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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
>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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.'
> 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Keep Downloaded. I had issues with notes going missing or just being empty shortly after saving, and this setting fixed that.You can add a layer of structure by periodically reviewing recent entries & updating an index, but I've never felt the need to.
Nothing against it, you just need the warning early on to avoid the timesink if you want things done and follow the wrong guide.
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.
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?
Inbox is where all new docs go to, I just use #tags and file references.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use logseq but Obsidian seems way more widespread, but I am struggling to give up tag inheritance
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)
> 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.
Obsidian is the simplest thing in the world. Write text.
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 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
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.
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).
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
https://github.com/Dullage/flatnotes
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.
As I'm currently contemplating using one of these tools, I'd love if you elaborated on that.
Great article, thanks.
> 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.
All other sync methods seem to come with caveats. I’d use iCloud Drive but I was not able to mount it with rclone.
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.
What can I expect to gain by using Obsidian?