fact that I can drag & drop pictures to Obsidian and it Just Works was the final nail in Emacs' coffin for me =)

I want to become a user - but I have not been able to set up a sync between my Android phone and Onedrive or Google drive for the Obsidian vault file.

My solution to this problem, which has worked for the past 2 years, is to rely on a private git repo for sync, obsidian on desktop, and GitJournal on mobile.

I use FolderSync for Android which works well for my obsidian sync needs

You would need to use a (freemium) app for that: OneSync or AutoSync for Google Drive.

I have OneSync but I'm currently using Syncthing (to not have to buy an upgrade and to better control which files are synced). To reduce sync conflicts, I run an always online Syncthing instance in the cloud with Fly.io.

What is Obsidian? For some reason the web site is blocking my browser and the GitHub isn't very informative.

A note taking app, bit like Notion.

Ah OK. I'm an Org user at this point, part of my emacs addiction.

I've been looking for a way to host my notes like a website locally. When I'm not writing but only want to refer to my notes, I'd much rather have something clean like that without the editor UI. Like a docusaurus instance.

Suggestions?

Any Markdown-based static site generator could work.

But the editor UI I think is where a lot of the power of a tool like Obsidian comes from. The main benefit for me is that it takes the pain out of cross-linking, so you can have a much more richly linked collection of notes, more like "hypermedia" than a journal.

Another option could be Tiddlywiki, which does have an editor UI but is self-contained in a web app.

There are a number of Obsidian plugins that will automatically convert your notes into an actual website. I don't use any but I know they exist. (I don't use them _yet_, I have a future plan to completely remake my website and Obsidian is part of it). Does that fit the bill? Or do you want something more native-feeling?

Check out https://github.com/jackyzha0/quartz (docs site can be found here: https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/ )! I found it recently and customized it a bit to redo my personal website (https://studium.dev don't mind the header on mobile, I need to fix that still). I plan to transfer my Logseq notes to it eventually but you could just as easily do the same for any markdown based notes

Seconding quartz. I also use it and love it.

It converts your markdown files to static HTML, understands Obsidian-specific markdown features, and just looks really nice IMO.

For publishing, I use Cloudflare pages to host the static HTML and Cloudflare workers to build the HTML whenever I push a commit to the GitHub repo hosting my markdown files. Quartz has documentation showing you how to set this up, and it’s all within the free offerings of Cloudflare.

Thirding this! It has proper support for Obsidian Flavored Markdown (e.g. wikilinks and callouts) and a pretty good search. I configured my setup to easily publish to CloudFlare Pages with a shortcut that I can trigger via Powertoys Run/Flow Launcher; deploying is only one Alt-Space away.

beat me to recommending this LOL. has good search and pretty feature rich. thorough documentation makes it easy to set up/customize.

I have an Obsidian Vault for my website, deployed via Jekyll. Obsidian is part of my current workflow for notes, documentation, and others, helping me write articles for my blog and other sites.

I chose Jekyll because Github has it by default and is supported by almost every other SSG service/platform, such as Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, etc.

This lets me write locally on Obsidian without running Jekyll to preview my website. Jekyll is slow, as I have over 1,700+ articles (last time I checked, even after pruning). I can look at other options, but that is not my focus, and I honestly do not care. I push it to GitHub, and eventually, in the next couple of minutes, it gets updated.

Right now, I'm on a slow experiment to separate the content (markdown / plain text) from the styling entirely. So, I can play around with the design and themes but leave the content. Akin to how I can move on and walk away from Obsidian if needed - a tool on top of my content.

To me, I feel that VitePress is lot cleaner, leaner, and simpler than Docusaurus - https://vitepress.dev

Docusaurus maintainer here. Can you expand that feeling? What makes you feel Docusaurus as complex?

Org roam and org roam UI?

Since Obsidian and Jekyll both use Markdown, you can create a Jekyll project, open it as an Obsidian vault. You could then use Jekyll to run it as a web server on your own machine. (It also works nicely with Github Pages for public websites, since that has built-in Jekyll support.)

There's also a third-party Jekyll theme specifically for this purpose (https://github.com/Jekyll-Garden/jekyll-garden.github.io).

MkDocs with the "Material for MkDocs" theme and it has a docker based builder image if you want a one-line isolated build command. Mostly pure Markdown with opt-in syntax extensions for fancy things like card grids or tables.

just in time for new year resolutioners. If only I could get back all the time I've wasted trying to build my "second brain", goofing around building some kind of connected graph nonsese. I cringe at all the time spent doing that nonsense deluding myself that it the way I am going to get organized and finally turn my life of procrastination and ennui around .

Now I spend most of my day chatting with chatgpt for work and personal life. If it could remember and build my second brain for me that would be amazing.

I really dont think any of these tools like notion, obsidian are really practical or aligned to way our brain works.

Yeah, I agree. All this note-taking is not about storing information for me. It's just planning private projects, writing long-form posts, and journaling. Mostly dumping down thoughts.

It can work, but only if you also make your second brain about building small habits.

For instance, my food recipes are there.

If I didn't establish a habit of "search notes for recipes" when I think "what should I eat" those notes would have much less value.

As for chatgpt doing this for you, I'm interested too. Give MemGPT or khoj a try.

Storing recipes is great example of why this doesn't work. I never have exact list of ingredients, equipment, energy level for a recepie.

I now just ask chatgpt that I have x,y and z in my fridge and I want to use to use oven and vitamix and that i am tired. It concocts a recipe for me that i can tune further. I have customgpt with promt about my food preferences, allergies, style of cooking, cooking equiment ect.

Most of the stuff I cook aren't unique recipes that need to store in obsidian.

> Storing recipes is great example of why this doesn't work. I never have exact list of ingredients, equipment, energy level for a recepie.

Really? My fridge typically has the same things I've found. Regarding energy level I have a different node called "low-energy recipes" the other recipes are linked from.

> I now just ask chatgpt that I have x,y and z in my fridge and I want to use to use oven and vitamix and that i am tired. It concocts a recipe for me that i can tune further.

I've done that, but there are tradeoffs in quality and depending on how you view LLM's.. confidence in the end result.

> Most of the stuff I cook aren't unique recipes that need to store in obsidian.

It depends on your memory... I forget certain steps of recipes I've cooked for years sometimes. Knowing I have things just there at my grasp puts things on easy mode.

It seems to me that any notes app works for storing recipes. I have a recipes folder in Apple Notes, which doesn’t use any special feature.

Yeah, you can replicate how i use it for recipes with notes + tags.

However sometimes tags are meaningful enough they should have their own page. And I'd like to know the surrounding context around the creation of that page, which I can do because the first link to it was from my org roam daily.

Or I want to know which friend shared the recipe with me.

Maybe those examples can answer the unspoken "why not simpler notes?" question.

You don't hear this take often, but I fully agree. I tried the second brain stuff myself. I attempted to create a personal wiki with all the software engineering knowledge I would come across. Knowledge about programming languages, networking, security, hardware... All of it was neatly organized in my wiki with interconnected notes. Whenever I learned something new about a topic, I would go back to that note and add it in.

And then... then what? It turned out that I never reached out to any of these notes. Most of the useful knowledge is already right there, in my brain. I don't need a second brain for that. The knowledge that I used less frequently was easily refreshed by a quick Google search or ChatGPT. I didn't need to keep this knowledge in any form of personal wiki. Turns out that this personal wiki simply added more overhead to my day, since now anything I would learn would have to be written in a note. But what was really the point of this writing if it was never read?

Right now I don't really keep any notes anymore, but I am not sure that this is the solution, either. As with all things, balance is probably the answer to all this note-taking; you probably want to keep notes of _some_ things, but you probably don't need to have a wiki with all of your knowledge, either.

> And then... then what? It turned out that I never reached out to any of these notes. Most of the useful knowledge is already right there, in my brain. I don't need a second brain for that.

This sort of approach shines when you need to mobilise knowledge that fell out of your immediately accessible memory, e.g. 6 months after having done something for the last time. It’s not very well suited to fields that move too fast and where you never need to look back, because by then the knowledge is outdated and you need to find new solutions anyway.

For me, it’s great because I have a handful of long-running projects concurrently and I switch between them every 3-4 month. Being able to easily mobilise project-specific knowledge after having spent enough time doing something else that I forgot the details is very useful.

To be honest, I would love a LLM that I could use to extract information from my old pile of notes and my pile of scientific papers. I don’t think it would make notes useless, though. On the contrary it would make them much more valuable.

The biggest benefit one gets from notes comes from the mere fact of writing (not reading), when one has to think, write, paraphrase, edit what and how to write, and how this new info connects to the existing knowledge.

Honestly, I'm not sure I buy the second brain marketing myself either. If it's a knowledge-base then it probably has more value in a wiki.

I use Obsidian as my daily journal, personal log and thinking partner. I have AuDHD and have a tendency to forget and I stress out when I can't remember things. Sometimes I need to make detailed plans and have it someplace accessible (phone) so I can stay on track.

The E2EE Sync as part of the service was a plus (not happy with the Jan '24 changes to Sync but that's a different story). It works very well on my iPhone.

As my journaling tool, I find it incredibly powerful to link to things I think about day-to-day. I can create a note about a topic I'm thinking about. (New notes automatically create a link to the current day, thanks to templates). At times, I will make a note on a particular media I've consumed (book, movies, etc.), put some things that I thought about it, and link it to the day I finished reading it. I do this for movies and other things. I often will forget that I've seen that movie already so a quick look-up can save me an hour of my time.

When I revisit a day on the journal, I'm able to see backlinks to things that I have thought about, watched, read or have done in that day. It also helps me with my emotion dysregulation and working through what I'm going through. Sometimes it's hard to understand because I don't always remember clearly what's happening. It helps me with weekly review. It helps me understand how I'm using my time (time blindness) a little better and it does so in a frictionless way.

Could I accomplish this with other tools? Yes.

But: 1) I value my privacy above everything, 2) I wanted a tool that doesn't impose a certain philosophy on me, 3) it has a mobile app, and 4) e2ee sync service.

I totally agree. I take tons of notes and rarely review them - but when I do, I really need the info.

So my focus is to get the information recorded and to spend pretty minimal time formatting or otherwise messing with the notes. The important thing is just to get things recorded.

My take is don't curate notes to excess or as its own end. Take notes to the extent that it's useful and (like email) don't over-invest in backlinking, tagging, and categorization -- search is a helluva drug. I find a lightly structured process for how I capture notes on upcoming trips (mostly during the planning phase), content I might consume later, bookmarks, books or courses I want to record some notes on, topics I can truly foresee wanting to come back to, and so in. I also normed into doing a weekly note where I capture a few notes a day that I'll want to refer back to, and track what I'm focused on that week. The dominant theme for me is a little goes a long way, and my goal is to be more productive in terms of writing and recall, not to be encyclopedic. This is absolutely ymmv, horses-for-courses think, I'm almost certain. But it's useful to know that there are many useful stops along the continuum as you're triangulating towards yours (imo).

Also, Obsidian is excellent software -- for me it's supplanted Ulysses/Bear, bookmark managers and web clippers, and todo managers. The plugin ecosystem is the deal, even as Stephano and team keep improving the core. I think it's reached enough users at this point, that even if they pivoted to a less non-evil heading, it seems like someone would come in behind them and offer an alternative for your folders and folders of md.

> it seems like someone would come in behind them and offer an alternative for your folders and folders of md.

That’s a killer feature for me. I’ve seen way too many applications that went bust or that stopped being developed, I really don’t want to deal with extracting stuff from yet another proprietary database.

I am looking to move off simplenote. I rely to heavily on it, it is really good, very simple and great. But something this important needs to be self hosted in my opinion.

I would love some type of plugin for Obsidian that could generate a searchable transcript of audio/video files I drop into my notes.

Did they fix the annoying problem with the properties section skewed to the left side of the editor?

Are you using Minimal theme? It was an issue with Minimal that was fixed, if you update your theme.

I was. But looks like I just needed to update the theme. Fixed now!

Whatever happened to the Zettelkasten note strategy approach?

You can use it in Obsidian. Or in any other note taking application. Or using paper notes and a physical zettelkasten.

> As of 1.5.0, the Legacy editor has been completely removed from Obsidian.

This seems to be one of (the only?) notable change in 1.5.0, especially for legacy plugin devs. Also tags can’t end in a ‘/‘ now.

I think the addition of decent/simple markdown table editing (without requiring a plugin) is a big feature for a lot of people

Ah good point. I typically avoid tables in my notes, but I imagine it’s super useful for some

I can't wait to try this out. I have a plugin installed now but table editing is still clunky. Decent first-party support of md tables is huge (for me) if true.

> Obsidian 1.5 Desktop (Public)

is a .. Common people, it is so hard to write a description of your program ?

The answer to that is on the home page, not the change log.

It's not the obsidian devs that choose which post makes it to HN, and I disagree with the (common on HN it seems) viewpoint that every page should be understandable with context removed in case it gets posted to HN.

It looks like reinventing the wheel which is the world-wide-web: Documents of different kinds with links between them. I guess the graph view is semi-novel - the idea is not new, but you usually don't see browsers or website editors presenting these graphs.

Perhaps I'm missing something?

Agreed on the doc-linking tech existing elsewhere. Obsidian just packages it in a really great format and UX. I really enjoy the local, note-writing experience here. Not sure if anyone uses Obsidian to publish a website, or if it’s even possible.

They offer Obsidian Publish for $8/mo: https://obsidian.md/publish

I’ve found that obsidian and Jekyll play pretty nice together. Not perfect but not bad

Of course it is :). It's a bunch of Markdown, something that dozens of static site generators happily ingest and turn into a website. I am using 11ty (https://mikka.is), a sprinkle of git to get things into production, Obsidian Git to simply push everything I write, as I write, and my website is done.

The concepts are not new. The innovation is in the UI and UX that makes it easy (almost seamless) to build documents like that.

As I said in another comment, you could get all of this functionality with any Markdown-based static site generator. But it would be a lot more work to achieve the same result.

The key value of Obsidian is that your “website” (linked documents) is a WYSIWYG text editor (and even has native vim keybindings)

It may not be “new” but it’s extremely useful, and better than any existing alternatives that I’ve personally come across

And the fact that a “vault” is just your existing directory is also extremely convenient; nothing is hidden or obfuscated

Interlinked heterogenous documents aren’t unique to Obsidian, but somewhat uncommon among local-first note systems that sit beyond the confines of browser chrome (though this is changing, for example Apple Notes in macOS 14 and iOS 17 support interlinked notes).

It is similar, but the idea is the files are closer to plain text and reable with a regular text editor if needed.

Technically, yes. You could even do this using MS Word, and wikis, of course, can do all of these. The only difference is that this is practically the first local-first app that maintains links automatically.

Wikidpad I used a while back did this automatically as well.

The WWW doesn't treat searching your own knowledge graph as enough of a first-class citizen.

Well it would have been nice if the www had turned into a people's network of editable, interconnected documents.

At this point it's about as far from that as we can get. It's a giant dystopian shopping mall.

Could we activate the editable people's web?

Could we resurrect the original Web 2.0 (before the meaning of "sharing" got mangled into "forward this corporate media post to another customer")?

Yes, we could. We probably should. But we can barely get the Fediverse into the mainstream. Nobody blogs anymore. Attention spans are close to 0.

It's harder to build your own note-taking system based on existing web features than to use an app that does it. Even just programmers, and we're talking about everybody. For every human who can and would do the former, there are perhaps millions who can and would do the latter. That's a pretty big difference, to put it lightly.

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