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Comment by iammjm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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