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
I was only willing to try it out because I had heard it mentioned [0] on CGP Grey's cohosted podcast, Cortex, in the episode they did on productivity software subcultures. Specifically I think CGP Grey was saying he didn't "get" Obsidian but had observed a fanatic fanbase around it of people who thought it was god's gift to note-taking because it represented the links between knowledge in a unique way. Apparently I'm one of those people because I went from installing it for the first time to writing all my new thoughts down in it in the space of 3 days.
I suspect the real reason I liked Obsidian right away is that long ago I used Microsoft Onenote as a freeform notetaking app to just spew unrelated thoughts into that I could organize later. Onenote's interface was good, but there was no way to port those notes in an exportable format to a new computer when the one with a Onenote license died.
[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/CGPGrey/comments/ihkqjp/cortex_105_...
Grey loves Obsidian, Mike doesn’t really get it though. Neither like Notion, even though it has a massive fan base.
There is a whole episode (maybe the one in question) where it comes to light that Grey has spent most of his life NOT making notes like most people do and instead just highlighting areas in source material and referring back to it.
Very funny episode given they were over 100 episodes into a productivity podcast at this point and had spoken about note taking extensively - without realising that one of them has a very different concept of the practice/process.
My biggest gripe with it may have simply been the endless hyping and gushing that all the "productivity gurus" on YouTube and elsewhere did over it. Indeed, it seemed custom-made for YouTube productivity gurus, since you could make everything look so clean and beautiful and polished. It seemed the sort of note-taking tool for people who cared more about how the final result looked, than for people who wanted to quickly add or go over notes.
That said, I recognize that there was much there I probably never really used to its fullest-extent, databases being the fundamental differentiator between Notion and most other note-taking apps, and potentially very powerful.
I know this isn't a very hacker newsy comment, but wanted to highlight how amazing your comparison is :D
OneNote has been free for the last few years.
> port those notes in an exportable format
You can export your notes in a HTML-like format. I haven't tried to convert it into a different format yet, though.
Not in my experience. The online, UWP, feature-reduced version that comes with windows is gratis, but ... .
The proper desktop version requires an office license. It then is "gratis" on top of the cost you already paid for office.
You can export as a .pdf, .xps or into most MS office doc formats like .docx
OneNote isn't great if you want to regularly export to a different format. Especially if you want to make your notebooks accessible to other non-MS software. Right now, I sync my notebooks between several different devices which is kind of a pain.
Only if you store your notes in OneDrive.
The development velocity of the (TWO PERSON!) team behind this app is ridiculous. They're constantly pushing updates, and seem to handle all facets of app development with aplomb.
No affiliation, just a happy user!
This! I just checked their page for a "careers" button to see if they got VC funding and are raising a team. Nope, still just 2 people. It's not that they are able to move fast, it's that they are moving fast while making a product that looks good, does the job, and is snappy. Kudos to the (2 person) team!
Scaling up teams is to deal with scope, not speed, and usually leads to much slower progress as processes and procedures are layered on top.
I had a small problem with the app once. I contacted them via email and it was resolved in a couple of hours and they were kind enough to offer different solutions -- solutions that didn't fill their pockets. (Needless to say, I'm sticking with their services.)
The fact that they can manage all that is almost a testament to how useful the app they're creating must be for them.
I too am just a happy user/customer and wish them nothing but success.
Well in general, isn't the velocity inversely correlated with the number of people in a team?
1. Privacy. You can roll your own syncing (or use iCloud, Dropbox, etc.), without the notes being stored on the note editors' servers, which is a huge win over Roam, Notion, Evernote, etc. After the Evernote fiasco from a few years ago (where they considered reading your notes for ML model training and got massive pushback), I value future-proof solutions that won't become a liability in 10 years if the company providing the note taking software gets desperate.
2. Markdown. Speaking of future-proofing, Markdown is as close as it gets to having interoperability with the notes. Obsidian is at its core just a Markdown file editor, which means your notes are stored as plaintext and easy to export. There is a bit of Obsidian-flavored syntax (e.g. bi-directional links [[...]]), but these are becoming standard in note-taking. Many note-taking apps claim export functionality, but at the end of the day they're not incentivized to give you your data in a format that will work with other editors.
3. Executing on features that have become indispensable for note-taking, and personal knowledge management specifically: bi-directional linking, block-embeds, query-embeds, unlinked mentions, graph view, custom CSS, note aliases, markdown diagrams (via mermaid), and a few others.
4. Offline support. If there's any kind of login or sync required to access your notes on your personal device, that's a dealbreaker for me. This seems to have been a regression lately in the latest batch of note-taking apps.
My entire personal knowledge base was in Evernote for a few years, and now happily migrated to Obsidian. The graph view is just a magical way to explore the knowledge that you've stumbled upon over the years.
The team gives away so much value in the core app for free. If you enjoy their product, consider supporting via the Catalyst plan: https://obsidian.md/pricing
This is actually the reason I don't use Obsidian. It's built on markdown, but it is not markdown. Things may be different now, but when I gave up on Obsidian, there was no general purpose exporter - you either use their editor or you lose much of the useful information in your notes. This would not by itself be a big problem except for the fact that Obsidian is a standard piece of proprietary software. It genuinely solves nothing in regard to future proofing.
I'm using the exact same folder of markdown notes in parallel with Obsidian, The Archive, 1Writer, Calca, TableFlip, Python scripts, and Keyboard Maestro macros I have written and everything works flawlessly together.
To me, the killer feature of markdown notes is not the future-proofing, but this kind of seamless interoperability.
In that sense Obsidian is just a fancy viewer for documents which can be edited in VSC.
And with regards to vanilla markdown (which would exclude the likes of Github or Gitlab, or the most popular extensions on VSC), personally, I wouldn't be satisfied with the exclusion of Latex which is already in widespread support across markdown supporting apps.
Community markdown is a moving target because John Gruber's initial vision is frozen in time whilst the demand for innovation is ballooning. It's unfortunate because the trademark for markdown is in some ways in the same ballpark of value as the community buy-in for the technology.
https://trello.com/b/Psqfqp7I/obsidian-roadmap
edit: they've moved it to the "working on" column
It's a one-man effort by a guy who created it for working on his PhD, but it's quite robust and usable despite a few small flaws (who should be corrected in version 2.0, likely coming during the year).
Of course it's a little bit of trouble but I imagine most people won't want to switch their notetaking apps that frequently.
The only shame with the mobile version is that (last I checked) it doesn't have Dropbox support, which makes it more or less useless to me. Hopefully it's on their list.
Can I ask what your use-cases were for Evernote, and how well they all migrated to Obsidian?
When I think over my Evernote usage, for me it really boils down to three things:
1. Evergreen notes, like lists of books to read
2. Wiki-ish knowledgebase for work, like how do I get data from this server, or whatever
3. Digital shoebox: the place to throw old receipts, tax returns, contracts, whatever. Mostly throw it in and forget it, but useful for the 1% of time when I need to find something and it's magically there.
Numbers 1 and 2 could easily be moved to Obsidian, but I don't know if 3 would work.
I still use a web clipper because pages go away too often.
I want image OCR because it's nice to search for something and have a snapshot of a whiteboard come up.
I want a native client on iPad and Windows. I would prefer local storage if possible.
Basically, I want Evernote from about 7 years ago.
Their privacy policy also allows them to use personal information for the purposes of
> recommending products and services that Dynalist believes will be of interest and provide value to you
I'm not going to wait for the "one true format" while something good enough is here.
Yes, perfect.
Last year when I was searching for wiki-type note taking tools, I stumbled upon many of them including Roam Research, TiddlyWiki, and then Obsidian. Obsidian is what I chose because of how it stores my data - markdown files.
And it does not lose any functionality even if it uses markdown. Bidirectional linking, block references, heading references, a beautiful graph - Obsidian features almost every feature you need.
It is also very customizable. You can use custom themes and build your own plugins to work better.
Though the only thing I think needs improvement is the outlining ability - it does not feel very intuitive in Obsidian. This is the reason I use LogSeq along with Obsidian. Now this also shows why interoperability is necessary, I do not have to worry about any data lock-in. I am free to use any notes editor along with Obsidian.
Offtopic: It is such a nice co-incidence to meet you here on HN. I found you on YouTube yesterday while searching for Notion swipe files and then followed you on Twitter today. :).
I got past that by not looking at it through the Roam lens. I realized Obsidian is the tool I wanted to build for myself. I see it as a view / management layer over my MD files. Also, the features have been fast coming and some key additions have made the tool much more useful. And I really like my MD files.
Exactly this.
One specific problem that killed it for me temporary is the lack of support for multiple vaults, to the point that there is not even a truely centralized global configuation. Everything is saved in the vault itself, including plugins. Vault is the name of the data-directory, basically your workspace. For someone using multiple vaults (work, and private stuff) on multiple systems, this really kills any motivation to use it. Did this change in the meanwhile? I losly follow the changelog and haven't seen anything yet regarding this things, but maybe I just missed it.
Other than thoise specific problems, it's awesome how activate and vibrant the community itself is. There is a very active forum and discord-server, and many awesome plugins coming from the community are available. Obsidian has really the potential to leave org-mode behind and become a serious alternative for the rest of the world.
You can invoke an overview, that lists the last five, or so, Vaults, you used. From there you can switch. But that is all. The configuration, and, yes, the plugins (yeez!), sadly, are still installed on a per Vault base. What I have done is to set up an empty Vault as a template, configure it the way, I would have my master preferences, and when I create a new Vault, I start by cloning that. It's not perfect, but better than nothing.
Another thing I dislike is, that the Vault can not go into a (programming) project's folder as a sub folder, but considers the project folder as the Vault.
https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/requesting-encryption-of-l...
Org being so feature-rich, I decided to tackle a subset on iOS, so I built https://flathabits.com.
I'm itching to build a similar thing for personal task management, since I currently rely on Shortcuts emailing myself org-formatted TODOs.
I find that it supports surprisingly large parts of org mode.
I'm also not so eager to regulary waste time for hacking tools. Updating the settings in all vaults each time I update some setting or plugin in one vault would be quite a pain.
I used Notion for years before Obsidian and the speed alone is a reason to never go back.
On a related note, I also consider Linear to be quite fast and responsive especially when you learn the keyboard shortcuts. And to achieve that responsiveness, they load the whole database (or deltas) at startup.
A second thing you can do is not rely on a bunch of bloated, poorly written libraries just because they're popular—another "best practice", of a different sort. I.e., pretty much the opposite of this advice, ironically:
https://medium.com/actualbudget/the-horror-of-blocking-elect...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16616374
https://archive.jlongster.com/secret-of-good-electron-apps
Also you may want to use Svelte rather than React.
I'm curious myself if the Obsidian team has anything to share about this.
My major issue with the mobile apps is the syncing. On iOS you get to decide between iCloud or Obsidian Sync. On Android you can hack together something with third-party syncing apps and local disk storage. But if you have been using Dropbox or OneDrive for syncing on your PC, you won't be able to (bidirectional) sync your data to your mobile devices (out of the box).
Obsidian Sync is awesome and at $4 per month (early bird lifetime) very tempting, but then with max 4 GB per vault (à 5 vault) including history, you can't exactly compare it with the 1+TB you get on Dropbox and OneDrive, meaning you'll have to cut out pictures, audio files, videos etc.
This leaves me a bit conflicted and forces me to rethink the setup I have right now.
https://help.obsidian.md/Licenses+%26+add-on+services/Obsidi...
There are some third party apps that kind of do this for you, but shouldn't Google just make their app do what it is supposed to do? Where's the «backup and sync» alternative for Android? That's the only thing I need to use obsidian on mobile and get rid of Keep or any other app, because obsidian on desktop is just perfect for my needs.
I used to use Zim wiki before, and it was almost what I need, but it didn't use markdown, looked uglier, was slower, and there was no mobile app.
Edit: looking in to https://workingcopyapp.com/ now. an iOS git client.
On Android you could probably somehow do a local checkout, but don't think that will work with iOS due to file system restrictions.
Also since I don't use iCloud for anything else base 5GB will be enough for the foreseeable future.
I've used Joplin for a while. It's Markdown so I like it. The UI is dry (compared to Evernote).
Although Joplin is FOSS, Obisian uses plain text files rather than a database which is a massive plus to me, personally.
Also, Obsidian UI is light-years ahead of Joplin's. It's interesting that (IIUC) Obsidian is also not native but it feels completely native when compared to Joplin.
Also most Obsidian plugins work fine on desktop and mobile and the ecosystem is visibly growing. I don't think Joplin's plugins are really getting a huge traction.
All in all, Obsidian replaced most other apps I used (Bear, Noteplan, Evernote). The only thing I can imagine replacing Obsidian is LogSeq if they get their mobile app right.
Some reasons:
- Joplin doesn’t save plain Markdown, you can‘t just edit/view your files with alternative editors easily
- Creating and organizing notes feels less smooth for me
- navigating between notes is not so easy
- you can’t write #tags inside your text and it just works
- plug-ins and configuration is stored inside the vault, if you sync the vault, you have all the plugins everywhere
What I liked better in Joplin:
- 2 Levels (or panels) of organizing notes, instead of just one tree view in obsidian. Like every email client or file manager does it (one panel with folder tree, another panel with all elements inside)
- possibility to custom order inside notebooks (but I didn’t work well)
It saves files to Markdown, and on right click, you can 'external edit' with your favorite text editor, which you have configured ahead of time in the settings.
In comparison, Joplin keeps its notes in a more opaque format, where the notes database is a bunch of files with garbage filenames and so on... and the UI is, er... functional.
I've been trying to switch away from Obsidian to Joplin though, because Obsidian is payware (with add-on subscription services available too!) and Joplin is simply open source.
Edit: Actually, I guess that won't work with mobile
Obsidian does have a slightly nicer UI and some nice features Joplin doesn’t have but I think the former points are way more important.
Here's a list in case anyone is curious what is available. https://discourse.joplinapp.org/t/plugin-list/17671
https://gitlab.com/stavros/notes/
I also like how it easily syncs with NextCloud and works well.
I actually like Obsidian more and I would be glad to pay the price. My problem is that it now runs well, uses compatibile formats, is actively maintained - but who knows how will it be 10 years from now? Having the whole of my bibliography locked in in Mendeley was not a great experience.
With this option enabled, it kept my Joplin synced across five devices without issues and all of them have this option enabled. My Joplin have 5-seconds delay of syncing between devices. I have about 100 notes/subnotes, I'm not sure if the amount of notes is a factor of syncing issues.
With the plugins and bits now, its really quite nice - and personally I find the UI much nicer than Joplin
Within a few days I'd paid for VIP and now subscribe to sync too.
It's fantastic especially with the plug-ins.
[0] - https://logseq.com/
The features I'm waiting for (I know they're in development) are the WYSIWYG editor and hopefully some integration with dynalist, the other amazing app from this team. Once that's done and dusted, this will be awesome.
Trying to understand - what is the feature that Obsidian got you hooked? Usually HN is very critical of Electron apps, but not on this one and I'm really interested why. :)
But when I have a lot of notes regarding a topic I start creating a lot of sections in a note, sometimes multiple notes, which are hard to navigate from one to another, etc.
So Obsidian for me shines when I have a topic or area when I need to have a lot of nodes, which are in some ways related to one another. Or even have a hierarchical structure.
My use case currently is developing OctoSQL as a side project and having to keep:
1. TODOs
2. Random non-categorized notes
3. Ideas
4. Notes specific to some in-progress features, so i.e. a note for optimizer strategies, a note-per-datasource describing the current state and todo's related to a datasource.
And some of those are best represented as a tree hierarchy, so I can start representing that using references in Obsidian, and easily navigate them using the graph view.
Bear is too disorganized for me to do that sustainably (most notes get forgotten and re-discovered a few weeks/months later).
- vim binding supported out of box
- notes stored in markdown files
- bi-directional linking
- feels pretty snappy
I would have considered bear if it supported vim bindings and was also available on windows (work laptop)
I also like that it's just markdown under the hood.
It's not perfect. Multiple vaults can be clunky and if I want to share a vault with someone it's going to get complicated, but it's pretty slick at what it does.
- Vim support
- text files on disk
- plugin support. community around it makes that worth it. currently i have 16 plugins installed. and most of them work fine on the mobile app too
If that's the case, hypothetically i could run a WASM app as the primary plugin code, right? The idea of extending functionality of Obsidian has me super interested in buying into Obsidian and developing extensions i'm interested in!
edit: Wow, this seems like a super yes. https://github.com/trashhalo/obsidian-rust-plugin - this is exactly what i was planning. Really cool!
This is the first time i'm actually been happy about a web based plugin lol
I've started using Obsidian just yesterday and have been loving it so far. I had to get 1writer to work with it on the go, and now this, problem solved!
It was my only major gripe with the product. Now it's perfect!
It's really really useful when notes about a topic surpass one page, and need good organization.
This makes such a big difference. I wish everyday that I could turn off iOS animations…
I have noticed that Obsidian (plus my Smart Keyboard) drains my iPad's battery a bit more than a full native app might, but it doesn't drain it nearly as much as a game and it works amazingly well.
I also using Obsidian as the backing store for my blog/site[1] and the ability to link up notes on a public site is really nice. I'm not even taking advantage of this fully yet. Because Obsidian uses plain Markdown as the source of truth, it was easy to write code[2] to augment page content with backlinks myself and then feed it to Hugo for generation of my site.
Overall, I'm a very happy customer!
[1]: https://www.kevindangoor.com [2]: https://github.com/dangoor/sharedbrain
But very intrigued by obsidian. I briefly tried it before but will give it a go again
https://techcrunch.com/2021/04/06/note-taking-app-mem-raises...
> The broader hope of the founders and investors behind Mem is that the team can leverage the platform’s intelligence over time to better understand the data dump from your brain — and likely other information sources across your digital footprint — to know you better than any ad network or social media graph does.
As for my use of Obsidian, I’ve put into it almost 400 permanent notes into it and I have my journal in it as well. I find the process of connecting ideas and thoughts great for exploring subjects/books/articles. I’m a fan of this product.
How Obsidian handlers sync conflicts? For instance, I edit a note on iOS while offline, then I edit the same note on desktop while online, then the iOS device comes back online. Apple Notes for example is handling this amazingly well by merging changes a bit like Google Docs. But it doesn't support plain Markdown files and version history, which are two things really great about Obsidian.
And also, do you provide a full-text search, for example by indexing the files in a SQLite FTS5 backend?
1. Performance reductions for sake of privacy is acceptable. 2. Feature reductions such as watching a directory are also acceptable. No other app even uses this feature. This isn't Linux.
In any case, The app can still run without storage access, but chooses not to. It can access it's own internal storage at root without permissions. It can also access a dedicated app specific directory in external storage. If I just want to use the app without storage permissions, I should be able to.
1: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Android+app#Storage+Permis...
Is there a plugin or something that enables list folding in a markdown file? I'm wondering whether it's time to migrate the Dynalist parts of my system to Obsidian and that's the big thing I'd miss.
Edit: Based on one of the developer's comments, it's CodeMirror 6, which makes sense since it's the only editor with good mobile support.
It is a great tool and has been game changing. But…
My workflow is inextricably linked to the way I use Notable.app and while I’m kind of happy with it, one way linking without a back button is a massive drag. As a markdown editor it is utterly fantastic. As an organiser of knowledge it is good, but could be better, but I can’t move on from it without a lot of work to migrate my workflow. I’ll get around to it at some point this summer but only if I get comfortable with a workflow in another tool first.
My point: be careful how you integrate these tools into your life. You are basically betting married to them.
They can be amazing. They can also be amazing 90% of the time and leave you high and dry in ways that make you want to move on, but cannot.
I tried to build a [plugin for VScode](https://github.com/madeindjs/vscode-notable) (with a fraction of feature of notable) but I finally moved to [Dendron](http://dendron.so/). I'm happy with it for the moment because I feel less coupled to a Software.
This "initial capture friction/anxiety" has been an issue with Notion. Roam tried to provide a simple "Quick-capture" but it's not great. Mem.ai addressed this problem head-on and they make quick entry dead-simple: on desktop, you just start typing anywhere and it enters into a new note, and from mobile you can text anything (including sharing links etc) to a specific number and it goes to a new note.
- pulling entire threads for a tweet
- offline support for markdown
- tags
- search for notes
- qr codes
- sharing entire blocks of bookmarks with other people
The thing that's most impressive to me is that the plugin community is constantly building radical new things you can do... seemingly every week. Normally I think of plugins as offshoot nice to have things, but in Obsidian's case the community comes up with vastly different, potentially workflow altering stuff all the time... from templating systems to query languages to task management to kanbans to mind mapping to uri improvements to outliner capabilities for plain markdown lists.
And while not 100%, many of them port easily to mobile thanks to Obsidian's hybrid approach. So all that power travels with you.
Is Obsidian worth trying if one's already using org-roam and is reasonably familiar with Emacs?
What features do you need that org-roam doesn't have? Hard to say if it's worth moving on without knowing that. If org-roam is working for you, then why bother moving? If it's not, why not and does obsidian possess those features?
Roam has better embedding eg tweets, but not for long.
https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-b...
I've been hacking on my own clone [1] for the past year with a WYSIWYG editor based on ProseMirror. Here's the demo page [2] for the math editor!
[1] https://github.com/benrbray/noteworthy (disclaimer: not ready for release -- hoping to polish it up by the end of the year)
[2] https://benrbray.com/prosemirror-math/ (disclaimer: the demo page is quite minimal -- many extra features, like Markdown syntax, copy/paste, etc. can be added through ProseMirror)
I use Notion right now for my notes which I like, except from the always online requirement. I'm currently waiting for AnyType to be released which will hopefully save me from that and be my forever knowledgebase.
That's pretty much their next priority, unifying them into one.
Graphs, yeah, same, never really used them. Links are incredibly powerful, I'm not sure how you're using Notion without fully utilising them.
Funny personal fact is that I started to use nvALT after seeing it mentioned in a bad fiction book, one of those that you read because you get stuck somewhere and it's the only book available.
At least I’m assuming that’s the reason, given the feature is notably absent from every note application that supports a vim mode on desktop on iPadOS. Please, someone implement this.
A spectacularly efficient and dedicated two-person dev team, and an awesome community.
I was brought to Obsidian when I was looking for a replacement for Roam. Quickly after I made the switch, I realised Obsidian is a much more powerful tool.
As a plus, Obsidian is free of that quasi-intellectual pretence that Roam ‘ecosystem’ is ripe with.
Anyway, it is good to see Obsidian going strong. I am a happy user since the very beginning!
A big thing i want in a note taking tool is Spaced Repetition, but not _just_ that, more like a way to manage how much information i'm going to try and keep sync'd with my actual brain.
I'd love this system to monitor how much time i'm dedicating to it, and how much knowledge i'm able to retain in my brain based on available quiz time and retention rates (which would vary, i suppose).
I've often debated writing it myself but so many of these note taking tools achieve 90% of what i want, but miss the retention phase. I want to pour my knowledge into Obsidian, i just want some additional tools to help keep some subset in sync with my brain.
Mochi is a nifty little markdown backed SRS app that I've replaced Anki with in my own workflows. Would love to be able to draw from the same vault/folder between the two.
Obsidian does have a plugin system that you might be able to use to add spaced repetition, but I don't know if anyone has written a plugin to do this yet.
Obsidian is the best. I expect to use it forever, and even if it goes away, all the files are stored in plain text without any proprietary data formats or databases.
I moved to Notion a year or so ago. Tried Obsidian and Joplin, but Notion hit the sweet spot for me. You can do very interesting things with the "everything is a database" concept.
Obsidian really seems to be picking up steam though, with all the community plugins and everything I really need to re-evaluate it vs. Notion later.
The good thing though, is that my "note vault" works with either, because it's just a folder containing plaintext files, some notes and some configuration files.
What I would love is if they made it possible to self host obsidian publish.
Personally, I've used our tool Hypernotes (https://zenkit.com/en/hypernotes/). It released with a mobile version of it and also runs of all the platforms and has a web version too. It is also able to do all the features the modern "second brain" note-taking apps offer.
I use this to keep track of things I’ve done, things I need to do and so on (helps with billing also since they’re timestamped).
Anyone come up with something similar for obsidian? I could write a little app that throws a line into “inbox.md” or so I suppose..
I also have hesitated to install community plugins on my Mac because of the scary safe mode warning (and also I believe plugins do have quite a lot of access to my computer).
Do community plugins have similar access on iOS? In other words, does iOS do a better job at sandboxing/silo'ing so that I can use community plugins on my phone without giving access to everything?
Thanks to anyone who has insight
but I'd still like a better tool. Worth a try to ask, I guess.
I generally need simple things on the go, like checking off an item on a to-do list. Almost built my own mini-markdown viewer/editor to do this myself but glad I didn't as now this mobile app totally solves my issue. Great update, thanks!
> The LYT system super-charges your digital library by giving you the ability to use fluid frameworks—like MOCs and a Home note—to enhance your ability to find things, create things, and develop ideas over time.
Another option on mobile is to use Ulysses to edit notes stored on whatever compatible sync service you are using, but you don't get the full Obsidian functionality (or E2E). If you mainly just type notes and don't do a lot of linking etc then it won't matter much.
1. Markdown editing with vim (Obsidian has vim support! Nice) 2. web clipping (one note) 3. note taking and image annotation with tablet (samsung notes) 4. Sync with desktop/web/android.
While 1 and 4 is great on Obsidian, it feels like it's limited on the image and annotation that I would like. Any ideas?
My use case is to export end-user documentation to PDFs including title page, TOC, headers, and footers.
Just tried the Obsidian mobile app - it is fast as well. I am tempted to switch for the vi key bindings.
I realize there's technical differences but from a use cases / feature perspective - isn't it essentially the same?
I've spent a lot of time trying to find my "perfect" note taking app, and have attempted to build my own a few times, and I'm very happy with Obsidian.
Apple Notes is great, but can't do things like tagging/graph view and doesn't allow you to export in a standardized format.
Obsidian is a superset of Markdown (with a few modifications for page embedding and wiki-links) and allows you to sync with anything that provides a way for you to upload a folder of text files.
E.g., tagging, graph views, back links between notes, note/document templates.
All docs are (more or less) plain markdown as well, so if for some reason the open source community ever abandoned Obsidian, in theory it’s easy to export/transfer your notes.
So while I use Obsidian for my personal notes I still use Notion for teamwork.
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
Apart from that they also offer a sync service. And for the technically minded there is also the obsidian git plug in.
I guess the options will stay limited, as the author wants to sell his commercial sync service.
Even the largest most successful companies with 100+ QA people on a flagship product lose data because of mundane updates, and this can be prevented by understanding how the SW works.
Also, I saw this (An Interactive Introduction to Zettelkasten) on reddit today and felt like sharing. This goes hand in hand with tools like Obsidian, Logseq, or Roam:
Joplin is no slouch and no shade on anyone who uses it, but here's why I am happy I made the switch.
- Backlinks (Linked and Unlinked Mentions) are the super power of Obsidian. (Roam and others can do what I will describe, but I'm not aware that Joplin can.)
- Being able to see everywhere I linked to my current note in my 1500+ other notes is super helpful. Having used Obsidian for over a year, I couldn't count the amount of helpful connections this has created and news trains of thought this has led me down.
- Unlinked mentions takes this to the next level since I can take a note that is where I have developed a core idea that I want to propagate throughout my thinking. By taking that core note and naming it properly or giving it an alias, in Unlinked mentions I often find dozens and dozens of places where I interact with this idea as a tangent before I developed this core note. (And sometimes after, too.) So when I return to ideas that are still in the sandbox and trying to be figured out, Unlinked Mentions sometimes lets me connect the new intellectual "key" to a "lock" that I had been frustrated with in the past.
- Obsidian's links and files work are consistent with Markdown spec, so they're more portable than with Joplin. I can easily move from Obsidian to most other platforms, but when leaving Joplin, tags don't always migrate very well.
- The Table Editor is fantastic for creating and manipulating tables in Markdown.
- The Dataview plugin that allows you to dynamically generate tables based on metadata fields you create for each note. I find this particularly useful for notes on other works.
- You can Tweet directly from Obsidian and also draw within Obsidian using plugins. Maybe it's been too long since I used Joplin, but those weren't options that I was aware of. And the list of plugins is more than 200.
- The search is the best I've used on any *note-taking* platform. I'm sure there are better options in code editors, but for someone on the less technical side of things, it's usable for them, but it allows regex, expanding context surrounding matches, and a host of other options.
[1] Win10: Win + Shift + S OSX: Shift + Command + 4 Linux: Shift + Ctrl + PrtSc
I know this is a problem with Kazakhstan government blocking everything left and right, but maybe you'll try to contact them and fix it somehow (I think few months ago I could access it without VPN, now I can't).
Still inferior to Analog Notecards.
* bullet journal https://bulletjournal.com/
* analog https://ugmonk.com/blogs/journal/analog-the-simplest-productivity-system
* hipster pda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_PDA
i use little index cards on occasion, but i often forget to bring them or later archive them.
i bought an s-pen so I can scribble notes in a handwriting app, next to tiddlywiki (and now also obsidian) managing markdown and org files (the letter linked to markdown otherwiste tiddlywiki doesn't get it) see how that goes.