Hacker News Reader

Comment by cloud_watching | Hacker News Reader

Obsidian is amazing because it is a notepad with pretty colors and the graph that gets everyone's attention. The graph is often the most overhyped and underused thing there. It looks complicated and that's the selling point of all that ecosystem around productivity systems and all that. The appearance of deep complexity and work.

I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134

View on HN

It's _also_ a notepad that runs on android and synchronises mostly successfully with machines elsewhere. I'm ignoring the plugins entirely but getting lots of use out of the text synchronisation across multiple machines.

This is one thing I love about it too, Obsidian Sync is very well done and great for moving text files around the place easily.

Obsidian Sync is a really solid (and complementary) product.

I just have a notes folder in Syncthing and it seems to accomplish the same thing. Or is there more to Obsidian Sync that I don't know about?

It also syncs config and plugins

In the beginning I had my Obsidian folder in my iCloud, but had not so happy experiences regarding the conflict resolution.

The WYSIWYG markdown editor and wiki links are what I like about it. I’m not into the whole plugin lifestyle that seems to be a thing among the “productivity” crowd.

This kind of file sync works but you can run into problems. Switching from one device to the other too fast and editing the same file can get you into trouble, for example. And all the other tradition file sync and conflict resolution issues in general. Also: If one of your devices runs iOS, you will probably have a bad/annoying day with any "sync your files outside the app you edit them in" solution.

I know it’s not the best place to end up, but I always end up back on Apple Notes. It’s has enough features, syncs across my devices, and is simple to use.

Same here... after years, I keep coming back to Apple Notes.

I really hate that article. Taskwarrior is infinitely better than a txt file. A txt file is the worst possible option for task management.

Now I'm using Emacs Howm for task management. It is based on text files and it is great. Org-mode is also great.

Looks a lot like taskwarrior.

Also for anyone interested in trying Howm the guide for it was recently updated.

https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manual

The cool thing about Howm is that it's note-taking and task management for lazy people. It predates org-mode (but it also works with it nowadays) and has a distinct way of linking notes by way of go-to and come-from links, think saved search and automatic backlink respectively. Also the way tasks are displayed and surfaced is pretty neat too, the guide/manual goes more in-depth but if you find stuff like org-agenda too complex you'll appreciate Howm's way of tracking and managing tasks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com