Nothing against it, you just need the warning early on to avoid the timesink if you want things done and follow the wrong guide.
This is a perfect analogy.
Making an elaborate Obsidian setup is very much the same instinct.
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.
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)
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.
I touched a bit on this in the bottom-up / smart notes section.
/proceeds to write 10 steps
It's simple to setup and will work forever instead of paying for different providers that might shut down or increase their prices.
I originally built it for my own setup (multiple devices, encrypted files, etc.), and it kind of grew from there.
Not everyone has a NAS at home, so the idea behind syncding.com was to provide a simple, encrypted online Syncthing hub that just works without the usual setup — with built-in ZFS snapshots for versioning and recovery.
Always cool to see others using similar workflows.
I'd pay for the option to host my own server with the official sync but they don't offer that for now.
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.
It's pretty simple. Just get Google Drive Desktop to mount your Google Drive to your filesystem, then point obsidian to work within that mounted directory.
At work, we just have what we call "brain" repos where we all just dump notes and commit straight to the main branch. They are just collections of markdown files that we use Obsidian to view/edit.
So if I am correct the "cloud drive as the storage" option is syncing with a the local SQLite db and to get local files one would need to be syncing the local db with both the cloud drive and the local filesystem.
With Obsidian I sync from local files direct to a cloud drive.
- 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 have one vault for personal, one for work. I open each one in a different window. They are both separate and easy to switch between.
Have you tried some of the plugins that allow you to open CSV / TSV files within Obsidian?
But I understand that my use case is niche and I certainly don't want the Obsidian officially bloats itself into such feature creating.
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
If you want to sync only some of the things from a single vault and not other things, can't you just use different top-level folders? Have a "to-sync" folder and a "do-not-sync" folder, and only sync the to-sync one. I'm not sure if that's possible using Obsidian's paid sync, but it should be possible with other sync options.
If it helps Obsidian has a newish command called "Change vault..." that switches vaults without opening a new window.
I mostly use one Vault for my setup, then things like linking and search work the best: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/obsidian-vault
I wouldn't call it unsuable though? I have one separate vault for just journaling and that works well.
No person does actually.
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.
Are you somehow showing raw markdown source text and also rendered markdown in Obsidian side by side? That would sound awesome.
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.
What makes this issue really terrifying is its silent nature. I only noticed one of the notes having had its content replaced while casually exploring my library.
It took me an hour to restore the original content, which I only managed to do thanks to a (very obscure) macOS feature that keeps versions of most text files. It is only possible to see these versions when opening the file (in this case, the note) in TextEdit. I haven't found another place in the UI where these versions are exposed, which is yet another interesting thing I did not know about the OS I have been using for years now. I wonder why Apple does not expose this feature in the right click menu in Finder, for example.
In any case, as much as I love Obsidian I have been rarely and cautiously using it since this happened. File safety is the bare minimum requirement, so I cannot recommend Obsidian as it is right now.
[1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/content-of-a-note-totally-replac...
Although there are some tools for better collaboration, but if it's just for one particular file it might be a bit "overkill".
But to give them a mention: Relay and Screen Garden are two community plugins that do it, HedgeDoc is a different app but it is a collaborative markdown editor, then the core team of Obsidian is also working on the multiplayer update.
You can add a layer of structure by periodically reviewing recent entries & updating an index, but I've never felt the need to.
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).
Multiple vaults break this. You end up duplicating notes, or linking across vault boundaries (which adds friction), or just forgetting where you put something. That's trading one of Obsidian's strongest features for... tidier folders.
The one case where I do split things out is genuinely isolated project knowledge - like a D&D campaign I used to GM. 99% of those notes have zero connection to anything else. Separation makes sense there precisely because there's nothing to link.
One more thing: a lot of people solve the "big vault gets messy" problem with elaborate folder structures, but Obsidian's search (especially with Omnisearch) makes most of that unnecessary. I don't really organize my notes into careful hierarchies. I write them, link them, and search for them. The mess is fine. I am one with the mess.
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 thinking of doing the same thing, as I want everything on my home NAS and not iCloud/Google Drive
It doesn't require iCloud/GDrive, I just exposed the corresponding port through a cloudflare tunnel and set up the apps to connect through it.
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.
Once they're in MD format, you can always get your favorite agent to do more formatting and organization, which was one of the big reasons I moved away from ON.
I had issues with images coming across not being correctly linked. Might be working better now.
Moreover, with a basic setup, for the most part obsidian can be replaced by almost any text/markdown editor, so no lock in, nor security risks from using community plugins.
Apart from notetaking I also use obsidian to create slide presentations, which is probably one of the laziest ways to make presentations that look good enough.
As I'm currently contemplating using one of these tools, I'd love if you elaborated on that.
Great article, thanks.
I was able to specify the folder for my daily notes and the format for their naming. I also have a template setup for them. There is a button in the sidebar that opens the current days note and creates it if it doesn’t already exist. I believe this was all out of the box. I then download a plugin that gives me a calendar, so I can visually see which days I have a note, as well as pre-make a future note.
I use daily notes at work to track what I’m working on any given day. If I know I need to do something on a certain day that isn’t a meeting, I use the calendar to generate that future note and write down whatever I’ll need when the day comes. My daily note template is pretty basic, it has a todo section (where I stick to the Ivy Lee method[0]) and a section for notes that are related to the day and don’t deserve their own file (like meetings and one-off support issues).
For a while, when I had to track everything, I wrote a little something to let me easily append text to my daily note. I ended up writing this I HammerSpoon (Lua), bash, and Apple Shortcuts. I used all 3 at various points in time. It made it really easy to append to my daily notes with a time stamped note from wherever I was without breaking flow. I could select any given day on the calendar and see how I spent that day. It was nice to have, but I also like the freedom of not having to do that anymore.
I haven’t used Logseq, but that is mostly because when I looked at trying it a year or so ago, most of what I saw online were people saying it was buggy, and I wasn’t sure what it would offer than Obsidian wasn’t already providing me. That said, there is no reason not to give them both a try and see what you like best.
All other sync methods seem to come with caveats. I’d use iCloud Drive but I was not able to mount it with rclone.
What can I expect to gain by using Obsidian?
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.
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.
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.
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.
