Hacker News Reader

Comment by epiccoleman | Hacker News Reader

I like Notion but I share the sense that it's not really targeted at my use case anymore. I think I could essentially move everything into Obsidian and lose almost nothing in the process.

I just use it for taking notes and writing stuff down. I like how easy it is to drop an image, video, or document into a notion page, but I've only barely used features like databases which seem to be the big selling point, and none of my usage of those is really anything that couldn't just be a plaintext table in a markdown doc.

One of these days I'll get up the gumption to crawl through, excise what's worth keeping into Obsidian , and cancel my subscription. But not today, lol.

View on HN

I started as an Obsidian user, and generally I like the fact that it's just Markdown, but markdown tables really suck, to the point that I simply ended up avoiding them at all costs, and I used OnlyOffice's Excel equivalent in parallel to Obsidian for a while.

But Notion has good tables by default, so I can have both good tables (and tableviews) and normal text files in the same app.

I could have tried Obsidian plugins, but I suspect that it would have been a time sink, and Notion offered everything in a neat package, so in the end, it won.

I just migrated everything out of Notion into Ibsidian. Notion was unusable after more than a few hundred items in a DB. I migrated to using dataview and lists in Obsidian and haven't had a problem since. And it works offline.

I use it for my workout logbook and cooking/recipe log with hundreds of entries.

I find DataView to be clunky as well. Data entry is not easy (I'm currently using "DB Folder" and it helps but it's quirky) and each-row-is-a-file does not give great performance.

Agreed. Not useful for large dataset. The magic is in connecting databases - relating project management to notes etc. I've resorted to duplicating each database and archiving anything that is worth keeping. That way databases I use operationally retain speed.

notion doesn't have normal text files.

You can click "export to markdown" on a notion page, you can click "import from markdown", but those two markdown dialects are totally incompatible. Most of the time notion can't even read what it exported.

The notion web editor for me has very noticeable lag, so I really want to just be able to write some text somewhere to represent a notion table or whatever, but there's simply no supported way to do that I'm aware of.

I mean, it's fine, using a i7 core at 100% at all times just to produce text at a 2 second delay is totally fine for a text editor, I'm sure notion's doing its best.

Yes. I use Notion (or Logseq or any other Electron-based note-taking apps) as a filing cabinet. I cannot type in it. The typing latency is too much.

I think that's fair.

I will say that Obsidian's tables have gotten a lot better in terms of reflow, sorting, etc. At some point Obsidian might add some additional config to their tables to allow users to manually control column widths, etc., but it would have to be non-standard markdown - like how you can scale down images by adding a width parameter.

    ![[./media/example_image.png|Custom caption|450]]

I would find markdown tables easier to use if they were just CSV and some delimiters for start/header/end. Imagine being able to write

    +------------------------------+
    Product,Cost per seat,Importance
    +------------------------------+
    GSuite,$7.20,Critical
    Notion,$10,High
    "Something, ""with"", commas and double-quotes",$5,Low
    +------------------------------+

Obsidian needs to officially embed SQLite.

I'm very curious how and why to use Obsidian well. It's so confusing I've given up multiple times.

It's just ("just" in the good sense) a fancy Markdown editor with a bunch of plugins, including for most of the core features (which are just bundled-in plugins and can be turned off).

Think of it like maintaining your own personal Wiki, comprised of flat-file markdown

At its simplest, it is a UI to markdown files. When I was first looking into it, it seemed very tightly coupled with the zettelkasten method which I know nothing about. At first I thought that I was missing something but have since used it as just a markdown note app.

I will asked ChatGPT to output responses in a note form in markdown so I can copy/paste it in.

You can wrap code with: ‘’’elixir Code here ‘’’ To get syntax highlighting

Todo lists are as simple as -[ ] to do item

You can use iCloud/dropbox to sync.

It's a pretty simple note organizer for markdown notes. That's literally it. Vaults/folders/subfolders are 1:1 representations of the folders on your physical computer.

It's WYSIWYG, so even if you don't know markdown, you can just use standard shortcuts like Ctrl-B to bold something, Ctrl-I to italicize, etc.

But it's only as valuable as the notes that it contains. If you are a fastidious note taker (for your projects, work, etc), like to ontologically tag things, and appreciate building inter-related knowledge (like wikipedia links), then you'd be hard pressed to find a better substitute even compared to other heavy hitters like Joplin and Logseq.

Don't buy into all the crazy around it. It's a Markdown editor with some organisation features. If you read Reddit, people treat it like some sort of second coming, making sure EVERY NOTE THEY TAKE is linked at least one other, tagged, etc. Like somehow that makes notes better. I was confused at first too but once I realised most of these people are insane and it's a note taking app, it's very easy simple and quick to use. I love it.

> Like somehow that makes notes better.

And for many, it does. It may not for you, but everyone has their own system.

So far, the only weakness I've found with Obsidian are the tables. Someone needs to build in a killer tables feature. Obsidian is an Electron app; it shouldn't be too hard to build a stripped down version of Google Sheets.

Check out the Advanced Tables plugin - https://github.com/tgrosinger/advanced-tables-obsidian

Unfortunately, it's nowhere close to Notion tables or spreadsheets in general. Formulas are very primitive (eg aggregation is either sum or mean), the syntax is confusing, and you have to manually re-evaluate them. Tables are Obsidian's main weakness to me.

> it shouldn't be too hard to build a stripped down version of Google Sheets.

HN, never change.

For basic notes, the ones that come with most devices imo are very good. Apple notes, Samsung notes, Onenote, all very good. So good I find it difficult to recommend anything else to people, like Notion still doesn’t even have proper pen/stylus support. Obsidian to me fits a good niche of being extensible with plugins but I get why some people can’t get into it.

Notion shines with database use, and was how I used to write my blogs and connecting the API directly to my site to auto update. I’m surprised you’re a paying customer and barely use the database stuff!

I think once I started using databases it made other note-taking tools seem primitive in comparison. It's hard to explain why, but it just allows you to organise and categorise hundreds of notes seamlessly.

I also really like how it treats everything as blocks, that's another thing that I can no longer live without.

If you're not interested in features like this, then yeah. Obsidian would be a good use-case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com