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Introduction to Obsidian

bryanhogan.com

209 pointsbryanhogan154 comments

A few months ago, i took the bullet and migrated my notes from Notion to .md files. This was the second time i migrated my notes (last time from Evernote to Notion), and this time it was a lot easier. Kudos to the Notion team for making export so easy.

Just downloaded the notes, then told Claude to organize and remove duplicate or index mds (Notion keeps a lot of random indexes) and clean up and within 30mins i had a very clean and usable (and agent accessible) md vault. I can open it in Obsidian or other md file viewer (as well as my own code editor). I opted for obsidian.

Setup was super straight-forward. I do miss the visual editor in Notion (obsidian editor is not as smooth, and i find myself just writing the files in text instead of using their visual mode).

for sync, i use icloud, and it syncs between the iphone and the mac app flawlessly, didn't have any issue with corruptions (yet). I use the phone app as mostly an intake, and the desktop app for mostly visualizations. I also tinkered with adding git to track history (has to put the .git folder outside the repo with --separate-git-dir).

Obsidian has a terminal support (which i suppose folks can use to run agents in there) although i found it easier (habbit perhaps) to run my agents separately. They provide massive unlock as their turn my knowledge to an actual insight and can connect things that i didn't think it was possible before.

Overall, 75% happy. From first principle, file is as simple as it gets and i think this is good enough personal knowledge management. I do miss sharing capabilities as well as multi-user in Notion, so i don't think this is useful for 2player/team/corp.

Regarding your visual editor experience, be sure your Obsidian settings use both "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode", which combination makes for fantastic WYSIWYG note-taking.

As for multi-user, the Relay plugin is amazing.

> "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode"

Are you somehow showing raw markdown source text and also rendered markdown in Obsidian side by side? That would sound awesome.

You can ctrl click the little book icon in the top right to show both modes side by side.

You can do that (side by side), but I prefer the unified (rendered AND editable) WYSIWYG view enabled by those 2 settings in combo. Whichever line has your cursor will typically show the raw markdown as you make edits, but the document as a whole is rendered.

Thanks for the kind words Chris :)

If you haven't already, set your vault directory in iCloud to `Keep Downloaded`. I had issues with notes going missing or just being empty shortly after saving, and this setting fixed that.

My suggestions to new users are: Start small, just create notes for whatever you want to (actually) remember and create impromptu TODO lists. Ignore the whole Knowledge Database / second brain thing. Learn the obsidian keyboard shortcuts really well. You can build a structure in your notes later when you actually see what's good and what needs automation.

I’d also say to ignore the graph interface. It makes for a cool tech demo, but unless you’re one of the 3 people zettelkasten makes sense for, it’s not all that useful and will encourage needless complexity while offering little to no benefit. I turned the feature off.

Everyone wants a scheme for organizing notes, and let me say: Just do it chronologically. It's fine. Taking notes is more important than reviewing them, and the older a note is, the less likely you are to need it.

You can add a layer of structure by periodically reviewing recent entries & updating an index, but I've never felt the need to.

The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world: Create a note. Write some lines of text. Organize some of those lines into - bulletpoints, # Headings, or ## Subheadings. Turn an some idea into a [[note of its own]]. Add a #tag for better organization. Check out your notes in the list of your notes or directly in the vault folder. And people sell courses for this??? Like I know you can add plugins, tweak css to your liking, and basically turn obsidian into an all-encompassing monstrosity to match your particular software kink, but the 80/20 of it all is really pretty basic to anybody who has ever used a personal computer.

There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines.

Nothing against it, you just need the warning early on to avoid the timesink if you want things done and follow the wrong guide.

It really baffles me that a forum full of people who casually deep dive into all corners of tech regardless of its “usefulness” can’t understand people might want to do the same with their personal notetaking or organization.

I can't speak for those commenters, but I think a lot of people have gone down this path and felt like it was a negative experience for them. I'm sure other people don't, but since a lot of these deep dive resources come from "productivity" communities, it's not surprising there's people that didn't feel very productive reorganizing their second brain, even if it seemed kinda intoxicating in the process.

I also feel like there's an odd assortment of people in the note optimization community that tries to present themselves as super human taskmasters, like Neo on a keyboard. The Roam research videos do not look like they're trying to teach me to use Roam. They look like they're trying to sell me a cozy aesthetic and vision of merging my brain with a computer to become greater than. I just want a note taking app.

It just ticks exactly the right boxes for people who are into STEM without really being satisfying at the end of the rainbow. Personally I'm done trying to do more than just some tags and backlinks.

> There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby. It's the adult equivalent of the student who had school notes in perfect handwriting with 7 different colors and underlines.

This is a perfect analogy.

This reminds me of people who build elaborate Notion "second brains" that serve no purpose other than to develop/demo them.

On the other end of the spectrum you have me, who’s been only vaguely organising my files for years. I am currently collecting my data from across different hard drives I have and running hashdeep as a first step to identify duplicate files. Even though I’m not organising the files themselves well, I do maintain backups. Both in the form of ones that are replicated ZFS snapshots, but also files that I’ve manually copied between drives and computers.

The amount of data has grown to too many TB now, so deduplicating things is the first step of cleaning up.

It remains to be seen if the reorganised files will be a sane and measured thing, or if I will go too far in the other direction and create a way too elaborate system of organization for my files.

I have been toying with the idea that since I am currently using hashdeep to get file hashes of all paths on different drives, I could collect all the files organized purely by hash in terms of paths on the file systems, and keep the hashdeep records for future reference, imported into queryable DuckDB databases to help me find related files etc. (For example, to find back to which other files were once under some given directory path.)

Blob storage basically. Perhaps something along the lines of Perkeep (formerly Camlistore) https://perkeep.org/

But I would really like to also do an effort of having the data organized in a way that makes it easy to determine which files I need more copies of (favorite photos of important moments, etc) and which ones I need fewer copies of (random screenshots of games, etc), and which files I can discard completely.

What do y’all do to organize all of your files? And how much data do you guys have that you consider important for the rest of your life?

I have an inbox/ folder and a daily/ folder.

Inbox is where all new docs go to, I just use #tags and file references.

It's like the people that build their complex arch based linux distro just to run neofetch and btop.

Mine really does help me, though I'm not very organised, I just dump my notes in a handful of folders and rely on the search function (which could be a lot better in obsidian, it always finds unrelated stuff first). Still it's magnitudes better than that crap they call onenote which I unfortunately am required to use at work.

I'm really averse to meticulous organisation so a good search function is key. Tagging and categorising stuff will never work for me. I've been thinking about looking for other plugins for that.

I know that it's just a super common distinction between pilers and filers, but I really struggle to comprehend the usefulness of just "dumping everything" in one place and hoping that search will sort it out.

At a certain threshold, doesn't it just become impossible to remember what you do or don't have in that pile?

When search fails, is it because it isn't there? Or is it because the search just didn't find it?

Yeah that's why the search needs to be really good.

I just don't have the mindset for painstakingly categorising stuff so that'll never happen. When I was younger I sometimes tried to do that but I always ended up giving up on it and just having a pile of outdated stuff.

As everyone has learnt the hard way, when you have a long to-do list, you will be tempted to suddenly spring clean your room, and it will make you temporarily feel productive... but it will not, in fact, shrink your to-do list.

Making an elaborate Obsidian setup is very much the same instinct.

>There is a subset of people that spend time developing complex setups as a hobby.

More than a hobby. There's entire businesses that are just moving from one system to another and convincing your followers that they have to move too.

Not defending some of the not that amazing Obsidian courses or similar out there, but it sounds like you already have a lot of pre-existing knowledge and an approach that works for you, so as I said in the post, keep using that!

You know about markdown syntax, about #tags, about [[linking]], but a lot of people who first hear of Obsidian don't.

Part of what inspired my post was to help people who don't need the extra complexity of a bottom-up note system, Zettelkasten, ever-green notes, atomic notes or other areas of Obsidian, but also to give direction to someone wants to explore these.

For example I'm very happy with my bottom-up approach for knowledge notes, I have been using it for multiple years now and I can still find the things I need, and it doesn't feel messy or anything.

Apologies, I didn't mean my post as an attack on your post, which was well thought out and reasonable. My post was meant as a general obsidian-related rambling in a general obsidian-related thread

I had a similar experience - and this was with zero mark down knowledge/experience. It is just a very comfy program.

Tools like obsidian are text files, that you can increasingly connect and organize in different ways.

It's easy to start with the detail when users are looking for their story to match the software.

How people can grow into it can be different, sometimes it's good to just start, and then learn about implementing the other concepts.

Not sure if new but every tool has its coaches and influencers. Running entire businesses off some SaaS tool. Not long ago I felt like I was swarmed with posts from Notion coaches. Obsidian no different. Repeat for every other tool out there.

I've embraced radical simplicity with Obsidian.

I have an inbox folder that is where all new docs go. Then daily notes. That's it. I tag lines with #thething #theotherthing.

Tagging acts as the organization, lowers the barrier of entry and keeps things discoverable.

Indented lines don't inherit tags, right?

I use logseq but Obsidian seems way more widespread, but I am struggling to give up tag inheritance

No but that seems like a read-query/time concern that can be solved rather than your data.

It’s interesting eh, it’s a wonderfully straightforward tool to use, but it’s scary.

My theory is that those courses aren’t selling you on how to use obsidian, but are instead selling “how do I organise knowledge and information. Oh btw we’re using obsidian”

They aren’t marketed like that, but I think that is what they’re really doing

It’s like taking a course of office organisation. I mean filing cabinets are easy right, it’s just putting labels on folders and putting them places.

Except I would absolutely be terrible at that job and would pay nearly anything to be good at it.

> Like I know you can add plugins, tweak css to your liking, and basically turn obsidian into an all-encompassing monstrosity to match your particular software kink, but the 80/20 of it all is really pretty basic to anybody who has ever used a personal computer.

Probably org-mode envy ;-)

(To be clear, it's the same story - using simple plain org-mode is easy, but some people love to customize like crazy)

Relevant skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZK8Z8hulFg

> Add a #tag for better organization.

Honestly, you kind of lose me here. I want to spend exactly zero time organizing things like tags. Literally zero.

Then don't. Obsidian's search is plenty good enough to find that note after.

Obsidian is the simplest thing in the world. Write text.

I find it the weakest link. It always tends to find the stuff that's least relevant first somehow. It's pretty terrible.

Having said that I have the organisational skills and affinity of a baboon so I really need to be able to dump my notes somewhere and still find them back somehow. This is not too typical for this kind of package, I notice a lot of people are meticulous and follow complex structures like zettelkasten.

For me that will never work though. It'll just subconsciously mark the system as "not worth the hassle" and never touch it again.

I also much rather use [[links]] for organization instead of #tags.

I touched a bit on this in the bottom-up / smart notes section.

>The aura of complexity/difficulty around Obsidian seriously baffles me, because to me Obsidian from the go felt like the most intuitive thing in the world

/proceeds to write 10 steps

Honestly with LLMs you don't need an Obsidian anymore. You can just use neovim or emacs. Every feature you need, like search, or linking can be done via plugins or shell commands.

Because before LLMs you couldn't use neovim? Emacs's search feature was vide coded in 2024? How is the first half of your comment even related to the second half.

You could but the barrier was higher.

You’re right to ask, but wrong to do it in a rude manner.

I use Obsidian to view a series of markdown files I am generating / working on with a LLM - a rendered interface if you will with pointing and clicking

There are tools for rendering like pandoc. Way more powerful than Obsidian.

Interfaces matter.

TUI is arguably a better interface. Faster, more lightweight, operable with keyboard.

The only problem was a barrier of entry which is gone now.

This was the case before Obsidian existed, see Org-mode, vimwiki, etc.

I was using vimwiki with a ton of plugins for many years before Obsidian came along. It was very nice to be able to open all of my notes in a UI made for editing them.

Agreed. I definitely also had a few qualms with the app.

Shout out to Joplin (https://joplinapp.org/), which I use on a daily basis.

It does most of what Obsidian does but has a free sync version where you just use your cloud drive as the storage.

The main thing missing, from what I've found, is that it does do the "notes mind map". But I never really found that useful.

For folks interested, Obsidian also has a free sync option that just uses your cloud drive, you just have to set it up yourself.

It's pretty simple. Just get Google Drive Desktop to mount your Google Drive to your filesystem, then point obsidian to work within that mounted directory.

I ended up just paying the $4/mo for syncing my personal vault, mostly to support the project but also because it's nice to not have to think about it.

At work, we just have what we call "brain" repos where we all just dump notes and commit straight to the main branch. They are just collections of markdown files that we use Obsidian to view/edit.

There's also obsidian livesync which is really great. A bit overcomplex but when you get the hang of it it works great. You can even see yourself typing from another connected client. Very impressive.

Google Drive Desktop will only help if you're on macOS or Windows. I know it's technically possible to mount GDrive on Linux but it's neither pretty nor user-friendly.

You can also use Dropbox.

People always warn that this setup can corrupt your stuff, which I understand you definitely wouldn't want to try to share Git via Google Drive.

Obsidian shows a warning about this. But the only issue it's pointing out is that mixing Obsidian's built-in sync with something that syncs your files is likely to cause problems. Otherwise it's a perfectly safe and normal way to sync.

Joplin looks great, and is open source, but it appears to have one problem: the primary data store is SQLite, not files, and in this AI infected era having plain text files on the local filesystem is really important.

So if I am correct the "cloud drive as the storage" option is syncing with a the local SQLite db and to get local files one would need to be syncing the local db with both the cloud drive and the local filesystem.

With Obsidian I sync from local files direct to a cloud drive.

Does joplin cloud have a merge algorithm for multi-user edits or does it just punt and do conflict files?

no merging, they just show as sync conflicts

Isn't it also missing nested folders? I tried Joplin, but no nested folders was a huge disappointment for me.

It has nested folders. But it will continue to have the problem of not being exactly whatever you are using now.

One specific bit of advice in there that I disagree with is keeping just one vault. Rather, I find that having one vault per topic/project is the right approach.

The reason for having multiple vaults is simple: I find that the usability of the one big über-vault drops off sharply if you're not disciplined in maintaining organisation, and a consistent workflow, and, if you're storing a bunch of disparate things in a single vault, an organisation/workflow that's universal enough to encompass everything rapidly becomes a pain in the arse to maintain. Inversely, topic-specific vaults tend to rapidly develop their own bespoke structures and workflows that match the topic closely and are very natural to work in.

For example, I have a large vault dedicated to Blue Prince (the game). As in several hundred megs worth of screenshots, over a hundred individual .md files (most of which are almost empty, but their existence is helpful in itself), folder structure that groups information on a per-puzzle basis, and it features pervasive use of tags to encode game features)

Another vault is a cookbook. I don't cook by recipe all that often, so that one mostly has reference tables for cooking times/temps for different foods in different appliances (I don't cook pearl barley often enough to remember how much liquid to use and what rice cooker programme to set).

I keep one vault for almost everything because the cross-domain links are where the interesting stuff happens. I studied sociology, political science, and media & communication before moving into IT, and I'm still actively interested in all of it and especially how these topics intersect. Where does a note on Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality go? The social science vault? The IT vault? Both? With a single vault I don't have to answer that question - the note exists, and I can use it to make connections to AI, social media, or cultural trends.

Multiple vaults break this. You end up duplicating notes, or linking across vault boundaries (which adds friction), or just forgetting where you put something. That's trading one of Obsidian's strongest features for... tidier folders.

The one case where I do split things out is genuinely isolated project knowledge - like a D&D campaign I used to GM. 99% of those notes have zero connection to anything else. Separation makes sense there precisely because there's nothing to link.

One more thing: a lot of people solve the "big vault gets messy" problem with elaborate folder structures, but Obsidian's search (especially with Omnisearch) makes most of that unnecessary. I don't really organize my notes into careful hierarchies. I write them, link them, and search for them. The mess is fine. I am one with the mess.

I just don't see myself needing to cross link my DnD, work, food, and home-lab nots significantly enough to not use separate collections.

Yeah, totally valid for things like D&D - I split that out too, for the same reason.

Work and homelab overlap constantly for me though. I make heavy use of periodic notes, so even something like recipes would get linked in weekly logs for meal planning or tracking. The connections don't have to be deep to be useful - sometimes it might just be 'I made this thing on this day' and that's enough context to be worth having in one place.

I like that because it's just text, and obsidian is un-opinionated on organization, it allows us all to find workflows that suit us!

I love Obsidian, have written a popular plugin, and my wife and I use it for TODO lists and various planning.

However, every few weeks the official Obsidian sync makes an absolute mess of our shopping list (which has fairly frequent edits and deletions across our laptops and phones). I have no idea how to fix it.

This thread shows other users having the exact same issue as us: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-sync-incorrectly-duplic...

If it wasn't for this one issue I would be able to strongly recommend the tool but as it is now I just tell people it sort of works and I am mildly happy.

To be fair I don't think any of the popular alternatives like logseq or joplin even attempt to do automatic file merges and just dump files into a conflict mode.

For me, Obsidian started to silently and (seemingly) randomly replace the whole content of a note with the content of another random note. This has been happening to other people as well for some time now [1].

What makes this issue really terrifying is its silent nature. I only noticed one of the notes having had its content replaced while casually exploring my library.

It took me an hour to restore the original content, which I only managed to do thanks to a (very obscure) macOS feature that keeps versions of most text files. It is only possible to see these versions when opening the file (in this case, the note) in TextEdit. I haven't found another place in the UI where these versions are exposed, which is yet another interesting thing I did not know about the OS I have been using for years now. I wonder why Apple does not expose this feature in the right click menu in Finder, for example.

In any case, as much as I love Obsidian I have been rarely and cautiously using it since this happened. File safety is the bare minimum requirement, so I cannot recommend Obsidian as it is right now.

[1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/content-of-a-note-totally-replac...

What sync method are you using?

I have my vault saved in iCloud Drive and solely access it from a single device.

We all know about iCloud Drive being known for being somewhat unreliable and sometimes causing sync issues, but I don't really see this type of bug being caused by it. I would be more suspecting if files were corrupted or changed in some other form than being replaced by other notes' contents.

The kind of issue points to Obsidian as the cause to me. Some commenters in the discussion I linked were hypothesizng about some kind of race condition or rare bug when opening two different notes in the same Obsidian window/tab in sequence and suggested using an extension that works by opening each note in a new tab, which I haven't tried. I try to work with as few extensions as possible to reduce any kind of attack risk.

I am very open to help or different interpretations of what I experienced though.

Make sure to set your Obsidian folder to "Keep downloaded" on iCloud for every device. Otherwise iCloud automatically deletes files locally to save space on your device.

It's a terrible default and Apple doesn't provide any way for developers to detect if it's off.

Thanks for the advice. I have "Keep downloaded" enabled already for all my devices, so it does not seem to be the cause for this issue, although I am sure it may be a factor for others.

Almost all ways to sync Obsidian has a problem with multiple people editing the same file.

Although there are some tools for better collaboration, but if it's just for one particular file it might be a bit "overkill".

But to give them a mention: Relay and Screen Garden are two community plugins that do it, HedgeDoc is a different app but it is a collaborative markdown editor, then the core team of Obsidian is also working on the multiplayer update.

Sure, lots of apps have this issue but I assumed it would work since they advertise the feature: https://obsidian.md/help/sync/collaborate

I mostly use Obsidian for my blog nowadays (using Quartz and Cloudflare Pages). For that it's actually pretty great. It's super easy to write links to your own posts that automatically update, it's easy ensure that your attachments are handled correctly, it's easy to have whatever layout you want.

I liked the notes stuff, but I found I was spending more time with the bureaucracy of it instead of actually doing work, so I've kind of stopped using it.

Three asks for Obsidian to make it my #1 tool (and I mean #1 tool):

- First-class multi-vault support. It's difficult to keep personal / business / team separate. I want to keep shared notes for my team, but it's really hard.

- First-class git support. The git plugin is dangerous and will overwrite changes from other devices. The mobile git plugin (which requires hacks to even use) is deadly bad with blowing away your entire git history. Do not use. Obsidian sync is cool and good and all, but I want git. And the existing git isn't just bad, it's deleterious.

- Spreadsheets. Literally just free-form tabular data would work too. Their "bases" thing isn't it. I just need to be able to sort data and keep it versioned. Google Sheets is a huge daily use product - if I had the same function in Obsidian, Gsuite would be dead to me.

> It's difficult to keep personal / business / team separate

I have one vault for personal, one for work. I open each one in a different window. They are both separate and easy to switch between.

I have been having a similar need for some sheets data in Obsidian, I was gonna look into writing a plugin to represent a JSON file as a Obsidian Base, but didn't get to that yet.

Have you tried some of the plugins that allow you to open CSV / TSV files within Obsidian?

What stops you from running git at the root level and doing a "git commit --all "notes" & git push" command?

For me, it's a Wolfram Engine plugin. My notes now scatter between Obsidian vault and Wolfram notebooks. It would be nice if I can unify them.

But I understand that my use case is niche and I certainly don't want the Obsidian officially bloats itself into such feature creating.

Obsidian's plugin architecture is a real strength, ideal for niches like that w/out bloat for the core product.

I would also love better Git support, especially syncing content from my Android phone to a GitHub repository, so faar it never worked well, I tried a few solutions here but wasn't satisfied with any of them.

GitSync works fine, you can find my previous comment about it (I don't want to spam the whole thread over and over with the same message)

I second your suggestion to have a decent Spreadsheet tool in Obsidian.

The Relay plugin is fantastic for multiplayer and/or nesting a "work" vault in a parent "personal" vault.

Daily Notes feature is a lifesaver. Just throw things in there throughout the day. Never lose anything

Dropping things in daily notes is my main use of obsidian too. I spent a lot of time exploring community plugins, organising my setup etc, everything but actually writing notes. When I reduced to the absolute basics, I just managed to write and retrieve notes consistently. In the end I need just: rendering, throwing in images easily, daily notes, and text search. The point is to minimise the effort/time to actually write a note. If I have to think about how to categorise my notes, what tags to put etc, I just end up not writing notes.

Moreover, with a basic setup, for the most part obsidian can be replaced by almost any text/markdown editor, so no lock in, nor security risks from using community plugins.

Apart from notetaking I also use obsidian to create slide presentations, which is probably one of the laziest ways to make presentations that look good enough.

I recently setup Obsidian thinking of it as an easy note taking system with self-hosted sync that Claude can read from.

I'm still building the habit for using it instead of scattering notes in text documents or self-DMs on various platforms, but during setup, the complexity was concerning, since I associate complexity in this kind of system with fragility. For now I am still in the exploring phase, so not ruling it out yet.

What self-hosted sync approach are you using?

I’m thinking of doing the same thing, as I want everything on my home NAS and not iCloud/Google Drive

I setup the LiveSync plugin in an LXC on one of my proxmox servers, since I was going to have to host the MCP server too (so Claude could read from it).

It doesn't require iCloud/GDrive, I just exposed the corresponding port through a cloudflare tunnel and set up the apps to connect through it.

I'm just so bummed that multiple vaults are pretty much unusable. I can't sync my sensitive work notes. But I want to sync general programming notes between work and other PCs. But multiple vaults hardly work. The just open in a new window.

Other than that, I love so many things about the program. Just linking and graphs are weird and strangely overrated. Search and tags still rules over everything imo

I think separate vaults being in different window is probably intentional behavior to clearly show that they're separate vaults, not something that needs to be fixed.

If you want to sync only some of the things from a single vault and not other things, can't you just use different top-level folders? Have a "to-sync" folder and a "do-not-sync" folder, and only sync the to-sync one. I'm not sure if that's possible using Obsidian's paid sync, but it should be possible with other sync options.

What do you mean by "multiple vaults hardly work"?

If it helps Obsidian has a newish command called "Change vault..." that switches vaults without opening a new window.

But I don't want to change vaults, I want to work in both. I want to search for something and get results from all vaults. Or rather: I want to select which folders to sync - that would effectively be the same for me.

The main problem I have with using different Vaults at the same time is that they all share the same taskbar icon. For syncing you can sync your files however you want.

I mostly use one Vault for my setup, then things like linking and search work the best: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-vault

I wouldn't call it unsuable though? I have one separate vault for just journaling and that works well.

The Raycast Obsidian plugin makes vaults pretty easy for me. Cmd+Space > "Open Vault" and then pick which one you want. You'll still have a window per vault but it makes it really fast to get to where you want.

Relay plugin lets you manage permissions at a granular folder level instead of all-or-nothing vault level.

I've tried obsidian so many times and want to love it but the sync situation - either the expensive official one, the approved options for mixed iOS/Windows clients (icloud) and third party tools like obsidain-livesync - were all way too issue-prone for me to ever trust it. I hope they figure this out

I recommend using syncthing. It's very easy to self host but I actually use a SaaS for it: syncding.com. It gets me 100gb to 1tb of disk in which I can create folders and keep them synced with my 2 laptops, my phone, my server etc... I have an Obsidian vault with Meld Encrypt to encrypt some files, a keepassxc file I share across my devices and my todo.txt

It's simple to setup and will work forever instead of paying for different providers that might shut down or increase their prices.

I should probably mention — I’m one of the co-founders of https://www.syncding.com

I originally built it for my own setup (multiple devices, encrypted files, etc.), and it kind of grew from there.

Not everyone has a NAS at home, so the idea behind syncding.com was to provide a simple, encrypted online Syncthing hub that just works without the usual setup — with built-in ZFS snapshots for versioning and recovery.

Always cool to see others using similar workflows.

Haha now your comment might make it seem like I was trying to advertise for you, hence the downvotes.

As a disclaimer, no I wasn't paid and have never been contacted before by Syncding, just a happy customer.

At $4 per month, I don’t consider it expensive at all to have this whole category of problem solved for me. Mobile app, desktop, laptop synced flawlessly and quickly.

A lot of people view that as pretty costly for what is incredibly small amounts of data in the scope of things. for half that cost you can get 100gb of storage through google and have it synchronize all my docs AND my pictures and videos and anything else I want, so by comparison $4 can seem like a lot for note synchronization.

The main value proposition of Obsidian Sync isn't storage. Obsidian is primarily used with text files which are tiny. My 20 year old collection of notes is only about 1GB for 19,000 files and a few images/pdfs.

I'm biased but I'd say the benefits over Google Drive are: 1. end-to-end encryption, 2. seamless integration with the app (e.g. version history), 3. granular control over what settings and files are synced for each device, 4. shared vaults.

In addition Obsidian Sync helps keep Obsidian 100% user-supported. Obsidian is not subsidized by advertising or any investors. And you can actually contact the team if you need help. See also: https://stephango.com/vcware

Yes even for me in Spain 4$ is not bad. But for me I just want to sync with my local servers. I don't want any stuff in someone else's computer even if it is end to end. So I use the livesync plugin.

I'd pay for the option to host my own server with the official sync but they don't offer that for now.

This might not work for everyone who reads this, but I put all my Obsidian files on my iCloud drive. Since they're just markdown, they sync up on all my (Apple) devices and I can see the notes on my Macbook, iPad and iPhone at any time. I'm already paying for iCloud storage anyway for other stuff so it's very cost effective for me. (Obviously this wouldn't work if you're not in the walled garden of Apple)

I know it's probably no help on iOS, but for people on android or no mobile requirement, just push and pull to a git repo. You can probably even set up a cron or something to sync regularly.

What setup are you using to push and pull on Android?

GitSync works for me both on Android and iOS. I'm not using it that frequently tho, and you have make it a habit to open GitSync first, sync the changes (pull) and then open Obsidian. Also, after changing the notes you should again open GitSync and do a sync (commit + push).

https://gitsync.viscouspotenti.al/

I had the same issues, so I built a macOS menu-bar app that does one-click git pull/commit/push for any local folder, including Obsidian vaults. Uses the system git binary, fast-forward merges only (stops on conflict instead of silently merging), blocks secrets before push.

I personally just use git, there's even a plugin that automates pushing and pulling changes. Does that not cover your use case?

I just use github and have a nightly cron job to sync the vault repo

I have tried many times to migrate to Obsidian and DataView from OrgMode, but I just can't get there.

Obsidian is appealing because it's available on iOS, but the whole approach ended up (for me) being more fiddly and less effective (again for me) than orgmode.

OTOH & to be fair, I've been using Org for a really long time.

I've had a lot of fun combining Obsidian with Claude Code. It's very much like having a personal coach. It's a low-friction way to have it remember things about me without having to re-provide a bunch of context on new chats.

Obviously you have to be careful what you share, and make your own decisions about the utility/privacy trade-off.

I also agree with keeping it very simple. I went down a rabbit hole where I installed a bunch of plugins and basically treated it as a dynamic web application. Now I keep it simple and have basically no plugins, no enforced structure. I don't try to do Zettelkasten or anything like that. Usually I just write in my daily note and link to other notes as makes sense, but I don't force it.

I migrated from Notion to Obsidian, mainly because of speed, and to a lesser extent I like the philosophy.

Having simultaneously embraced AI a lot more, it's been incredible having AI very easily access and work with my notes for me (not to mention making the migration so much better by brute forcing a lot of the tidying and database formatting).

The only thing I haven't been able to replicate from Notion is my shopping list. It used to be one big database, filtered by "unticked". So I could add items, and ticking them would essentially hide them. Rudimentary grouping & sorting by clusters (frozen section, fruit & veg) was a small help, too.

A pretty simple implementation but I can't work out how to get that to work in Obsidian. AI had no ideas either than an extension (which I've already forgotten the name of) which didn't really do it properly (or at least elegantly). Am I missing something?

I'm surprised there's nothing about using this with Claude (or whatever LLM). That's the killer feature of Obsidian imo. My original friction of keeping up with a style or format of notes is taken care of. You can also do full passes of your vaults and ask it to look for connections you might have missed or to reorganize it after some time if the original purpose has drifted. You can also just open a terminal in the root of a vault and start asking questions. I use this for all kinds of things now: health tracking, music gear questions, work ideas, etc. It's such a natural choice for a basic memory system, and it's not beholden to a specific provider since it's just files.

I also give the agent an mcp with combined FTS and vector based semantic search using sqlite-vec so it can search up things quickly.

I threw Obsidian over a vimwiki set-up I had and it's been pretty fun. I made a separate base for a "CRM" I'm building (it's just people, companies, and their projects, not customer relationship management). It's nice to have all my vimwiki stuff there and great to have a database when I need that view. I think I'm using about 5% of its capabilities though.

Sync is not automatic for me and so far that's a feature. I commit my changes to gitlab and since it's markdown that gives me a chance to review what I've done and add a summary in my commit message. It helps me stay a little more focused.

for my obsidian is just my mobile markdown editor I just haven't been able find a better one, for desktop I use neovim and telekasten

It's the opposite for me, I use Obsidian on desktop but hate it on mobile, so I use Markor there.

I like Obsidian on mobile, so I'm not really using it, but I found the "Zettel Notes"[1] app to be a good markdown editor for Android also.

[1]: https://www.zettelnotes.com/

seems to be what I need, I'm gonna check it out

I really like Obsidian, but its features are still too much for me. Are there any aesthetically pleasing, faster alternatives that simply render Markdown and LaTeX? It would be even better if it also supported mixed inputs like Obsidian.

You don't have to use _all_ the features. I don't.

Logseq, it's geared to daily notes and visualizing everything in a graph, and support KaTeX. It also supports org-mode. If it fits your workflow I'd recommend it. Personally I feel like Obsidian does too many things and none too well.

I mean, that kinda was the point of my post, you really don't have to use all of the features!

No person does actually.

Vimwiki?

pandoc?

Bear

I've used Flatnotes for about a year or so and if all you want is to write notes in markdown and search them it doesn't get much simpler. It has tags and decent search, but other than that nothing. Easy to sync or backup though with a single folder of text files.

https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes

Just curious, since I think they have the same focus, have you also tested SilverBullet?

https://silverbullet.md/

I have been using Obsidian for 3-4 years, and I will keep using it. I really love it.

I have 0 community plugins. I use it for writing articles that becomes .qmd file for my quarto blog, I make lists, I track progress, and I have a standing file called scrip.md where I write tables, LaTeX equations, and screenshot and share them.

I have some folders, and I link some files. That's it. It has first class Linux desktop and Android experience, and that's all I want. No web browser, no internet dependence, no black box data processing, and complete freedom. If it is ever bought by potential enshittifiers, I just stop using it!

I don't use many Obsidian-only features to not be dependent on the benevolence of the creators.

The only thing I use openclaw for is managing my obsidian vault. The flow is a series of crons that prompt me to fill out daily files and update projects as they progress. I also use it for calorie tracking and basic daily journaling. This is simple, secure, and very cheap 'life coaching.'

In the last paragraph, OP mentions using Logseq "for short daily notes/journaling", which suggests both Obsidian and Logseq fall short in some ways.

As I'm currently contemplating using one of these tools, I'd love if you elaborated on that.

Great article, thanks.

I use Obsidian for daily notes. I’m not sure why someone who primarily uses Obsidian would reach for another app just for daily notes.

I was able to specify the folder for my daily notes and the format for their naming. I also have a template setup for them. There is a button in the sidebar that opens the current days note and creates it if it doesn’t already exist. I believe this was all out of the box. I then download a plugin that gives me a calendar, so I can visually see which days I have a note, as well as pre-make a future note.

I use daily notes at work to track what I’m working on any given day. If I know I need to do something on a certain day that isn’t a meeting, I use the calendar to generate that future note and write down whatever I’ll need when the day comes. My daily note template is pretty basic, it has a todo section (where I stick to the Ivy Lee method[0]) and a section for notes that are related to the day and don’t deserve their own file (like meetings and one-off support issues).

For a while, when I had to track everything, I wrote a little something to let me easily append text to my daily note. I ended up writing this I HammerSpoon (Lua), bash, and Apple Shortcuts. I used all 3 at various points in time. It made it really easy to append to my daily notes with a time stamped note from wherever I was without breaking flow. I could select any given day on the calendar and see how I spent that day. It was nice to have, but I also like the freedom of not having to do that anymore.

I haven’t used Logseq, but that is mostly because when I looked at trying it a year or so ago, most of what I saw online were people saying it was buggy, and I wasn’t sure what it would offer than Obsidian wasn’t already providing me. That said, there is no reason not to give them both a try and see what you like best.

[0] https://jamesclear.com/ivy-lee

> Don’t fall for FOMO marketing or feel anxious. Keep it simple. Obsidian should help you work on other things.

Great advice, I tried to get into Obsidian a few weeks ago and could immediately feel myself getting pulled into the "Workflow Optimization Spiral". I love nothing more than fruitlessly tooling with workflow stuff, in place of actually, you know, working. I kind of just decided to set it aside, rather than parse through exactly which parts would be actually helpful for stuff I needed that day. Really appreciate this blog post to help me revisit the app from a more practical starting place.

Thank you for the kind words and that the post actually helped! It's exactly the kind of inspiration I wanted to achieve.

The first time I got into Emacs and vim I also spent way too much time on the editor customization spiral. Then in 2015 I just picked and settled on Spacemacs while strictly limiting how much time I spend on customizing my editor. I’ve had three jobs since then and I brought basically the same editor config to all three jobs.

I wanted to jump on the obsidian train but from what I understand I’d need to pay for their sync service to be able to use iOS and headless Linux right?

All other sync methods seem to come with caveats. I’d use iCloud Drive but I was not able to mount it with rclone.

Not necessarily. There are dozens of syncing methods aside from Obsidian Sync (Git, SyncThing, etc) and you can create your own plugin to sync.

I first struggled with it, gave it another try couple of years later and now using it on a daily basis as a key work tool to organize my knowledge, like code snippets, documentation, roadmaps...

For me, the 2 most powerful aspects are: - as mentioned in the article, there is no pricing plan, no limits, no enshittification or feature creep... Fully usable from now to eternity

- md format! So damn easy to export it to a proper pdf file, to copy it into a html page converter etc.

Is there a reliable way to move content from OneNote to Obsydian? I have 10+ years of notes there and have a hard time figuring out how to migrate them to markdown.

Have you tried the Import plugin in Obsidian? I used it the other day, and it seemed to do a good job with OneNote, though my ON notebooks are just simple text and images. I believe it automates an export from ON to HTML and then converts that to MD.

Once they're in MD format, you can always get your favorite agent to do more formatting and organization, which was one of the big reasons I moved away from ON.

https://obsidian.md/help/import/onenote

I had issues with images coming across not being correctly linked. Might be working better now.

I've been pretty happy with a terminal, sublime text / (forked) zed, and a directory hierarchy of .md files.

What can I expect to gain by using Obsidian?

Impossible to tell! Even when I have established patterns, I do take alternatives for a spin… usually a solid week to give them a chance. Most times I’m just reaffirming that I like what I’ve got, but I do occasionally discover features that are new/interesting.

Thank you for this. I am one of those that find Obsidian a mystery but now wish to learn to be able to reproduce How to build a Karpathy-Style AI Wiki in Obsidian Without Writing Code as mentioned here: https://x.com/KanikaBK/status/2042973243888554122 Hopefully this will help me with the Obsidian-based AI Wiki

AsciiDoc in a private Git repo does it for me.

Notebook Navigator solved Obsidian for me

wondering on starting with this

once you start tagging it stops being notes and starts being a project

Reading all the comments here i feel I’ve learned all the obsidian i need.

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