My journey with Obsidian | Hacker News Reader

My journey with Obsidian

kyry.cz

42 pointskyry_cz11 comments

> What helps me a lot is to have a new sheet of paper for each day - this is my base of operations - I jot down what I am working on and when I am interrupted, I can simply go back to where I was.

Many people use the daily note. It's even built into Obsidian due to the popularity, but it's never worked for me. I'm referencing previous notes and copying data around rather than doing my work. Weekly notes work much better for me. During peak work times, a monthly note is better still. Once you feel like you're fiddling with your system too much, you tend to avoid it.

Obsidian is my command center. So many advantages compared to almost everything out there: https://notes.dsebastien.net/30+Areas/33+Permanent+notes/33....

Plus as a developer, I can extend it in any way I want I recently created a plugin to let me quickly publish posts on social media platforms: https://github.com/dsebastien/obsidian-typefully

diagraming is not note taking mind mapping is not note taking

i dont think i will ever be sold on overly visual note taking tools

emacs org mode, is a unicorn, i dont know how they came up with it or they stumbled upon it, but its the golden standard

we just need a decent emacs on mobile devices that is it

Is it just me or was anybody else not sure what Obsidian was while reading this article?

The article doesn't explain it at all, so I'm left wondering if I'm incredibly out of the loop or whether this is a very niche thing that I haven't run into yet.

The article definitely assumes you know that 'Obsidian' is a reference to the text editor found at https://obsidian.md/

it's a note taking app. a very rad one at that.

context is not part of the orange site culture unfortunately.

It's kinda obvious from the context if you know that space, but yes, it's leaving out many explanations. It's not well written for random visitors.

Anyway, Obsidian is a knowledge-tool, using Markdown. It's for taking notes, collecting information and aims to support the user in building their network of knowledge. It's pretty powerful for a markdown-editor/manager, especially because it's supporting plugins, which is feeding a small community of developers bringing up all kind of ways to enhance Obsidian.

Obsidian is very popular and well known on this site, though attention for this space comes in waves, and I would say the big hype is over for the moment. So depending on what you read here, it's possible you just missed it.

this isn't a cool take (specifically words like "kinda obvious" and generally the sentiment which obligates the reader to have awareness of the subject) and we shouldn't assume readers here know everything or a single thing is "well known".

If I'd try to describe/categorize it, I'd call it a local, ?most often? single-user, scriptable and plugginable wiki-software.

I use it for taking notes, keeping a journal, TODO-list, and to bookmark/annotate stuff. Basically my own personal "knowledge base".

Technology-wise it saves notes as markdown, optionally with a yaml-style frontmatter, built on/with javascript, and exposes a bunch of APIs making it very extensible.

A strength/weakness with it is that it exposes the end-user to all this power, and does not enforce much in the way of ways of working, so you get to define for yourself how you go about using it.

I have mostly settled on workflows that works for me, but it also seems, if I am being completely honest, like there is always some little tweaking/refactoring going on.

I've created a beginner's guide that covers most of what there is to know about Obsidian: https://www.dsebastien.net/free-beginners-guide-to-mastering...

In short, it's a free note-taking app using the Markdown syntax, storing files locally and with wiki-like linking, tagging, a plugin system and tons of community plugins. Using it, you can organize knowledge, ideas, references, keep a journal, and more.

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