[raviisoccupied]

I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it.

For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.

[muppetman]

There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them.

Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.

But don't install Obsidian and then spend hours adding addons. You'll get overwhelmed, confused and wondering why all the Influenzers are saying it's CHANGED THEIR LIFE. It hasn't.

[cloud_watching]

Obsidian is amazing because it is a notepad with pretty colors and the graph that gets everyone's attention. The graph is often the most overhyped and underused thing there. It looks complicated and that's the selling point of all that ecosystem around productivity systems and all that. The appearance of deep complexity and work.

I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134

[JonChesterfield]

It's _also_ a notepad that runs on android and synchronises mostly successfully with machines elsewhere. I'm ignoring the plugins entirely but getting lots of use out of the text synchronisation across multiple machines.

[muppetman]

This is one thing I love about it too, Obsidian Sync is very well done and great for moving text files around the place easily.

[dtkav]

Obsidian Sync is a really solid (and complementary) product.

[safety1st]

I just have a notes folder in Syncthing and it seems to accomplish the same thing. Or is there more to Obsidian Sync that I don't know about?

[zevon]

This kind of file sync works but you can run into problems. Switching from one device to the other too fast and editing the same file can get you into trouble, for example. And all the other tradition file sync and conflict resolution issues in general. Also: If one of your devices runs iOS, you will probably have a bad/annoying day with any "sync your files outside the app you edit them in" solution.

[dasil003]

The WYSIWYG markdown editor and wiki links are what I like about it. I’m not into the whole plugin lifestyle that seems to be a thing among the “productivity” crowd.

[omnibrain]

In the beginning I had my Obsidian folder in my iCloud, but had not so happy experiences regarding the conflict resolution.

[pgorczak]

It also syncs config and plugins

[matwood]

I know it’s not the best place to end up, but I always end up back on Apple Notes. It’s has enough features, syncs across my devices, and is simple to use.

[deafpolygon]

Same here... after years, I keep coming back to Apple Notes.

[UltraSane]

I really hate that article. Taskwarrior is infinitely better than a txt file. A txt file is the worst possible option for task management.

[pqs]

Now I'm using Emacs Howm for task management. It is based on text files and it is great. Org-mode is also great.

[aquariusDue]

Also for anyone interested in trying Howm the guide for it was recently updated.

https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manual

The cool thing about Howm is that it's note-taking and task management for lazy people. It predates org-mode (but it also works with it nowadays) and has a distinct way of linking notes by way of go-to and come-from links, think saved search and automatic backlink respectively. Also the way tasks are displayed and surfaced is pretty neat too, the guide/manual goes more in-depth but if you find stuff like org-agenda too complex you'll appreciate Howm's way of tracking and managing tasks.

[UltraSane]

Looks a lot like taskwarrior.

[wkat4242]

> There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them.

It is a simple markdown editor yes but it's the addons that make it so different. There's tons and tons of markdown notetaking apps, but this one just hit the right balance for me. End to End encryption, self-hosted livesync (I can see myself typing from another client), good mobile support, fast searching. Self-hosting is a must-have for me, even with end to end encryption.

The one thing I miss is a bit more security on Android (it would be great if the app offered an option to hide its files from other apps by locating them in the app's private storage area). And for it to start quicker, it has to load a whole browser on every open because it's an electron app even on mobile.

But overall it's great for me. Not earth-shattering but it just offers the right combination of features for me.

I don't really see what the 'wankery' is.

> Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.

For me there are several third party addons that are invaluable. The livesync plugin first of all, it's really great sync and fully self-hosted. This is quite a complex thing to get working and one where so many other apps fall down.

ReadItLater for capturing websites is also pretty nice. And the copilot one for searching notes with RAG.

[direduck]

> it would be great if the app offered an option to hide its files from other apps by locating them in the app's private storage area

For what it's worth, you can do just that now. Not sure when it was introduced, but on the current Android version, you are prompted to select either "Device storage" or "App storage" when creating a new vault.

You can also change the location of existing vaults from app to device and vice-versa.

With that now available, the one thing missing for me is a biometric lock option. Or even any kind of locking at all. There's a community plugin for that, but it's quite unstable and no longer maintained.

[kepano]

On iOS any app can be set to a biometric lock by long-pressing the app icon. I believe some Android flavors have this feature, but not all. However I think it can also be done on Android using the "spaces" feature.

[direduck]

I use a Samsung device which unforunately doesn't have the app lock feature.

But it does have a "secure folder" which is more or less what you mean by "spaces", I guess.

The downside of the secure folder against normal app locking is that the apps are no longer seamlessly integrated with the launcher and other apps. It's definitely more secure but is ultimately overkill for my needs.

[wkat4242]

Yeah and for me it's no option because I have all the banking apps in my secure folder and as such I have a pretty long password on it. If you could have two secure folders then yeah maybe.

And I also have a work profile as well through "Island" :)

[wkat4242]

Oh great! I didn't know that was an option <3 I'll have a look. I originally installed it a couple years ago when I bought my phone.

[wkat4242]

Ps: Where do you see the feature to move an existing Vault? I don't see this option sadly

[direduck]

Sorry, I was mistaken about that aspect.

The option is available to move a vault from the app to the device storage, but not the other way around. At least not from within Obsidian.

But if you use a PC or a file manager that has full device access, you can manually copy the vault folder to the `/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/md.obsidian/files` directory.

I just tried that and Obsidian recognised it.

[HSO]

yea how about you do you, and live and let live

nobody cares what you think people "should" do

[dimitri-vs]

It's not you, it's the productivity influencers making you think it's "supposed to be" more than what it is: a nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files.

I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing).

Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative links and weird plugins that break the premise of having universal markdown files. Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.

[dustincoates]

While I agree that the zettle-nerds take it way too far, I disagree with this:

> Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.

I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my "<Project> Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).

[Nathanba]

> nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files

wow okay, I kept thinking that there must be more to it, why does it only list my files that I can already see in my filetree on the left, like what's the point? I was expecting to see something like what Atlassian has in Confluence (which was also far more intuitive to create btw) https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a...

[AstroBen]

Start with the problem you're trying to solve and use the features to solve it. Don't just try to cram its features into your life

[Eji1700]

I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be.

A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch".

Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy.

Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two.

Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be.

Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear.

Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way?

I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile.

I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this.

Edit- To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.

[bitexploder]

Remember, this is basically your own personal Wiki. You can either embrace and accept a rigid organizational structure or not. You are signing up for a lot of up front maintenance and design this way. The alternative is to heavily use links, tags, and other tools that make it easy to find data later.

For a personal knowledge base I think the latter approach saves time in the long run. I have clusters of well organized information. Well tagged and linked. I can always find my movie ideas, projects, and deep thoughts when I want them. I like the idea of just curating the clusters I care about. Just enough organizing. I then have a few highly connected entry points to my clusters. Often I find people don’t link enough in their Obsidian. It’s free and puts things in a more graph oriented layout that the tool can show you.

Edit: oh, also remember, these are text files. Grep still works. Also, we have very powerful CLI LLMs to summarize and categorize text data rapidly. Like “suggest 3 tags for this document based on <prompt magic here>. :)

[Waterluvian]

No “hey idiot” but for what it’s worth: are you making things too complicated? It almost feels like you’re a bit distracted by all the dimensions of data you want to track. Could this all be one page with a bulleted list, each one might have sub bullets if you care to record things like who shared it and other notes? You can just Ctrl+F for “wife” when you need that sub query.

[Eji1700]

This is kinda where I get to "then why use obsidian?". Like to me the whole point is to kinda have some linking and clean notes organization, and i'm keeping it fairly simple (just some basic tags). But yeah I suspect a large part is trying to bend it into something it's not.

[Waterluvian]

Yeah. All I use it for is a listing of some markdown files. I don’t use any online features. After a decade of experimenting I’ve found this very simple approach is perfect for me.

[al_borland]

I’ve been using Obsidian at work for a few years now, and things like this are why I ignore almost all Obsidian content on the web. Everyone seems to create these really complicated setups, in the name of zettelkasten, that seem nearly impossible to maintain and use in real life. If I want to make a list of movies to watch, I use a simple checklist in one note and move on with my life. I keep Obsidian simple so it gets out of my way.

I tried going down the road like you’re talking about one for managing past, present, and future trips. It technically worked, but it was so fiddly that I hated using it. I just made a few folders instead.

I suppose now, if I wanted all the metadata you’re talking about, using a base would make the most sense. But I’d still need to be realistic about how I’m going to use it. Do I care enough about future sorting abilities to turn adding a movie to a watch list into a multi-field form, where I need to consider all these potential futures to fill it out, creating a lot of friction to the action?

[azeirah]

The default search is not great and the syntax of the dataview plugin is not amazingly well designed. Even the author of dataview admitted to that.

The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik

[Ezhik]

Hyperlinks are all you need: https://ezhik.jp/hypertext-maximalism/

[Eji1700]

I sorta agree, but i feel like i just want the "one more step" of dynamic content for this.

The hubs described are nice, but they don't always reflect larger changes. Updating a hub becomes a dependency that seems silly as I feel like that should be one of the easier things to keep up to date with a basic code overlay. It's one of the first things I wrote when messing with Obsidian, and part of why I really like dendron (easy refactoring, but it's got other issues).

[simgt]

I like that simple rule, I'll give it a go. Thanks for this shameless plug ;)

[hifikuno]

I was kinda similar when I first started using it. I watched heaps of videos and had so many plugins installed but I was never really sure if I was doing it "right". Then one day I got annoyed and uninstalled every plugin and just went back to basics. I only reach for plugins when I feel something is missing, but honestly the only plugins I use are Style Settings which let's me customize the theme a bit more and Calendar so I can have... well... a calendar.

I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!

[theshrike79]

Linter and Templater are the two I can't live without. The rest are just nice to have.

[nylonstrung]

I highly recommend Siyuan as an alternative, it has many the best features from obsidian plugins included by default

[Wolfbeta]

Dev has a history of installing cryptominers in his previous projects and rootkitting people into starring and forking his projects.

https://www.v2ex.com/t/534800

[shunia_huang]

I think the difference here is that Siyuan is fully open source, which means you have more confidence here.

Thanks for bringing this history up, and I think everyone should be careful when downloading a new version for this product, or better build by themselves after checking out the recents commits with some AI tools.

[ujkhsjkdhf234]

SiYuan doesn't have canvas. Obsidian Canvas is great for diagrams.

[TheFuzzball]

Coming from Logseq... this looks ideal for me.

[barbazoo]

I can’t believe my eyes. Is that the self hosted notion alternative many of us have been looking for?

[crossroadsguy]

If all you need is just daily/one-off notes/jottings then Obsidian is not at all something you might want to use. Because, as excellent and a powerful tool it is for right purposes, even w/o its horde of plugins, it will be an overkill for just note taking. My assumption is based on just this comment of yours but you might want to try simpler note taking apps - that just does one thing - note taking, nothing else. Preferably a plain text note taking app for your OS.

When I was looking for nv->then->simplenote replacement Joplin and Obsidian didn't even stay on the radar for more than a few mins.

[bccdee]

Idk—I use Obsidian all the time & I don't even [[link]] my notes, much less need a database feature like this. Regardless of how many features it has, it is also simply a good markdown editor at heart.

[zevon]

Debatable. I use Obsidian specifically because it can be relatively minimalist and it's easy to get the view I want and use 99% of the time: List of files on the left, main note window (sometimes with tabs and/or split) in the middle and a calendar that can jump me to a daily note on click on the right. You can't make such relatively small UI adjustments in the more minimalist note-taking apps, so even if you may not use all of the functions and plugins, Obsidian can still be a relevant choice.

[BenFranklin100]

You’re not the only one. I invested months on Obsidian before walking away and returning to OneNote. It’s advertised as a ‘second brain’ but at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer. You can’t even manually sort notes and folders. Directory Opus can do that and more.

Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.

[jve]

> at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer

For me it's a feature.

[BenFranklin100]

A poor one at that.

[kid64]

Breakage is the best-case scenario. Mass data exfiltration is the bigger concern. The community plugin system is both an unacceptable security risk, and a necessary part of achieving even a baseline level of usability. Imagine the scale of theft that must already have taken place.. the targets may never even know. The fact that Obsidian falsely claims to audit this cesspool is hilarious.

[BenFranklin100]

It is an hilarious claim. They don’t have enough resources to implement critical features, much less waste developer time auditing every random Tom, Dick, or Harry plugin contribution.

[kid64]

I can count their staff on one hand. And at any given time, half of them are busy playing D&D. No vision or leadership.

[clickety_clack]

I just use it as a personal wiki, so plugins are overkill for me. I was basically using it as a way to basically have txt files with latex and it fits the bill.

[Ezhik]

One of the best things about Obsidian is that even all this new stuff is done through built-in plugins and can just be turned off.

[bryanhogan]

Obsidian can do a lot, but in the end it should be a tool to help you do other stuff. Just use it for what you want to use it. And if you want to explore plugins, themes, snippets, etc., think what about what you want to do, then find solutions for that.

It can be fun to explore various features and extensions, but set limits and try to keep things simple rather than complex.

[profsummergig]

Off topic, but I discovered this recently:

http://tangentnotes.com/

Similar to Obsidian, but offers good code syntax highlighting in markdown files.

I found it useful for reading code in markdown.

[wiether]

> Supports ... code blocks with syntax highlighting.

Based on the documentation and the screenshot next to it, I don't see how it differs from Obsidian on this point.

A Markdown code block in Obsidian is going to be highlighted as expected.

Actually it appears that they both relies on Prism to achieve this :

- https://help.obsidian.md/syntax#Code+blocks

- https://github.com/suchnsuch/Tangent/blob/main/apps/tangent-...

[profsummergig]

I've used Obsidian and Tangent. For whatever reason, I've found Tangent's code highlighting brighter, more colorful, and (maybe hence?) more easily readable. Obsidian is more muted. Steve Jobs would have preferred Obsidian.

[aldonius]

Surely that's plugin-modifiable in Obsidian.

[whatevertrevor]

Doesn't even need a plugin, just some custom CSS iirc.

[tietjens]

You can also create a code block in markdown and then write the language type at the top. This also creates highlighting.

‘’’go {your code} ‘’’

[profsummergig]

Thanks for this tip.

I've seen this feature off and on in some online code editors. I didn't know this was a (universal?) Markdown feature. Is it supposed to work universally in all Markdown editors (e.g. VSCode's Markdown view)?

[tietjens]

I know it works in Obsidian. I believe it also works in VSCode.

[dmje]

Just use it how you want to use it. For me, a bit of structure is enough - too much and it becomes unwieldy. But don’t let anyone tell you it’ll either save your life or become your “second brain”, that’s all bullshit. Just stick with no plugins or a small and solid set of ones you love. For me probably the only absolutely critical plugin is omnisearch, but YMWV.

My other advice is that it’s fine to boot up new vaults for other things. I’ve got two main vaults - a sort of work KB and a journal. But then I’ve got a bunch of smaller ones - songs I’m writing, courses I’m making, writing. Don’t be told that you’ve got to get some kind of universal thing that does everything. This is also b/s and often pedalled by the productivity wonks.