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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

This is beyond slick.

I'm finally able to kill Notion (good riddance - I never liked it!), and if it can handle larger tables then I'll stop using Google Suite as well.

My last request of the Obsidian team is a better git plugin. Their official built-in sync product is fine, but I'd still like to manage my own versioning so I can use automations.

The currently available git plugin is extremely dangerous (!!!) if set up incorrectly. I would consider myself an advanced user of git, and Obsidian's git plugin has on several occasions blown away my history and notes. It has frustrating and opaque behavior for how it consolidates change sets and diffs.

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The Git plugin is great for single-device backup IMO, but not great for device sync or collaboration.

I've been working on making Obsidian "work for work" with a real-time collaboration plugin called Relay [0]. We use CRDTs for conflict resolution between users/clients and it also happens to remove a ton of headaches for device-to-device sync as well.

Our collaboration server can be run on-premise and we also just open sourced a Git Sync connector so you can do google-docs style collab via Obsidian+Relay but still have the merged documents end up in git (and plug into (Markdown + git)-centric publishing workflows like Mintlify and Quartz.

The whole Obsidian ecosystem feels really electric right now.

[0] https://relay.md

Can you expand on when the git plugin is dangerous?

I've never had it wipe anything before[1], but I do have a stretch of 200+ commits in my personal vault where my laptop and desktop were fighting back and forth on the contents of one setting file.

One caveat is that the obsidian android app DOES NOT seem to save files to storage until the note unloads, which can break things if you pull in the middle of making changes.

[1] Though I have had to fix my termux clone of the vault enough times that I now just nuke it and re-clone instead of bothering with git - but that's more of a "termux likes to break git" issue than anything

For better/worse, I've noticed save seems to be triggered when moving to a new line. Plenty of times I've unloaded (swiped away the app) only to have a missing last line later when I get on desktop. Building a habit of adding a few trailing newlines seems to have mostly resolved this for me

I know this won't work for some and is no replacement for a good git plugin, but have you tried using an Obsidian terminal plugin to manage git and the git repos yourself?

Speaking as a superficial git user, can you say why not simply git init on the vault is enough to use it?

Why is a plugin necessary?

Plugin commits and pushes the contents of the notes as they are being updated - from within the Obsidian app.

I prefer not using git the plugin, but still commit to a repo.

Sometimes you'll have to push a big ugly commit.

But other times the manual diff review can save you from a headache, like if you have some obscure syncing going on, like syncing READMEs and other markdown files to external repos to manage all markdown with the same Obsidian interface.

Also if you need to maintain a high-standard for the contents of your notes while still utilizing AI tools, the manual diff review can prove invaluable in ensuring trusted resources don't turn into slop

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