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ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

We don't want to prevent people from looking at the DOM to make custom CSS: https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian

It also makes it easy to debug issues with users since we're still in beta.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

I think most people are used to seeing the source and can basically "imagine" what it looks like. So they really only switch for double checking before sending something out I would say.

Many people in our community said things about "staying in the editor" so I guess that's a common workflow.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

We're working on WYSIWYG but it's not an easy problem. Eventually we want editing to feel comfortable to everyone! :)

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Apologies for our lack of experience on Linux, we'll look into it!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Is it possible for you to join our Discord so that we can help you?

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Found and fix the mistakes, thanks for the heads-up!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Oops, will fix! Good catch!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Need to consult a lawyer on that, maybe it needs to be notarized somehow?

There have been some attempts to do this (by other apps), we can look into their approach as well.

And yeah no offense taken, don't worry about it :)

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Sorry but because it works on a local folder, online demo is unrealistic.

I would recommend installing, opening an empty folder, and going to Settings - Help to grab our hel & demo folder to play around with it and get a feel.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Yes, it's TypeScript and we're loving it! :)

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Interested in hearing more about the graph view!

As of the latest release our graph view can be zoomed in and out, and we've rewritten it to generate the graph with WebGL rather than SVG, so it's a lot more performant for 1,000+ notes.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

The idea is that if you're creating value with Obsidian, your employer should expense that, ideally it shouldn't impact you financially. If you're working for a non-profit for example, it's all free.

> (Also, their license page could do with some proofreading)

Interested to hear more! We did a few rounds of proofreading, did you find any typos?

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

The second box on our feature page might help!

https://obsidian.md/features

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Totally agree (except for the first sentence LOL!).

Come to think of it, IDEs are exactly that: a powerful front-end for your code files. That means us programmers are not locked into any one IDE.

> And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and standardized) database tools that are user friendly

Yep, but I wonder how we can get there. Hope someone figures it out! It's always hard to set standards.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Obsidian will auto-update all backlinks when you rename it.

Essentially, we think wikilinks should identify the destination exactly and should not perform a search instead.

Thankfully it's all just plain text at the end of the day, and it's not hard to do some text processing to convert both ways.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

We designed the "Publish" add-on service for that purpose (not yet available): https://obsidian.md/pricing

We still want to give you the option to export internal links to standard [Markdown](link) links so that static site generators or sites like GitBooks can understand them out of the box.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Yes we do support the standard format, navigation will work in Obsidian but unfortunately not link auto-completion.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Not aware of many good resources since it's pretty new, but you can probably look into the Zettelkasten method.

The gist is to make your notes atomic and link them together whenever possible. [[ links provides auto-complete, and the backlink plugin tells you what notes links to this note, and what notes mention it but don't explicit link it.

The graph view is for discovery and navigation mostly. It lets you discover clusters, and identify "orphan" nodes that aren't connected anything. That might inspire you to think of connections and strength your knowledge network.

Hope that makes sense!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

There are a few videos made by beta testers already, but it's a good idea to have some official ones. We've just been too busy shipping releases...

Some videos that might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFYaWC_86W0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAkJMHg-dGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh2ysYig8Wo

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

I'm also a skeptic. Although nothing is forever, we want to get closer to forever than all the other note-taking apps.

We'll likely make a formal guarantee to open source in the case of us shutting down. Didn't realize that was a possibility until today.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

The closest thing in Markdown is probably front-matters. You're right in that Obsidian is not great for structured data right now, and for that purpose Notion or Airtable is much better.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

We'll likely make a formal guarantee to open source in the case of us shutting down. Didn't realize that was a possibility, thanks for the suggestion!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Inline math is coming very soon! WYSIWYG unfortunately will take a while to get right, but we'll get there.

Give Obsidian a try and let us know what you think! :)

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

We'll likely make a formal guarantee to open source in the case of us shutting down. Didn't realize that was a possibility, thanks for the suggestion!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Yes! We really want people to be able to leave their knowledge bases as a legacy to their grandchildren, so we'll do everything it takes.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Yes we do have a Vim mode. Thanks CodeMirror!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Could you please reach out on our forum or Discord so we can help you debug?

Link to forum and Discord: https://obsidian.md/community

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

We have been in private beta for a few months already, with 5000+ beta testers and a community. We did let them know that we're doing a "Show HN" today.

Hope that explains things!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

That's an interesting idea and we'll look into it!

We plan to stay in business in the long run, but if things do go wrong and we shut down, we do intend to open source the app.

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

Maker here, excited to be on Hacker News. Obsidian is going into public beta today! (We're also on Product Hunt, come check us out!)

We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services.

We believe you second brain should work similarly to your own brain and connections are crucial in thinking. Obsidian supports [[internal links]] between your notes out of the box, and provide a powerful graph view and backlink pane to help you understand your knowledge.

We also noticed how personal note-taking and knowledge management is, so we built Obsidian to be very extensible from the start, and let you put together your own workflow with plugins like daily notes and page preview as building blocks.

This leads to our three fundamental values of Obsidian:

1. Local-first, Markdown plain text based; 2. Link as first-citizen. 3. As extensible as possible.

Obsidian is a powerful front-end for your knowledge, like an IDE for your notes.

Learn more about Obsidian's features: https://obsidian.md/features

Read the story of the project and the team: https://obsidian.md/about