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ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

We have a bunch of short clips that show how to do various things, not sure if they are helpful to you:

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

Canvas is less of a piece of drawing software and more of brainstorm/mindmapping/idea workbench software. Excalidraw will satisfy different use case than Canvas and you can definitely use both!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian Canvas – An infinite space for your ideas

We considered many options to use Markdown but came to the conclusion that Canvas is not something that can fit into a readable Markdown file. Either the Markdown file would so messy that it becomes pointless (i.e. you would never open it in Typora to edit), or it would severely limit the power of Canvas.

After much internal debate we chose the JSON format. We stay committed to keep it as open and easy to work with as possible. Plugin developers are already parsing and modifying the JSON file to programmatically change a Canvas view, and I think that's a fantastic start!

ericaxon CodeMirror 6.0 Stable Release

We use PixiJS!

We used to use d3-force for force simulation, but then we rewrote it in wasm ourselves for performance.

ericaxon CodeMirror 6.0 Stable Release

Obsidian developers here! (https://obsidian.md/)

The new editor in Obsidian was made possible by CodeMirror 6, and it has been powering both the Live Preview mode (like Typora) and the source mode in Obsidian ever since.

It can be a bit overwhelming to get into first, but as we experimented more with it, we found it to be extremely extensible and powerful. It's also highly performant for large documents. Another major reason we chose CM 6 is that it's also one of the only code editors that work decently on mobile.

While developing the new editor, Marijn was also amazingly responsive in investigating and fixing all the big and little things we ran into, even relatively niche issues like IME input bugs.

If you find CM 6 useful, consider what you can to support the project! Funding link is here: https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/

ericaxon Ask HN: Best 2022 April Fools'?

We here at Obsidian did this: https://obsidian.md/cloud

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

Yup! The app is written in TypeScript and shares much of the code with our desktop app. We're using Capacitor https://capacitorjs.com/

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

iCloud and Working Copy are both known to work. Obsidian Sync is also an option.

File Provider is something we'll attempt to implement sometimes in the future to support other sync providers.

More info available at https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/iOS+app#Sync

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

We'll give at least one month of advance notice before ending the discount, so as long as you receive news from us (Twitter, Discord, forum, etc) you should be good!

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

App Store allows external code if it strictly runs under WebKit and JavaScript Core. There's a few more general restrictions (like the additional functionality must be free or use IAP).

ericaxon Show HN: Obsidian for Mobile – Plain-text knowledge base on the go

Hi HN! After months of private beta, Obsidian is now finally available for Android and iOS!

Obsidian is a personal knowledge management app that works on top of a local folder of Markdown files [0]. Because "local" often means your computer, for the longest time, it has been a pain to access these notes on the go.

Our original plan was to build fully native mobile apps. Instead, we decided to build hybrid web apps. Hybrid web apps gets a lot of hate, and for good reason. There's heavy performance penalty for running JavaScript. Animations are often janky. A lot of native capabilities are restricted.

We know everyone's favorite argument for using the web stack. "We're a small team, and it's just not possible to....". Sure, we're also just two developers, but that excuse gets old.

We see it in a different way. We leverage hybrid web apps not as a shortcut, rather, we use it to put power in the hands of our users. This has always been a key principle driving Obsidian's development.

Obsidian is one of the few apps out there that lets users customize every aspect of the app. Themes and CSS snippets let users completely change the interface. Plugins [1] let users augment the GUI [2], run macros [3], build databases [4], synchronize with other apps [5], and much more.

It's unprecedented for users to have access to this kind of power on their mobile devices.

Now, it's reality, thanks to the web stack. Get it at https://obsidian.md/mobile

[0]: https://obsidian.md [1]: https://obsidian.md/plugins [2]: https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-calendar-plugin [3]: https://github.com/SilentVoid13/Templater [4]: https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview [5]: https://github.com/renehernandez/obsidian-readwise

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We have a vibrant community of passionate users: lawyers, database engineers, dungeon masters, medical students, CEOs and CTOs under their alternate identity. You can find them on Discord and our forum at https://obsidian.md/community

We're also launching on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/obsidian-for-mobile

ericaxon Foam – A Roam Research alternative with VSCode, Markdown and GitHub

Obsidian supports LaTeX through the $...$ and $$...$$ syntax and renders them using MathJax.

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

Updated the pricing page to reflect the trial period, sorry about the oversight!

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

Nothing is stored on our servers. The app does not upload anything at all.

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

Yes, once we get close to a stable v1.0 release we'll be opening up a plugin API!

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

Yes! You can use the embed syntax ![[video.mp4]] to embed videos in Obsidian. The video should show up in preview mode.

I think you would really enjoy our active discord community where a lot of people share and discuss their use cases and specific workflows. https://obsidian.md/community

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

Plain Markdown links should work just fine in Obsidian, but you might need to convert space characters to "%20" according to Markdown spec, since space is not allowed.

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

Thank you for the tip!

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

I can't reply to your post further down, but it seems like space characters aren't allowed by Markdown spec. Apparently you have to convert it to "%20" :(

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

Plain Markdown links should work just fine if you use relative paths to files within the vault folder selected.

Is it not working for you?

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

Totally agree! Still quite some work ahead of us (We're about 3 months from first line of code).

Ideally the help docs can be opened as its own vault and can be a nice testing ground for a new user to play around with the functionality.

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

Sorry for the confusion! Help docs are in Settings > Help.

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

We'll add an option to disable auto-update soon!

If you don't trust us, technically you can also use firewall rules to block internet access (or monitor network and see what Obsidian is doing).

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

Thank you so much for the tips, they make a lot of sense! Our onboarding surely needs some re-thinking.

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

The catch shall be fixed soon! :)

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

Hi there! It certainly doesn't sound normal for the app to take a few seconds to open files.

Would you join our community to give us a chance to debug the issue? https://obsidian.md/community

We're still currently in beta so we'd really appreciate all the help we can get to polish any hiccups in the app.

As for the editing experience, we're only about 3 months in so there's a lot of catching up to do, and Typora-level editing experience is something we're shooting for.

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

This is a popular plugin idea right now, and I personally like it. Definitely not part of the core app though.

Markdown has definition lists that can serve as front and back of the cards (https://www.markdownguide.org/extended-syntax/#definition-li...), not as advanced as Anki but should suffice in most cases.

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

Hi there! Sorry it's our first time doing a license like this.

If I understand correctly, licenses are usually written more strictly for legal purposes, but in my opinion your use case sounds like it should belong to personal use.

If anyone has pointers for us to make the license text more clear, please let me know!

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

Thanks! For anyone who's curious, not a fork and we wrote most of the core code from scratch.

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

You can use any web clipper extension that can turn HTML pages to Markdown files.

Our community made this: https://github.com/deathau/markdown-clipper