How I use Obsidian | Hacker News Reader

How I use Obsidian

jasonheppler.org

79 pointsspeckx63 comments

I went down this rabbit hole for about six months last year. The hook is easy if you're working in IT (hint: it's in the name). The first two months were quite enlightening as I learned about Zettelkasten, PARA, Second Brain, Obsidian, Roam, LogSeq, etc. I even did a side journey into bullet journaling (it appears that craze is dying now).

Towards the end of my journey, I couldn't help but feel I was getting pulled into a cult. I would watch certain Youtube personalities famous in this area and realize they are talking in a language that doesn't make sense. To the uninitiated, it sounded fascinating, but the more I learned, the more I realized a majority of it was cyclical.

Perhaps this is an overly pessimistic view, but nowadays I just write stuff in a daily Logseq journal and move on. No organization, mind maps, second brains, thought galaxies, idea mitochondria, etc. Just a little bit of English spread across a few bullets.

Yes. Add nothing, do nothing until forced to.

Obsidian still does this.

It's not an IDE, heck no. It's just notepad with some bells and whistles coders could use (but only when necessary.)

Yeah, folks show off online. Ignore those wankers.

ADD: Good grief, reading these comments. You folks aren't building a spaceship, you should be just taking notes and organizing them into something greater than the individual note. Every second you spend in CSS or trying to get a batch process to do your taxes or whatnot? You're doing it wrong. You're going the wrong way.

There are YouTube influencers for every niche interest. The pattern you describe can be found in people talking about diets, exercise, fashion, home remodeling, etc. Creating novel terms is one way for influencers to differentiate and increase their views and search rankings... but I agree that it makes things far more complex and inscrutable than they need to be.

The best way to start journaling is to write a little bit every day with whatever tool has the lowest friction for you.

I don't find that "pessimistic" at all, though I don't think it's fair call the serious PKM crowd a cult. Different use cases and projects just have different requirements. The set up for someone like the author here who is doing historical research, will naturally require more organization, and thus naturally go through cycles of reorganization. I think this is similar to how engineering architectures sometimes cycle through idiomatic themes over the course of different refactors.

Though especially now with the potential of LLM-based retrieval I personally worry about keeping things well organized even less than it used to.

For clarity, I wasn't calling the PKM crowd a cult. My point is that after a certain level of engagement (i.e., consuming a ton of written and media-based information about the subject), I realized there was a certain cult-like following present. I'm unsure how much that following constitutes the overall PKM crowd, but I wouldn't say it's the entire crowd or even a large majority.

Like with many things, serious people tend to be a lot quieter (i.e., they are not running YouTube's content treadmill). So, the perception likely doesn't match the reality.

Agree. Most of it is productivity porn, and indulgence in it happens at the expense of getting any real work done. The OG outliner community has a term related to it: CRIMP, which is the compulsive behavior of acquiring new software tools (and obsessing over the perfect organizational structures. )

Every hobby seems to have a version of this on the web. In electronic musician and producer circles it's GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) though I've seen it used in many other hobby communities as well. In video games, people have endless backlogs. I think it's just a consequence of the attention economy preying on our craving for instant gratification.

I've been a big fan of Obsidian for years. Once I started teaching myself how to write long-form fiction, I tried at least six different tools. When you're doing zero-to-one work, "magic" tools will fuck you up every time.

The beauty of Obsidian is that there isn't any magic. Write markdown, stick it in a folder and do nothing. Or you can write markdown, organize a nest of folders and tags and do a lot.

I didn't know how to write long-form fiction, and I determined that the last freaking thing in the world I wanted was a tool that imposed a process or recipe. God, recipe-driven fiction is a POS. So I started with nothing and added and removed structure as necessary to teach myself. I even set up a second folder to add all of my research and how-to trials and errors as I went along. Way cool.

Just finished my first novel at ~700 pages. My currect system is still more complex than I need, but I'm learning. Along the way I wrote a build pipeline where I just write in Obsidian, run a script, and end up with pdfs, ebooks, interactive website, etc. I've even got it almost all the way through the desktop publishing part that comes at the end. Probably need another year for that.

If those folks start adding any kind of lock-in (I know they won't) or beginning over-engineering the UI, I'm out. And guess what? I can take my markdown elsewhere. And my pipeline still works! It's a beautiful thing.

I use far, far too much Obsidian, building cataloging systems in the sky. Tools tend to engage your imagination of what you might need to do instead of what you actually need. But with Obsidian, I don't need to go down the garden path. I can pull that crap back out. I couldn't have learned writing with any other tool. Obsidian allowed me to make structural and Information Architecture mistakes and iterate without locking me in somewhere. Love the tool, guys! Keep doing nothing!

Congrats on finishing the novel! I also use obsidian for fiction and would be quite interested if you end up writing anything about the pipeline you mentioned.

Happy to chat some via email or Discord. Hit me up using the email in my profile.

(This thread has convinced me never, ever to write a "How to do awesome X using Obsidian!" essay)

This is just way too complicated and too structured for me.

Tagging and searching is better for my brain, otherwise I'd keep optimising the folder structure endlessly and never get anything done.

What if I have a note that relates to two different folders? Where does it go? Do I copy it to both? Keep it on one and link from the other? What if it relates to a third one later down the line?

I've just got my Second Brain category which is stuff I keep forgetting and/or want to keep a local copy of (like how to set up iwd on Debian or how to bootstrap a deb-based Linux machine from scratch to where I want it to be)

Then I have my Daily Notes, Hyper-O shortcut automatically opens Obsidian with today's daily note. This is where I just jot down a few bullet points about what I did at work and in my personal life. Just enough to have something searchable if I want to figure out when did I do something. No purple prose, just strict business with #tags if relevant. Maybe some #todo's.

you don’t have to use folders. I don’t, I just type notes in obsidian and use the omnisearch plugin.

My main grief is the startup time on mobile - although it does seem to be mostly iCloud shitiness.

I lost some text due to iCloud being crap and me editing the same file on two devices.

Paid for the official sync and haven't regretted one second.

Is the startup time faster on iOS then? For me it spends time loading workspace and indexing the vault mostly…

I envy individuals who organize their digital information in this way. Yes, I can practice discipline. Yes, it is possible. And it has always been (and continues to be) an uphill battle to keep my information tidy in this way, when my is scattered at best.

Yeah, I always go into note taking or a new machine thinking this time, THIS time it will be different. It will be organised, neat.

Then it goes to hell within a month.

yep. a part of me wants to take advantage of all that org-mode in emacs has to offer. but it's just not critical enough for me to keep it up. maybe if i was a manager...

same which is why i only note take, write my todos in one file with specific type of formatting

It’s best to lean into that. Even though it looks pretty, I (and I assume you) don’t need to be as organized because the organization wouldn’t help us surface the knowledge later anyway because we wouldn’t follow all the tags and links around systematically. Different systems work for different brains. For me, I’ve found just taking flat chronological notes with a good search engine is best, and there’s no point fighting that.

Very much agree.

No snark, "I Use Obsidian": Open Obsidian, click daily note, type note(s) adding #tags as needed.

Excellent. This is also my flow. Tags and search are good enough for me to find anything I need to find.

This is me, except I don't even bother with #tags.

I find top-down organizational systems like Johnny Decimal difficult to maintain over time. There is an overhead in having to think about which folder something belongs in. And a similar cost to recall.

My own Obsidian vault is bottom-up. I assume I'm going to be in a hurry, or too lazy to organize. Instead I try to write wiki style with lots of [[Links]] to reference people/places/things, and the structure emerges from those links. This is the only approach that has stuck for me.

See https://stephango.com/vault

Johnny Decimal is fine (same with PARA, or the combination of both) as long as you have automation in place to avoid worrying about what should go where.

In my own system, JD + PARA + Templates + Automated filing works like a charm and saves me a ton of time.

I also like delaying "organization" to later points in time. I do this by using daily notes as the single entry point (bullet points), and rely on weekly/monthly reviews to extract whatever makes sense to extract into separate notes

This is something that Obsidian, Tana, Roam, LogSeq, and a few others actually excel at. I try to keep my organization minimal or at least static, and backlinks (plus templates, or in Tana supertags) + good search (of all that I've used, Obsidian has the best) help to take organization off your plate and make it more fluid. I've also built a pretty rudimentary RAG MVP to make finding information even easier, but don't use it too much right now.

I'm slowly coming to the idea that the solution of this problem is to refine and reduce intake. I am a naturally curious person, as I assume many other people on hacker news also are. Unfortunately, this leads to what I've started calling "information hamster" behavior. I consume information almost habitually, without pausing to consider if I should consume it in the first place, or how it fits within a growing sphere of research and knowledge. Considering where something belongs, as a first step, before consuming it has been a tremendous help in staying organized. Obviously, as you consume the proper place for your notes might change, but essentially every system today can handle this flexibly. The key is making organization, filtering, and order a key part of the consumption process.

I'd also state that it's not always necessary to be super organized. Some people get by just fine living in a chaotic sea of notes. There's a reason that the stereotypical image of the professor involves a desk that looks like a tornado struck the office.

Couldn't agree more. Information hoarding is one of the main pitfalls of Knowledge Management. One must select the right sources, and curate relevant information (unless if it's all for fun).

Organizing notes like this is a challenge for me too. Instead, I keep most notes in one file, and split off that file when it becomes too big. I use ripgrep to search my notes and back them up in a Git repo

I think the important ideas for me are to keep notes, keep notes in plain text for portability and easy searching, and to keep notes backed up.

If I ever find the "perfect" organization for my notes, I feel confident I can write some crazy shell script to move stuff into the right places and ask an LLM to add the right tags.

Until then, I've got a searchable history of my work for my coworkers and future me to enjoy.

My isn’t search working for you? I’m genuinely curious. I try to use the correct keywords so I can find it again and then I use search, that’s it. Folders are so inflexible, it doesn’t work for me.

I've been using Obsidian for a few weeks. It fits my note-taking style (Markdown and wiki) and I want to like it, but honestly it's a struggle.

My main issue with Obsidian is the steep learning curve because Obsidian is not self-contained; it needs many plug-ins, templates, and customization. I tried to keep things simple but it seems that to be useful you need Better BibTeX, Zotero, Zotero Integration, Pandoc, DataView, and so forth. All of these have their own learning curves and configuration, so it's a slog to get started. Obsidian seems designed for people who enjoy extensive customization and tweaking.

My second issue is that Obsidian is very free-form, so you need to decide on an "ideology" of how to use it. Do I want to go with Zettelkasken or Johnny Decimal or organize in folders or organize with tags or use Maps of Content? So far I feel like I'm ending up with a mess of notes, which isn't really helping me.

I started using Zotero at the same time. I highly recommend Zotero. It's essentially a PDF organizer and document citation system. Before Zotero, I had piles of PDFs in various directories and I couldn't find the information I wanted. Now I click in my browser and Zotero downloads the PDF, does OCR, auto-generates a detailed citation, makes everything searchable, and lets me annotate PDFs and take notes. Zotero is straightforward and has been a big help to me.

Zotero and Obsidian are commonly used together, but I haven't got the hang of the integration, so I'm open to suggestions. Specifically, I have notes and annotations in Zotero. Then I import everything into Obsidian and have a copy of the record in Obsidian. Now I have duplicated data. How do I keep things in sync? Should I be doing all my note-taking in Obsidian, or use Zotero's notes for a first pass through the document, or keep some notes in each?

I'll try.

1. What are you trying to do? If it's simple research off the web, simply copy some files and paste, or use MarkDownload and get fully formed markdown from a page to put in your vault.

2. Can you code? You don't need to code, but things make a lot more sense in Obsidian if you know markdown, CSS, and maybe a bit of javascript/html. I didn't use anything but markdown productively for a long time. Even now there's very few plugins I would recommend. ADD: When I started, I went through all the plugins and added everything under the sun. This is because I was stupid and thinking I was at some kind of nerd buffet. Once I realized I was looking at complexity upside down, Obsidian kicked ass.

Your second issue is a feature for me, so I can't help there.

As to your specific question, if you're stuck on Zotero, then add stuff there and make a one-way pipeline to Obsidian. Obsidian becomes your source of truth. If not, ditch it. I don't think it does anything Obsidian doesn't, but you should check with some users.

Remember KISS, Keep It Simple, Silly. One tool. If you're stuck using two tools, one-way data pipelines. Syncing two knowledge tools together sounds like a nightmare and I'd stop doing that right away.

One more thing: I decided on folders for long-term categorization, things I think will mostly never change. Then tags, nested tags specifically, for trying to freeform WTF I'm doing. Tag Wrangler is awesome for this. There are only about five extensions I'd always use. Tag Wrangler is one of them.

Thanks for your reply. For background, I'm doing technical/historical research. I have 100 documents on a topic (mostly PDFs, also some scans) and I want to keep track of them, pull ideas out of them, and write a coherent article. Cut-and-paste isn't enough at this point. Zotero is the perfect solution for me to keep source documents organized and I would pay money to keep using it. Researchers who use Obsidian mostly use Zotero too (it seems) since Obsidian doesn't handle citation management, tracking documents, downloading, OCR, PDF annotation, and other important tasks.

For your second point, sure, I can write tons of code. That's why I'm cautious with Obsidian; I don't want to get distracted by writing templates and JavaScript customization rather than useful work.

By the way, the basic Obsidian process I'm using is "Notetaking for historians", which is described at https://publish.obsidian.md/history-notes/01+Notetaking+for+... This process is very similar to the process described in the topic article.

My first Obsidian project was a research project for an upcoming non-fiction book. It's not academic, but I believe the synthesis/citing issue is generally the same.

I just looked at it. It has a little over 1,000 files in it, so I've been filing a lot.

I only have dataview, PDF to markdown, templater, and a couple other community plugins enabled. My decision was to dump everything, kit-and-kaboodle, into a Reference folder. No processing, no tagging, just dump it in there. Then I created a Topic Summaries and a Synthesis folder. The idea here is not to start categorizing and synthesizing until you're absolutely forced to.

Between Topic Summaries and Synthesis I create a book outline. Note that the folder names are things that are set in concrete. Then I created a tag system. As I begin teasing out ways to organize my research, simultaneously I create a tagging system. So one research item may eventually get referenced in several Synthesis Notes. I may go back and create a Topic Summary based on the syntheses or just ad-hoc. The tagging system links to that layer, not the data dump layer.

This allows me to continue dumping data, then join it up in various creative ways later. I don't even hook my synthesis into an outline directly. That's a separate and also creative step. Once joined and I've committed to an outline, I can chase down the original research and provide whatever footnotes or links I feel are appropriate.

Hope that helps. My big lesson was not to categorize my research as I gathered it. Usually my first guess is wrong. Instead use an abstraction layer and continue to churn through synthesizing many docs into new ideas. Then join those ideas into an outline.

Best of luck.

I agree that the learning curve can be steep, but it's worth it. The key is to keep things simple for as long as possible. There isn't that much you REALLY NEED to get started and to grow up until you reach a critical mass of notes (>=500 IMHO). Avoid falling into the trap of focusing too much on the system and too little on get value out of it

There are vault templates you can start with and build upon, instead of trying to build your own system. Some are very basic, but others are more elaborate and better documented. I have to mention mine since I've been working quite a lot on it, based on my own usage as an author/blogger. It's called the Obsidian Starter Kit [0]. It includes a clear structure, templates, plugins, automation rules for easily creating and filing notes, and a detailed user guide going from theory to practice.

The key parts it includes and that I recommend are: a simple folder structure (I chose to combine Johnny Decimal and the PARA method of Tiago Forte out of habit), tags (to ease search), clear naming conventions (for consistency), templates that define the base structure for the different note types and include the base tags to recognize those.

The combination of links/backlinks, tags and Maps of Content (even simple indexes based on tags) is key to finding whatever you need whenever you need it.

Regarding the integration between Zotero and Obsidian, having looked into it a while ago, I would recommend importing what you need in Obsidian, and accepting that as duplicate information, but enabling you to centralize as much as you can (reference information) inside of Obsidian. It's all right if you capture highlights in Zotero (I do that with Readwise), but I consider those as "transient" knowledge inboxes. You can find a copy of my Zotero template in [2].

In my own system, described in [1], Obsidian is my single source of truth. The other apps (eg Zotero, Readwise, etc) are just secondary and limited in scope. The important point for me here is the ability to connect everything within a single tool, which is where KM really shines.

PS, I've described my system a while ago in this blog post [3].

Hope this helps!

[0]: https://obsidianstarterkit.com

[1]: https://www.dsebastien.net/overview-of-my-personal-knowledge...

[2]: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/dsebastien/30c5d5e85a3dd2...

[3]: https://www.dsebastien.net/2021-12-03-personal-knowledge-man...

After doing a lot of productive journaling with a lot of productive tools. I keep coming back to something that is just simple plain text files in apps that have barely any formatting (except MD because that's just there these days) and the apps that are snapping fast and robustly stable. It was NV (-> nvAlt) for a long time and then Simplenote (well, with hiccups and finally had to let go of it) and now I am giving Bear/FS Notes that chance (will settle on one; my tilt is towards the FOSS+non-subscription). These stick - the kinda "plainish note taking apps". Nothing else does. Definitely not the Zoplins and the Obsidians.

To me it seems all this "productivity" and "workflow magic and shit" talk is just for that - "the talk". And then there's a fancy "folder naming system". Right. I did try to understand the why of it. Didn't happen. But then I guess I am not even close to the power note takers these apps are supposed to be aimed at.

This has worked for me (anything more (complicated) and it just becomes friction and within few days):

- Open the app

- Write a new note or add to/edit an existing one

- That's it; at least the mere mortal version of it

I gave up on Obsidian and just use Foam (https://foambubble.github.io/foam/) and/or vimwiki. I just can’t get into overwrought, arbitrarily designed organization schemes or proprietary apps (Foam-managed content is just plain Markdown, so I can easily do without it—it provides the absolute bare minimum for easy linking of notes without proprietary markup).

Does anyone use obsidian for editing and managing emails? I have some email templates I need to adapt and send over and over (including file attachments and embedded links). I’d love a way to store and manage them from within obsidian without having to awkwardly copy paste into outlook, use an old Chrome plugin to convert the markdown to html, and manually attach the files. (My idiotic current scheme until I have a chance to “get myself organized”.)

I use org-roam, absolutely love it.

Tip: Select the text on the website and you'll be able to read the yellow boxes.

I looked at the documentation, saw it looked like a lot of stuff to learn, and went back to my plain org-mode files. Not sure what it is I miss out on?

I've always had the same problem - could never figure out why I'd want backlinks and endless templates all that. Seems like a lot of complexity for little gain. I put similar items in the same directory/note and never have trouble finding anything. It's possible that I have so much stuff and so many things coming at me that a simpler system is needed to operate at that scale. I've still got an old Roam Research account from when they were free, watched videos, listened to podcasts, read blog posts, and could never find an advantage of going the complex route.

The nice thing about obsidian is that you can start off really simple. It can be as minimal as linked markdowns documents if you like. Which is pretty much most of the core plugins disabled up to all the bells whistles.

I've never used org-mode so can't really comment on whether you'll actually be gaining anything

Oh, I use Obsidian too. It's org-roam and related software like Roam Research that inspired it that adds a bunch of complexity. My primary system is to dump similar items in notes in folders in Obsidian.

I think it just depends on how you're able to access and use your notes. For me, backlinks were a life-saver because it's important to model relationships between individual notes. It's really helpful for synthesizing knowledge and creating output, or just exploration to find related ideas, etc. Backlinks also help with breadcrumbs, so if my memory fails (frequently) or my search fails (more often than I'd like), I can usually find what I was looking for by navigating backlinks or using hierarchical breadcrumbs (all generated automatically with backlinks in a defined property). So I get a bunch of bottom-up organization for free with minimal effort, and for me it's pretty helpful. Plain textfiles I have trouble resurfacing knowledge very quickly, but YMMV, it's really personal.

Is there a free/easy way to use this on my iPhone yet?

I would love to get away from apple notes siloed on my phone and ms onenote siloed on my computer

I own https://Nestful.app which I made for myself.

Nestful is first and foremost a "what should I do next" todo app, but I've found I've been using it instead of Obsidian, even though the note-taking features are much less superior.

This made me wonder if some people are document people, and some are list people. If such a classification exists, I'm definitely the latter.

Interesting. I use Apple Reminders in Kanban view to do that.

IF the author of the blog reads this thread, the highlighted text on your blog on this machine (Win10/ Firefox) is unreadable. It's a very light grey text on yellow background.

You might have some custom styling applied somehow, I'm also in Firefox on Windows and the text is quite close to black. It's defined as #403d39 in the CSS.

Edit: Sorry I see, I missed the word "highlighted". Looks like it's only an issue in dark mode. You can toggle the theme at the bottom of the page.

> You can toggle the theme at the bottom of the page.

No I can't, the buttons don't do shit.

It does change the data-site-theme attribute in the <html> tag, but that doesn't seem to affect the page in the least. Something is overriding it. The <code> blocks where the issue happens don't change with the style.

Might be the browser. Firefox has a setting for setting the mode. I have it on dark-mode, and the buttons are not working for me. With Chrome the site is opening in light-mode, and the buttons are working.

Tried on Safari, Firefox and Arc. None of them do anything.

It works for me in Firefox when I set the color-theme(?) for websites to light. There is automatic, light and dark. Dark seems to deactivate this completely, and automatic seems to use dark because of my system-settings.

I don't know how this is called in english, and the Firefox-documentation sucks so hard that there is no way to get to the english version from my language.

Interesting, looks like this is Windows' (or maybe Firefox's) fault. If I go into Windows Personalization settings and turn on dark mode, the buttons don't do anything as you say. If I set that to light mode, then I can toggle the website between light and dark at will.

Same on iOS

Completely unreadable on macOS too, tried Safari, Firefox and Arc.

I can just barely figure out what it's supposed to be if I select the text, but it's nigh-unreadable even then

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Y2EC3lq

Weird — my macOS + Chrome experience is much better, even with Dark Mode: https://imgur.com/a/T7nY9qF

Edit: I may be confusing two issues because the OP said "the highlighted text" which, without further context, I assumed to mean "selected text".

Same in Chrome for Android.

Yep, it's totally unreadable. To author, please check you website with "prefers-color-scheme:dark". It looks fine on light.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/devtools-gu...

For some reason the theme toggle button doesn't do anything for me, but I was able to get edit the css variable used for the 'highlight'.

    document
      .querySelector(":root")
      .style.setProperty("--color-yellow-darker", "#4d4614")

How well does Obsidian work with org-mode?

It doesn’t, really. Logseq can read and do some thing with .org files, but I wouldn’t use org-mode with anything other than EMacs tbh. It’s shoehorning otherwise.

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