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

• mjedmonds 6y ago
  This app has changed the way I take notes - markdown, local files, wiki-style [[backlinking]], and Latex support has made it fun to build a personal knowledge base. I never liked the hierarchical structure of most note taking systems, and backlinking just lets you write - you navigate the network structure later (you can also still use a hierarchy on top of the network structure if that's your thing). Highly recommend checking it out!
  • sevensor 6y ago
    I've had a lot of success with even less organization -- writing one giant append-only markdown file per project. Search for the thing you want and it usually comes up. Notes have a timestamp and they're in order, so it's not hard to determine whether they're still relevant.
    • cxr 6y ago
      Sounds like a blog. Maybe you should publish those notes. Most people won't find it useful. Some people might.
      • sevensor 6y ago
        I wish I could! Proprietary work pays my bills at the moment.
• ymolodtsov 6y ago
  Obsidian is one of the best apps I discovered recently and almost immediately become a core part of my workflow despite its early stage. It's a personal knowledge system built to last: proprietary formats provide advantages but end up locking you in it – especially when it's about a monthly subscription. Obsidian is built on plain Markdown files that can be accessed by any app and are unlikely to become obsolete. The files are local, though you can put them in any cloud (in the future Obsidian will provide an additional paid sync option). The devs are great and have been great at receiving feedback and adding the right features.
  • steve76 6y ago
    The best way for me to take notes was to have a leather note taking portfolio with a steno pad inside it. I would take fast notes on the right, and index on the left. Here I would rip out pages if I had to and throw them away. Then in the pocket would be a college ruled journal. I would take that out and summarize everything each day. This one I kept on my bookshelf. If I had to do it today, I would use a guillotine cutter to a page feed to a scanner to an OCR system.
• katktv 6y ago
  It's not exactly Roam, but the thing looks promising still. I like that it is offline-first and Markdown based, really feels like the crew has got some ideas in what direction to lead this project to. The bi-directional links in themselves are quite a killer feature that makes many note-taking apps like Evernote feel obsolete.
  • maurelian 6y ago
    Curious what it's missing that Roam has? I liked the Roam concept, but didn't use it for long before moving to Obsidian because of the privacy model, so I never really got a good feel for it. I still feel like I'm not getting the most out of the bi-directional link functionality everyone loves so much because I keep forgetting to create them.
    • katktv 6y ago
      I think Roam's graph is flawed, but it's much better that Obsidian's, which you can't even zoom out of. Also Conaw experiments with some neat things like to-do lists that double as backlinks, Kanban boards, Pomodoro timer (ok that's overkill but it was added recently anyway). Daily note-taking is also pretty streamlined in Roam with new notes created every day that can be referred to in a neat fashion, and perhaps also allow for SRS. Idk, Roam feels too familiar to me as well, so I doubt that I'll drop it anytime soon (we'll see how will I handle the future $15 price tag).
      • ericax 6y ago
        Interested in hearing more about the graph view! As of the latest release our graph view can be zoomed in and out, and we've rewritten it to generate the graph with WebGL rather than SVG, so it's a lot more performant for 1,000+ notes.
        • joshuahutt 6y ago
          Love it. Would also love to be able to search/filter in the graph view!
• jsplit 6y ago
  This is a great product if you want to take advantage of all the latest (and more) features in note taking + personal knowledge management software. Bi-directional linking, graph view, plugins, community themes. But the kicker is you own all your own note files in plain text (.md files) in a folder of your choosing on your computer (and can also sync your database with something like Dropbox, iCloud, etc.).
• ericax 6y ago
  Maker here, excited to be on Hacker News. Obsidian is going into public beta today! (We're also on Product Hunt, come check us out!) We made Obsidian to be your long-term second brain and personal knowledge base. As you put in more notes and make more connections, the knowledge base gets more valuable, so we think it's important that you can 100% own your data and not rely on any cloud services. We believe you second brain should work similarly to your own brain and connections are crucial in thinking. Obsidian supports [[internal links]] between your notes out of the box, and provide a powerful graph view and backlink pane to help you understand your knowledge. We also noticed how personal note-taking and knowledge management is, so we built Obsidian to be very extensible from the start, and let you put together your own workflow with plugins like daily notes and page preview as building blocks. This leads to our three fundamental values of Obsidian: 1. Local-first, Markdown plain text based; 2. Link as first-citizen. 3. As extensible as possible. Obsidian is a powerful front-end for your knowledge, like an IDE for your notes. Learn more about Obsidian's features: https://obsidian.md/features https://obsidian.md/features Read the story of the project and the team: https://obsidian.md/about https://obsidian.md/about
  • kotutku 6y ago
    Are you going to add some features for more structured data? I'm thinking about tables like in Notion where you can sort by any column. Working with Markdown tables is very clunky.
    • ericax 6y ago
      The closest thing in Markdown is probably front-matters. You're right in that Obsidian is not great for structured data right now, and for that purpose Notion or Airtable is much better.
    • O_H_E 6y ago
      That might be a good candid it feature for a plugin when the API is released. It was mentioned before in the discord.
      • 6y ago
• coconido 6y ago
  Been using this for months now and it’s my full time PKM amazing product and amazing team, highly recommend!
  • sanjayparekh 6y ago
    I'm behind you and have only been using for a few weeks but I dig it. And it comes as an AppImage too!
• joaogui1 6y ago
  I've migrated from Roam to Obsidian and it's really awesome. I have ownership of my files, there are constant updates with newer features and bug fixes and the community is really nice :)
  • programmarchy 6y ago
    I haven't gotten my invite to Roam yet, but isn't an aspect of Roam that you can network with others to aid in collaboration and discovery? Privacy is great, but for collaborative research, Obsidian's model seems to be at a disadvantage.
• jarodise 6y ago
  I've never been involved in any software testing until I stumbled upon Obsidian a couple weeks ago, been testing it with a bunch of other PKM nerds and #Roamcult refugees ever since, it's been a quite exiting and rewarding experience. Really looking forward to the plugin ecosystem, no doubt it is going to become one of the most promising PKM solutions in the future.
• justindirose 6y ago
  I did a first look run-through of Obsidian on YouTube if anyone would find it helpful. It's a top-of-the-list recommendation for personal knowledge management software in my book. Kind, helpful community around the software too. Video: https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0 https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0
• deleted 6y ago
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• jpinnix 6y ago
  For me the biggest benefit of Obsidian over several other PKM tools is that it uses local Markdown files rather than outlines/blocks. It still has bi-directional linking, and bubbles up unlinked resources like Roam. The pace and responsiveness of the developers is remarkable, and the community has been so friendly and helpful. No egos! [editing to add that I'm using iCloud for my vaults which allows for very fast syncing and the ability to edit on iOS]
  • neal_jones 6y ago
    Can you expand on the "...allows...the ability to edit on iOS"?
    • jpinnix 6y ago
      You can create Obsidian vaults wherever you would like. I created my vaults in iCloud Drive on my Mac. As these are just Markdown files, you can use any Markdown capable iOS app (that has access to the Files chooser which includes iCloud Drive) and make any edits or modifications to those files. It doesn't automatically make link suggestions while editing it in an iOS app, but once you are back on your Mac you can easily update those links or just use the suggested unlinked references tool in the side panel. Does that make sense?
• cxr 6y ago
  It looks like this isn't open source. If this is supposed to be one's second brain, please at least consider using a time-bomb FOSS license. Something like: you're permitted to use Obsidian under Apache/MIT/GPL license either 7 years after a given release, or effective immediately in the event that Obsidian shuts down.
  • ericax 6y ago
    That's an interesting idea and we'll look into it! We plan to stay in business in the long run, but if things do go wrong and we shut down, we do intend to open source the app.
    • O_H_E 6y ago
      Oooh, I have been wanting to suggest that. Thanks Erica!
    • Whil- 6y ago
      I guess we all have an incentive to make you go out of business then ;-) On a more serious note: I see no issue with software being a service and costing money if it's built on a standard that leaves the data in the owners hands and in the owners own structures. I.e. Markdown files synced using infrastructure like OneDrive/Dropbox/whatever with some nice features on top of it and a nice UI can cost whatever and no one should complain. Because if that software goes away the data is in the owners hands and in a standardized format supported by many other tools. That should be the preferred way we build software btw. And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and standardized) database tools that are user friendly, treat them in similar fashion as files by syncing with user owned Infrastructure and we might just get to the point where more rigid data structures can be used in a similar manner as what I described above for files. That future would be great.
      • ericax 6y ago
        Totally agree (except for the first sentence LOL!). Come to think of it, IDEs are exactly that: a powerful front-end for your code files. That means us programmers are not locked into any one IDE. > And to take it to the next level we should create more general purpose (and standardized) database tools that are user friendly Yep, but I wonder how we can get there. Hope someone figures it out! It's always hard to set standards.
• kotutku 6y ago
  I was going to ask about possibility to extend the editor with a VIM emulator, but I see you guys already included that, neat! I'm definitely going to give Obsidian a try.
  • ericax 6y ago
    Yes we do have a Vim mode. Thanks CodeMirror!
• deleted 6y ago
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• atfzl 6y ago
  The graph view seems cool but I don't feel it is much useful in the long term. It has a wow factor in the initial use but it is just a mingled web of links. It is like creating a graph of the www but I don't see how that could be useful.
  • programmarchy 6y ago
    If the links between node could be directed and annotated, then it'd become much more powerful, though. Similar to how TheBrain works [1] I see that the public plugin interface is a long term goal at this point [2] but it'd be amazing if plugins could expose ways to mark up graph relationships! [1] https://www.thebrain.com https://www.thebrain.com [2] https://trello.com/c/Z7qqKVXd/19-public-plugin-interface-v10 https://trello.com/c/Z7qqKVXd/19-public-plugin-interface-v10
    • atfzl 6y ago
      Still not sure if having a mind map would make it more usable. Do you feel having mind map like this would help you ?
      • programmarchy 6y ago
        Well, I don't really mean mind map; I don't think those are very useful at least not in the traditional sense. But yes, I think directed graphs would help me. Take the use case of modeling social relationships: each node is a person or company with a short bio, links can include "funded-by", "worked-with". Suddenly you have a tool that you can use to traverse professional relationships to find a connection to an investor funding a certain type of company. You can sort of do this with LinkedIn and Crunchbase, and it's possible with TheBrain although its UX is very tedious.
  • kickopotomus 6y ago
    I agree. I think in it's current state, the graph is just a neat toy but even with just the help page, it already looks like a jumbled mess. It would be nice to be able to customize the graph or at least have it present the information in a cleaner way. For instance, have the ability to separate intra/inter document links. It would also be nice to be able to view a link hierarchy by treating a single file as a root.
• justtocomment 6y ago
  Can't comment on the merits of the product itself. That in the first five minutes of this post being online, several users more or less claim that this has changed their lives in their first-ever comment on HN strikes me as a little odd however. (Yes I'm aware that this is also my first-ever comment on HN.)
  • ericax 6y ago
    We have been in private beta for a few months already, with 5000+ beta testers and a community. We did let them know that we're doing a "Show HN" today. Hope that explains things!
    • justtocomment 6y ago
      Thanks for taking the time to reply! I guess it does explain things ... Best of luck with the product, also +1 to the suggestion of an open source client from a sibling thread!
      • ericax 6y ago
        Yes! We really want people to be able to leave their knowledge bases as a legacy to their grandchildren, so we'll do everything it takes.
  • katktv 6y ago
    This got shared on their discord, but I s2g that it really is the case, given that I use a similar tool called Roam, which recently had such a big spike of attention (in part due to Thomas Frank's video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxOffM_tVHI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxOffM_tVHI) and somewhat popularized what Obsidian is kind of aiming for here (so much that Roam had to close registrations due to massive traffic influx). Plenty of ppl just swear by Roam at this point, including its creator who has big vision for a thing. Here is his white paper on a thing: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help/page/Vu1MmjinS https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help/page/Vu1MmjinS. I can attest to that as well, and given that Roam is unavailable, would suggest to try out this alternative that is pretty decent for what it does (even though Conaw (Roam's creator) does think it doesn't exactly align with what Roam really seeks to do, yk the thing) Edit: to elaborate, I am not raving about either Roam or Obsidian, I am raving about they approaches they provide, and after nearly a month of using Roam it honestly feels like a game changer to me. Solved my art block a bit as well.
• dangom 6y ago
  Looks really cool. For those who are more comfortable taking notes in org-mode rather than md, check out org-roam [1]. [1] https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam
• amflare 6y ago
  I want to like this application, and the little time I was able to spend in it certainly displayed a lot of promise. But it only worked for one day. Since then, it will not display any of the files. I know it is still connected since I can make new files and folders and see them appear in my directories, and before I tried to refresh the vault I could still see my tags. But Obsidian refuses to show anything in the file explorer, and unfortunately, that renders the product useless.
  • ericax 6y ago
    Could you please reach out on our forum or Discord so we can help you debug? Link to forum and Discord: https://obsidian.md/community https://obsidian.md/community
• deleted 6y ago
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• greenpizza13 6y ago
  The comments here are so positive, I had to try this out. After reading through all the built-in notes and customizing some shortcuts, I have to say this is some very slick software. I tried Roam before but didn't get into it, but the similarity between this and VSCode makes the barrier to entry very low. The formatting is very nice, the linking is fantastic. I am going to attempt to make this my daily driver for notes. Great work Obsidian team!
• loughnane 6y ago
  I will never again build any kind of workflow for my knowledge on top of anything that isn’t open source. 5y is a long time and 10y is an eternity for these sorts of products but its just a fraction of my working life. My own personal setup is a bunch of markdown files and it’s great, so I like that approach, but I’m very cautious about investing time for something so important in a product i don’t control.
  • ericax 6y ago
    We'll likely make a formal guarantee to open source in the case of us shutting down. Didn't realize that was a possibility, thanks for the suggestion!
    • loughnane 6y ago
      that sounds good in principle but I still wouldn't feel comfortable with it unless I was aware of similar setups that worked out well for the users. Not saying such examples aren't out there. I just am unaware of any.
    • unknown2374 6y ago
      You may want to look into the Gitlab [1] model of open source monetization, as it has strong resemblance of what you are trying to achieve with Obsidian. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#self-managed
    • prepend 6y ago
      That’s pretty cool and it’s good of you to think about the scenario. The problem is the bankruptcy court/buyer/ex-spouse/whatever may have a different preference. So you may want to set up something legally binding now when everyone is the same agreement. Could you also solve this by GPL+Commercial license for those that pay?
    • sneak 6y ago
      Standard Notes is open source (and free software) today, while still in business with a business model similar to yours. It also allows people to read, audit, and trust the crypto code, which your model does not. For people like me, that’s a hard pass.
• qppo 6y ago
  I actually get a lot of value from cloud hosted solutions, I bounce between 2-3 machines daily and multiple OS installations several times a week, and would like for my notes taken on one machine to just be there when I write notes on another machine. Another thing I need to do often is type up design docs collaboratively, we use google docs for this currently but it sucks for our use cases. And finally, I read and write a lot of GH wiki pages and various markdown notes in git repos for open source collaboration, which isn't really helpful for cross referencing information. Is there any way to do this with obsidian? I'm all for owning my data but tbh, a lot of the powerful features you demonstrate only make sense for me if I can throw my data up on a server and make it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection.
  • mjedmonds 6y ago
    Definitely can use across computers using a cloud sync provider (dropbox, etc). You can also have multiple vaults, and if you want to collaborate, you can share that vault with someone. Realtime collaboration may be a bit dangerous with syncing over a cloud provider. They are also planning a subscription with note hosting - perhaps that will include some form of collaboration. If you put all of your GH wiki pages into a single vault, that may be a solution (though I don't think it's possible to create a solution to your setup in the most general setting - you'd have to be able to link to any file on your OS). But you can throw your data up on a server and make it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection
  • mackrevinack 6y ago
    there's always the option of syncthing + a vps (or network drive or raspberry pi if you have one). i use it with a synology network drive myself and would find it hard going back a cloud storage due to the slow speeds you get when files have to go across the country and back again
  • kixiQu 6y ago
    It sounds like you want either something backed by a cloud drive with local installs of the software, or something more like a traditional wiki server with a markdown plugin.
• jcun4128 6y ago
  I'm glad the demand exists for this/it's a thing, I've made several of my own so that's cool other people make similar tools
• deleted 6y ago
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• sdedovic 6y ago
  My two biggest issues, skimming the website: - this does not seem to be open source or free-as-in-speech. That worries me - especially when it comes to longevity. It's the reason I wouldn't use this product if it was by Google. - i don't see an easy way to export my data in case I would like to migrate to a different service. That being said I am definitely going to try it out and see what it does for me! There is definitely a gap in knowlege-mapping software in my life
  • mjedmonds 6y ago
    You don't need to export your data. Your data is stored in plaintext markdown files on your machine. So if it does shut down, you still have all of your content in a format that can be readily read by many, many editors
    • Horita 6y ago
      I dont think many can read properly
      • ahel 6y ago
        it's just markdown and [[two way links]]
  • galoisscobi 6y ago
    As for your second point, when I tried it out, it just used a local directory that it puts all the markdown files in. I think that should work fine.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • marchenko 6y ago
    What convinced me to give Obsidian a twirl is that there's essentially no danger of sunk costs: I already store my notes as markdown files in a local folder synced via cloud service between browsers and mobile, and accessed via IDEs/plaintext editors. Obsidian merely replaces the IDE as an access/manipulation point. The only 'cost', so to speak, is adding bidirectional link syntax, which I suspect is soon to become a common standard. I am curious to see what happens when they open up their developer API, as the Obsidian PKM community is quite active.
• benrbray 6y ago
  This looks great! Good timing too, since Roam has recently closed its doors to new signups. I've been looking for a new notetaking / PKM / Markdown app recently, but unfortunately all apps out there fall short in at least one of the following criteria: * bidirectional [[wiki links]] * support for both inline and display math * customizable themes / CSS * rich formatting beyond markdown (e.g. wrap content in <div> tags with custom formatting--useful for e.g. placing a box around text, etc.) * WYSIWYG (crucial for documents with tons of math and rich formatting as above) including wysiwyg editing of tables Tools I've tried that come close but aren't quite good enough: * Jupyter Lab / Notebooks * Typora * Roam * OneNote (just let me write $\LaTeX$ math!) It's actually been quite frustrating. because some apps are soooo close to what I need, but they're closed-source so I'm powerless to make the small improvements I need. My current workflow for notetaking uses a pretty suboptimal combination of Overleaf, Typora, and OneNote. I'd really like to be able to replace all three with a single tool. At the moment, the only thing that comes close is a Chrome tab with document.designMode="on". To the Obsidian team: Please add inline math support and consider WYSWIG!
  • ericax 6y ago
    Inline math is coming very soon! WYSIWYG unfortunately will take a while to get right, but we'll get there. Give Obsidian a try and let us know what you think! :)
    • codezero 6y ago
      You didn't ask for advice, so feel free not to take it - but you should consider using a pre-baked editing solution like Quill.js or something similar. Rich text serialization is its own problem and you shouldn't waste your development time on it :)
      • FreezerburnV 6y ago
        As someone who was experimenting with text editing in a browser recently: I could not find any open source (non-commercial expensive license) text editors that could actually handle workloads I cared about. (and which are not also specialized on code, such as Ace Editor) While Quill (and friends) definitely provide some very nice functionality, the moment I tried to do something like shove a full novel into one, not only did it take quite a while to actually load that text, but it took 500ms+ to insert single characters. There is a serious lack of an open source text editing library for Javascript that can handle any amount of characters without completely bogging down. I was actually seriously impressed that I was able to take a huge amount of text and shove it into Obsidian and the UI stayed completely smooth the entire time. Props to the Obsidian devs for that!
• itsspring 6y ago
  I was about to spend $25 for a one-time/lifetime license, until I read your license. No commercial or professional use? I'm not paying $50/yr for that sorry. A yearly fee for this is unrealistic and is way more expensive than other products like Quiver or SimpleMind which offers a lifetime product
  • Veen 6y ago
    It is quite an odd choice. It makes sense to tier based on features, but tiers based on how or when people use an app is bizarre. Am I supposed to monitor myself so I don't read a note in Obsidian while I'm doing commercial writing work? (Also, their license page could do with some proofreading)
    • ericax 6y ago
      The idea is that if you're creating value with Obsidian, your employer should expense that, ideally it shouldn't impact you financially. If you're working for a non-profit for example, it's all free. > (Also, their license page could do with some proofreading) Interested to hear more! We did a few rounds of proofreading, did you find any typos?
      • Veen 6y ago
        That doesn’t work for freelancers.
      • itsspring 6y ago
        > your employer should expense that, ideally it shouldn't impact you financially. You're really limiting your userbase (customer pool) here by expecting only enterprise users. Many people here are freelance designers, students with part-time jobs, researchers writing for-profit books, or they work for themselves. Most employers don't allow expenses for note-taking apps. I would encourage you to adopt this pricing model: https://simplemind.eu/features-pricing/ https://simplemind.eu/features-pricing/ It looks cool, but I won't buy it until it's a lifetime license. Edit: Sorry that this came out overly-negative. It's a beautiful product, congrats on launching it!
• rrherr 6y ago
  What I'm looking for: 1st priority: macOS & iOS apps that always sync, open FAST, and look clean, to enter new notes with no friction. Like Bear (which I currently use) and Simplenote (which I used to use). 2nd priority: Bi-directional links. Like Roam and Obsidian. Transclusion. Like Roam (and Obsidian?) I'm willing to pay up to $15/month. Like Roam. Are there any solutions that give all of the above?
  • kilroy123 6y ago
    I 100% agree. I've been tempted to migrate from Typora + Joplin to bear app. Do you think it's worth it?
    • rrherr 6y ago
      I love Bear! Here are the only drawbacks I see: - Only available for macOS & iOS. - Not free if you need sync. But it's only $1.49/month! I'd rather pay for a tool because then it's more likely to last. - Has [[one-way links]] but not two-way, so I feel some FOMO when I see people getting so excited about Roam Research. If you migrate: Go to Preferences and turn on Markdown compatibility mode. Then use Import Notes to read all your files from Typora & Joplin.
      • Eugeleo 6y ago
        I think Andy Matuschak has some utility that automatically inserts the “Pages linking to here” into a mardkown document. Not sure if it could be used for Bear, but you might check it out.
  • aroberge 6y ago
    I just joined the beta last week. I keep my notes as md files in a private github repo. I just "loaded" the folder in obsidian and it just worked. I imagine that any editor that you can use with your own storage place would work. Edit: Someone else mentioned " ... editing to add that I'm using iCloud for my vaults which allows for very fast syncing and the ability to edit on iOS".
  • 6y ago
• bravura 6y ago
  How do I browse and edit my notes when I’m on mobile? Desktop only is a non starter for actually going all-in on a notes solution.
  • O_H_E 6y ago
    A mobile version is planned in the long term. Your notes are in plain markdown files though, so you can use any markdown editor your phone supports. I have seen 1Writer (ios) and Markor (Android) recommended a lot.
  • pps 6y ago
    https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-do-i-work-with-obsidian-on-mobile/471 https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-do-i-work-with-obsidian-on-m...
• christiansakai 6y ago
  Nothing is forever. Especially if it is not free. Especially if it is not open source. If personal use is free forever but not open source, how am I supposed to believe that it will be free forever? Color me skeptical.
  • bachmeier 6y ago
    All your data is in text format. It's a desktop app, so you don't really lose it, but if for some reason it disappears and your installed app stops working, all your data is already in a directory on your computer.
    • christiansakai 6y ago
      I mean, the data is the least I'm concerned about. It is the app itself and the way it works that it tightly integrated to my workflow. In the case it shuts down, there's now way I'll spend my time redoing my workflow or grep stuffs over all now already scattered digital documents.
      • ancientworldnow 6y ago
        It's a desktop app. If Obsidian shuts down the app will continue to work as long as your OS can run electron apps. If it doesn't work, they're just markdown files a million other apps can handle.
  • ericax 6y ago
    I'm also a skeptic. Although nothing is forever, we want to get closer to forever than all the other note-taking apps. We'll likely make a formal guarantee to open source in the case of us shutting down. Didn't realize that was a possibility until today.
    • christiansakai 6y ago
      How would you guarantee that your guarantee is guaranteed? (not a troll question even though the wording seems to imply so)
• O_H_E 6y ago
  A few amazing things the site is not doing justice yet - Everything transclusion: just like you can show images in Github-MD, obsidian allows you to view PDF, Audio, or even other notes inside a note. - Header-level linking: You can link a note using [[note_name##sub_heading]]. Therefor, you can embedded a section of a note inside another. - CSS modding is AMAZING. The community is getting creative with modding obsidian to fit different workflows. From Andy Matuschak mode[1][2] to minimalist theme[3]. [1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/andy-matuschak-mode-v2/170 https://forum.obsidian.md/t/andy-matuschak-mode-v2/170 [2] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes [3] https://github.com/kmaasrud/clean-theme-obsidian https://github.com/kmaasrud/clean-theme-obsidian
• elric 6y ago
  I'm sure it's intended to look nice, but that website is so dark I can barely read it. I hope the application ships with a readable theme? From what I can make out, it seems to draw some inspiration from zettelkasten tools, which looks promising at least.
  • ubercow13 6y ago
    It seems to support custom CSS and there are a few user-submitted themes you can choose from
• alexktz 6y ago
  I tried out Obsidian in the closed beta and also Roam Research before ending up learning org-roam as part of org-mode in emacs. I won't deny there is a heck of a learning curve with org-mode but once you make the jump I doubt you'll ever look back.
• JSavageOne 6y ago
  Would be nice to see a live example, I can't tell from the website what this actually does or how it would be useful to me
  • ericax 6y ago
    Sorry but because it works on a local folder, online demo is unrealistic. I would recommend installing, opening an empty folder, and going to Settings - Help to grab our hel & demo folder to play around with it and get a feel.
    • JSavageOne 6y ago
      You could have a video demoing it on your landing page. Most site visitors aren't going to take the time to install a random desktop application and toy with it just to see if it might be something they find useful. Maybe you're ok with that, just giving you my advice if you want to increase usership.
• mleonard 6y ago
  Very interesting I'm going to try it out. What's the app written in? It has a VSCode feel to it (which is great!)... Any chance it's built in typescript like VSCode too? I'd love to write a JavaScript extension or two to customise it in the future if that's the case. Can you share what it's built with and what the future extensions will need to be built with? Thanks!
  • ymolodtsov 6y ago
    It's Typescript.
  • ericax 6y ago
    Yes, it's TypeScript and we're loving it! :)
• m-p-3 6y ago
  Jeez, 50$/user/year for commercial use?! That's almost as expensive as G Suite.
• BoysenberryPi 6y ago
  I was using Obsidian in the beta and it's pretty great but I stopped using it when the licenses were released. I like the product and I'd like to support it but is quite the leap from $25 one time fee to $50 a year for commercial especially since I'll be using it for side projects alone. Getting a proper commercial license is a must for CYA reasons and I don't see myself paying $50 a year for it. Also, the $25 catalyst license seems odd to me. It's called a license but you get a Discord badge and nothing else really changes from the personal license. I would reconsider how these are structured.
• casmith 6y ago
  Would be great if this were a homebrew cask
• yt-sdb 6y ago
  Can anyone who uses cross-referencing speak to the benefits? I take notes using a simple web server-based Markdown editor and organize them with directories. I link between files occasionally using URLs. Does quick-linking between files or graph views really help? Any examples?
  • ymolodtsov 6y ago
    I think the Daily Note is the best example here, in both Obsidian and Roam. It makes it easy to jot down quick notes about the things you read/learned without thinking too much where to put it. You just highlight a few key words you find reasonable and then you'd be able to find that piece using any of them and then follow the graph around. Now instead of just reading articles in Pocket I always take quick notes and save the most important parts for me.
• kepano 6y ago
  Obsidian is crazy good for how new it is. And the team is moving extremely fast. It seems like they really know what they want out of this product. I've tried dozens of knowledge management tools and settled on TiddlyWiki a couple years ago. It took a lot of customization to get anywhere close as useable as Obsidian is out of the box. Here's what I love about Obsidian: - Local files, syncs via iCloud/Dropbox/etc makes it future proof - Markdown with [[ ]]] bidirectional links and - [ ] checklists. - Automatically updates all old links if you rename a file(!) - Compatible with 1Writer on iOS - Really nice keyboard shortcuts - Runs as its own app (in a wrapper), but can be styled via custom CSS - Automatically parses external URLs (don't necessarily need to use the markdown format for simple .com URLs) - Great editing experience, e.g. auto indenting bullets - Autocomplete for everything (tags, linked pages) - Lots of extra nice touches like graph view and the pane system to open multiple files at once
  • kixiQu 6y ago
    Yup, I've got my Tiddlywiki in a place where the portability makes me not itch to try this (sort of the opposite of local-first; a raspberry pi in the sky holds my Markdown files) but this seems like it will be something like an IDE for markdown notes, which is very, very cool.
• ryantuck 6y ago
  This is sweet. I've been building and working in a markdown-based zettelkasten locally for a while, and this does provide the added killer benefits of the graph visualizer and pretty-preview functionality that I'm currently missing in the terminal. Nice job, looking forward to playing around with it!
• BasilPH 6y ago
  I've been using The Archive (https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/) to browse a knowledge graph of markdown files i.e. a Zettelkasten. It's one-time $19 and worth every penny. I use it to browse my notes. There is a shortcut to open them in VIM. It's powerful and simple. Shameless plug: I created a CLI tool to visualize a set of linked markdown files, print stats, and display orphans. See https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel https://github.com/BasilPH/vizel
• alexmingoia 6y ago
  For the people complaining it’s not open source: Why does that matter ? It’s not like your markdown disappears if they do. You would just have to write software or purchase another software with the same conventions.
  • O_H_E 6y ago
    Since Obsidian is one-time purchase and offline-first, you would continue to use it as you were. Them going down should only affect future updates. Plus you would be able to continue writing plugins (when the API is released) to extend it if you want.
  • harritaylor 6y ago
    Yeah, I’m totally confused by this. It’s not like the data is in a mega proprietary format, it’s all valid GitHub markdown apart from the back linking, which would probably be relatively easy to reimplement if the company went out of business. I see org-mode being promoted as a viable alternative but it’s personally been a significant pain in the arse getting org files to being valid markdown. The beauty of obsidian IMO is that the “backend” is just Plain text markdown files organised in folders.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • kixiQu 6y ago
    It's a little overblown, sure--but I do think that for the super technical power users especially, people like to invest in getting their setup tweaked just right, including all the UX details. This then creates anxiety over the risk to all that time invested. I don't want to learn and rejigger a full set of power user keyboard shortcuts for an app that might disappear, goes the thinking. In addition, open source often means further tweaks are possible (though it sounds like they're trying to maintain extensibility so this may be less of a big deal).
  • milofeynman 6y ago
    Joplin is open source and basically the same application minus the linked graph. For people complaining, use that. I do.
• shampto3 6y ago
  I've been using Obsidian for the past week. Here are my thoughts: I love that this is basically just markdown with wiki links. I'm not too concerned about Obsidian going out of business and my notes not being useful anymore. Contrast that with Notion (which is great in many other ways), where I store my data on their cloud and even though I can export to markdown not everything is actually markdown (e.g. tables) so they just put a link to their site instead. I also love that since this is locally stored, I have control of how I store my data. I have a private git repo, and just occasionally commit and push my changes. I wish it were open source, that way I could feel better about the wiki links being useless if they go out of business. It's not a blocker for me though, since my notes are fairly straightforward and I mostly just use the links for table of contents files. The downside of being locally stored is that it isn't cross-device capable. This limits me when I'm taking notes on my iPad. That said, I don't take many notes on my iPad so if I need to I can just manually transfer my notes when I get back to my computer. I can understand though that this would a be a show stopper for some people. Overall, this solution works for me. I have high hopes that it will continue to improve and become even better than it is now. Thanks to the team for the hard work!
  • xapata 6y ago
    I store the notes in Dropbox and use iA on my mobile. Works well enough.
    • rcarr 6y ago
      I can confirm that both iA writer and 1Writer work great as mobile solutions. 1Writer allows for following links. Both allow you to search through all your notes quickly, though there's probably a tiny bit less friction with iA than 1Writer.
    • j_chodorowicz 6y ago
      You can also keep notes in git, sync them using Working Copy and use IA Writer.
• lmayliffe 6y ago
  It's freaking me out that Obsidian is capitalized most places but in the MacOS client in the tool bar, it's: Hide obsidian Quit obsidian
  • ericax 6y ago
    Oops, will fix! Good catch!
• tevino 6y ago
  Timestamp-based ID is missing the point of Zettelkasten IMHO, here's an opinionated approach to a digital Zettelkasten: https://www.tevinzhang.com/digital-zettelkasten/ https://www.tevinzhang.com/digital-zettelkasten/
• Hammershaft 6y ago
  This is awesome! great work! I'm in the process of switching from Roam.
• drcongo 6y ago
  OK, I love this already. I have a couple of feature requests though. 1. Allow scrolling past the bottom of the document - see the way Sublime Text and a lot of code editors do this. I find it _really_ uncomfortable writing with my current line anchored to the bottom of the screen. 2. Allow some (all?) of these markdown extensions [1] - our current knowledge base docs make heavy use of them, and a few are pretty critical for technical docs. [1] https://facelessuser.github.io/pymdown-extensions/ https://facelessuser.github.io/pymdown-extensions/
• supersrdjan 6y ago
  Looks great. Would be amazing if I could use it as an alternative frontend for my vimwiki, which is also markdown. Only thing missing is that links like these should work: [anchor](path) As that's the way vimwiki generates them :)
  • jibcage 6y ago
    +1 for vimwiki! As a matter of fact, you can get almost all of these features with vimwiki, minus the fancy graph visualization. Plus, it's open source :)
• rodneyzeng 6y ago
  Some comments after testing it for the first time: I am looking for alternatives of Typora since it is not open sourced. Obsidian is new and close to it (same feature to paste image from system clipboard) but still needs more work - 1. Font size and equation font size are not easily configured. 2. Inline Latex is not supported yet. 3. Equation numbering are not supported yet And it is not open sourced either. Good work and keep going!
  • mackrevinack 6y ago
    have you looked at marktext? I think that's fairly close to typora, but i hasn't used typora much so I could be wrong
• zachguo 6y ago
  If you don't need to render your notes as a graph, try VSNote out, or simply write markdown-based notes in your favorite editor and store them in your dropbox. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=patricklee.vsnotes https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=patrickl...
• ComodoHacker 6y ago
  Local Markdown files are nice. Can it also use my local browser, instead of bloating my system with yet another Electron instance?
• bigbossman 6y ago
  Obsidian is awesome. I moved over from Roam and never looked back.
• StonyRhetoric 6y ago
  This is amazing - I have a homebrew version of this - markdown only, with some scripts to wire-up the links, relying on unique file names. This is miles better that what I have, and I look forward to using it. A feature request - mermaid JS support please! This would allow me to import my ~3k existing markdown files without modification.
• rement 6y ago
  I'm considering using this but I'm having the same issue many others are with Obsidian itself being closed source. To any obsidian employers or stakeholders have you thought of an open core model for Obsidian? Open core would help any cautious users and give your community the ability to help maintain your product.
• tobias2014 6y ago
  Am I the only one that has never before stumbled upon AppImage or Snap? I had to "google" to see that it's basically just chmod +x. I suppose when the appimage doesn't work out of the box the user is knowledgeable enough to figure out what to do with it anyway.
• the_mango 6y ago
  I have a feeling I found a gem
• _virtu 6y ago
  Self promotion: I maintain an open source visual studio code plugin that organizes plaintext (md, tex, html you name it) files with a simple directive `@nested-tags: tag1, some/hierarchy/you/want`. I have been pretty lazy in regards to actively adding features to it though. I do have plans on adding a graph based visualization and to add more detailed views to simplify workflow. If you're interested in obsidian but don't want to be locked in, check it out. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-nested-tags.vscode-nested-tags https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscode-n...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• kn8 6y ago
  Hm.. I opened Obsidian. Double clicked the title bar to make it not full screen (on a Mac), now it's not visible anywhere. It's as if the window is 0 width somewhere on my screen..
  • ericax 6y ago
    Is it possible for you to join our Discord so that we can help you?
• logicprog 6y ago
  I've been using a Fandom Wiki [1] to hold my world-building notes, since I couldn't really find anything better. It's pretty annoying though, I might have to really think about using this instead. Although, getting my work out of the Wiki might be annoying. [1]: http://ceremony-universe.fandom.com/ http://ceremony-universe.fandom.com/
  • logicprog 6y ago
    Downloaded Obsidian and moved my notes (and plot outline too, since it supports interactive task lists!!) over, and man this thing is wonderful. Good job!
• gexla 6y ago
  How does this compare to Trilium? Looks similar. https://github.com/zadam/trilium https://github.com/zadam/trilium
  • unqueued 6y ago
    Trilium is really cool, I especially like its note cloning feature. The thing that held me back was the back-end it uses.
    • luckman212 6y ago
      Can you elaborate on this? What is the backend used and why is it problematic?
• jtbayly 6y ago
  Can somebody help me understand something about Markdown and Obsidian? Why would I ever want an edit mode and a preview mode while taking notes? Don't I want to be able to both see my note and edit it at any time? I mean, I guess I could just ignore preview mode if the edit mode actually allowed me to see all of the content of my note, but it doesn't. Images are only visible in preview mode. So all the talk about transclusion seems dumb to me. I can't see jack unless I decide to stop working and start viewing. I just don't get it. Is this really what people do? Switch back and forth between editing and viewing all the time? Or perhaps they just decide to put all the content of the note on-screen twice? But why would I ever want to look at the same content twice? We're not talking about folding, so I can see two different places in the same note. We're talking viewing the exact same content twice, cutting my usable screen real estate in half for displaying the content of my note. So I have 50% of the context I could have... And don't even get me started about how synchronized scrolling is impossible in this view if you use images in your note. I feel like I must be taking crazy pills, because everybody seems to love using markdown, and I really want to like it, too. I know the benefits of plaintext. But I just don't get making that sort of usability sacrifice.
  • ericax 6y ago
    We're working on WYSIWYG but it's not an easy problem. Eventually we want editing to feel comfortable to everyone! :)
    • jtbayly 6y ago
      That's good news for me, but apparently a lot of people don't feel the need for it. I'm still confused why. In general, are people switching modes or doing side-by-side or what?
      • warranty 6y ago
        I like side by side. Especially when I am linking pictures and or creating blocks and linking pdf .. I can write in left pane without those pictures blocks and pdfs taking space in left pane and shows up on right pane.
• arduinomancer 6y ago
  I feel like I've seen a lot of similar apps like this posted to HN but as usual the main blocker for me is no mobile support. A personal knowledge-base is a great idea but you need to be able to easily reference it wherever you are. If I had a second brain I wouldn't leave it at home ;). I mostly use Notion and just as an example say you're at the mechanic and they say "hey you got the VIN for your car handy?" I pop open notion and its right there.
  • kixiQu 6y ago
    I use Tiddlywiki 5's node server to host my wiki. I can use it on anything that can take my Yubikey :)
  • milofeynman 6y ago
    Joplin has mobile-support and is very similar to this app.
• kmtrowbr 6y ago
  I have wanted an app like this for so long -- I love it just hooking into a local folder of markdown files, and making editing and navigating those files better. Little touches like, prepending the date in, sort order format, e.g. 2020-05-27 at the beginning of new files, for things like that, it's like you're reading my brain. Basically, in order to win me over, you're competing with JetBrains. JetBrains is so good, so wired into my brain, they have good Markdown support, they just miss the little touches such as the easy linking and backlinking. But primarily when I get into my giant collection of notes, I need to be able to find things very quickly -- this means navigating via keyboard shortcuts and having very rich file management, as well as close integration with the OS. Things this doesn't have: * Really good keyboard navigation in the file pane, using the arrow keys. For example if I navigate down to a folder, then I want to be able to press the right key to open the folder and navigate into the folder. This doesn't work, so I have to open the folder using the mouse. * It's great that you have the [[quick links]] -- but why not work really hard to make the regular inter-linking work? E.g. if I have [my link](./my-file.md), that should work too, but it doesn't. * Say I find a file, and I want to open it up in the finder. JetBrains has a right-click action to "Open in enclosing folder" and it pops up the Finder. Something like that acknowledges that a tool is a part of an ecosystem & provides an "escape hatch" to interact with the files in another way. Overall this is the best attempt I have found. I will spend more time with it trying to organize my notes using your excellent inter-linking features. Git repo of markdown files is the best way I have found to keep notes. A game changing tool to to make that even more awesome will come along one day -- you are on the path. Thank you for your work.
  • milofeynman 6y ago
    I use Joplin which is similar to this, and it has a hotkey, Ctrl-E I think, which opens the external editor of your choice
• joyceschan 6y ago
  @ericax, Thanks for this product. I have a lot of notes in Jupyter notebooks that contain chunks of markdown. Would be great if your product works with Jupyter notebooks.
• SimianLogic2 6y ago
  This is basically how I use notion now -- mostly "code blocks" full of Markdown. The split panes look really impressive. This is definitely worth keeping an eye on if I ever decide to bail on Notion (which just went free).
• karakanb 6y ago
  Genuine question: what exactly are you taking notes of? I have tried using tools like this before, but in all of my attempts I have found that I actually don't have much to take notes for; for example, I have never felt like "I wish I had taken notes of this", because I feel like any kind of search engine is doing this on a much larger scale, practically for combined notes of millions of people in a much efficient way than I probably could ever do. I am genuinely asking this to learn more about and maybe adopt note-taking as a habit, any input is appreciated.
  • ergl 6y ago
    At work: I type up all the notes about the papers I read, meeting minutes, list of tasks, and also me wondering "out loud" about bugs, design notes, etc. For personal use: I write down notes about articles I read, copy-paste some quotes and write my personal thoughts around them.
  • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Any time you spend more than a few minutes solving any problem, note how you did it. For example, I have a full log of what I did to set up my Hackintosh, or code snippets on how to use some library or how to fix when my PC doesn’t recognize the Arduino etc. This instantly fixes any situations where you run into the same problem again but you don’t remember the details how you solved it. At least to me, that happens quite a lot. Your future self will thank you.
  • iliekcomputers 6y ago
    I have found taking notes to be very helpful for a sort of spaced repetition. It helps me retain more from the books / articles I read. The main benefit that I'm trying to get is well explained in one of Andy Matuschak's notes. [0] [0]: https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z6UDDkom8Aifg6mLdjT1sPtbMBweCmpyTwmJT https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z6UDDkom8Aifg6mLdjT1sPtbMBwe...
  • kixiQu 6y ago
    * random lists (e.g., things to do, books to read, movies on netflix) * personal CMS (e.g., mailing addresses, the name of so-and-so's boyfriend, etc. etc.) * bookmarked articles with quotes or summaries (e.g., I read lots of things like https://psyche.co/ideas/a-touch-of-absurdity-can-help-to-wrap-your-mind-around-reality https://psyche.co/ideas/a-touch-of-absurdity-can-help-to-wra... but since the idea that absurdity can push people towards the familiar is very disheartening to me, and therefore has interesting implications for my ideas, I'm taking notes on it) * "ruby case statement syntax" (don't laugh, I switch languages a lot at work, and it's always faster to pull up the neat little answer I wrote myself) * drafts of things like blog posts * little fragments of ideas that I might or might not want to turn into blog posts * journaling (especially nice when linked to entries for people mentioned) * freewriting on anything I should probably be seeing a therapist for * personal project documentation (e.g. install commands for self-hosted nonsense) It's never "I wish I had taken notes of this" exactly, but more a combination of being able to pull up some fact /information/resource, draft things with lots of interlinked connections, or write just about anything down with connections to other things (like my journal entries linked to people they mention). In addition, the process of writing notes means you remember more even if you never consult the notes you wrote, so it's not wasted even in that case.
• killface 6y ago
  I've been taking notes in Markdown for years. Your search and linking functionality to make it a great hybrid nodes-wiki system is fantastic. I'm gonna give this one the 'ol college try. It seems to hit my sweet spots.
• colinjoy 6y ago
  Sad to see that the only way to use it for work related note taking is a subscription. I know a lot of people will just ignore the license and happily use the personal or catalyst version, but I wish there was something in between the $0 one time fee and perpetual rent payment. I’ll pass. https://obsidian.md/pricing https://obsidian.md/pricing
• kitplummer 6y ago
  Anyone know if this thing has a web-clipper plugin?
  • ericax 6y ago
    You can use any web clipper extension that can turn HTML pages to Markdown files. Our community made this: https://github.com/deathau/markdown-clipper https://github.com/deathau/markdown-clipper
• dvt 6y ago
  Is there any reason why so many Electron apps (this one included) don't disable "Ctrl-Shift-I" to bring up the Chrome developer tools when they distribute their binary? It's trivially done with `devTools: false` in the main window bootstrap code. It's kind of a pet peeve and just seems lazy.
  • fenwick67 6y ago
    I mean... why should they?
  • ericax 6y ago
    We don't want to prevent people from looking at the DOM to make custom CSS: https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian https://github.com/kmaasrud/awesome-obsidian It also makes it easy to debug issues with users since we're still in beta.
    • dvt 6y ago
      This is a fair point, congrats on your launch!
• tonyhb 6y ago
  A fork of visual studio to only work with .md files, with an NPM plugin to render markdown as a preview, and pull out links between the files as a D3 map. :thinking-face: I'm not sure about this one. Maybe for others, but not the UI for me. Good luck to you all, in any case!
  • ericax 6y ago
    Thanks! For anyone who's curious, not a fork and we wrote most of the core code from scratch.
• flarg 6y ago
  Isn't this basically a very slightly slicker version of Zim desktop wiki? Zim is based on plain text files, has links, to-dos, backlink pane etc. Oh, and it's Foss.
• hkh28 6y ago
  As several people have pointed out, both the "Personal" and "Catalyst" licenses are intended for personal use only, making this quite an expensive product should I want to use it for work as well. But in the full license text, there seems to be an even more problematic phrasing: > The use of OBSIDIAN for the exercise of your own trade or profession (...) does not qualify as personal use. I would interpret this to mean that I as a developer can not use this to exercise the "trade" of software development. That would in turn mean that I can not use this to make notes of stuff I learn on my own time, if it is related to software development. I would imagine most people not caring about this kind of license limitation, but it would be interesting if it was intended this way, or if this is just me being bad at licenses.
  • ddrdrck_ 6y ago
    Commercial license is 50$ per year. Not even 5 bucks per month. I do not think this qualifies as "expensive", especially if you intend to use it for work related stuff
    • fao_ 6y ago
      I mean, if you're in a software job, sure. But in total for a year, it's almost 1 month worth of rent in the city that's close to me.
      • Waterluvian 6y ago
        Rent is $50 a month?
        • fao_ 6y ago
          whups! corrected
          • Aeolun 6y ago
            I don’t think the message really changed?
• microcolonel 6y ago
  If you use org-mode, do you really need more than one file?
• haolez 6y ago
  What's the team sharing story here? Can I share a folder with other people and collaborate?
• KingMachiavelli 6y ago
  Seems like a more polished version of the Zettelkasten-based system "Neuron". [1] I suppose there are benefits having a dedicated editor and viewer but I kind of like the simplicity of Neuron. Although I will admit that install it can be a pain since it depends on having the Nix package manager setup. [1] https://neuron.zettel.page/ https://neuron.zettel.page/
• dpc_pw 6y ago
  I've been recently working on something similar (but much more primitive) https://github.com/dpc/tagwiki https://github.com/dpc/tagwiki if anyone is interested. It's an async/await Rust project too, which might be interesting to some.
• slightwinder 6y ago
  Why is it that most of this apps are all following the same road feature-road? Some markup-language and a preview or a low richtext-mode and some simple filesystem-like organisation or even worse. The better ones have sometimes ability for internal linking or nowadays alternate views like graphs. More and more comes some basic plugin-support, mostly for editing or simple stuff, but hardly more. How is it that none of them are offering advanced feature for automation? Or mature levels of organisations? Or some serious interface-ability?
  • tin7in 6y ago
    Could you elaborate what you have in mind as automation? Context: I'm working on a document editor that can resurface relevant information across different sources (docs, notes, emails,chats) while writing a document.
    • slightwinder 6y ago
      Notes in an application are just semi-structured databases. There is the structure of how they are saved, how they relate, but also the data they contain. Apps could offer ways to quer notes by certain constrains, like any other database, but also tools to parse the content into a generic data-structure and then have views to work on them manual or programatic. Keyword for this would be DOM and structured editing. Usually a document has an internal structure to some degree, like header and body, different paragraphs, sentences and blocks, etc. For some welldefinend formats like there is the DOM (socument object model), but this is something limited to specific formats and purpose. Why not give people thenability ro parae data as they which and then have tools working on it manuel or programatic? Personally I use some ancient outliner for notes which has a very open scripting-support. It's really nasty garbage and quite limited. But it gives me a tree which is kind of a database and the ability to run scripts over the whole tree and manipulate individual notes. I use this to import documents or whole folders, break it into pieces, transform the tree by hand or with a script and then export the document again. This is very handy, especially the ability to explore the structure and change by hand when neccessary. For notes this is helpful because I can mass-change them, add properties, change content as I wish and so on. Though, this is also quite limited because at the end its just an outline with a text-view, not more UI. And alls automation must be written by myself. A proper community could biold new tools, views, parsers, exporters and other automations. But for some reason, automation is hardly used in this space. Emacs org-mode is the only working in that area. But well, it's, emacs..
• leke 6y ago
  It's nice that it's on my local machine. I can always make backups on github.
• bnlxbnlx 6y ago
  I wonder how this could be connected to some flash card system. I've been using anki for some months now to help me rememer things better (apps on linux, iOS and OSX and syncing via ankiweb). My notes are not linked so far as I have been looking for a solution that allows me keep all my notes in plain markdown files while linking them. I'm syncing the md files across all my devices via a self-hosted rpi-nextcloud and I want to be able to add new notes through my mobile. So obsidian.md looks like a good fit for me, I will definitely give it a try. Thanks for putting this together, erica & shida! However, I want to transfer as much of my second brain into my first brain, by actually memorizing linked notes. So the plugin 'open a random note' (https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0?t=547 https://youtu.be/cFYaWC_86W0?t=547) goes a bit this way, but to optimize memorization it would need some system that makes use of spaced repetition and active recall like anki. Anyone, ideas? Or do you actually have plans that go that direction, erica?
  • ericax 6y ago
    This is a popular plugin idea right now, and I personally like it. Definitely not part of the core app though. Markdown has definition lists that can serve as front and back of the cards (https://www.markdownguide.org/extended-syntax/#definition-lists https://www.markdownguide.org/extended-syntax/#definition-li...), not as advanced as Anki but should suffice in most cases.
  • mfranzs 6y ago
    Although it's not markdown based, we're building https://www.remnote.io/ https://www.remnote.io/ for this purpose; it lets you take hierarchical, nonlinear, linked notes and internalize them with spaced repetition.
    • mandliya 6y ago
      +1 for remnote! I really love its research based spaced repetition functionality!
  • synista 6y ago
    I saw Anki integration mentioned recently on the TiddlyWiki boards. TiddlyWiki was also mentioned elsewhere here. It can technically do a lot of the things Obsidian/Roam can with modifications. Stroll and Drift are examples of TiddlyWiki variants. I've been trying them out, there's a bit of a learning curve. Look it up on Google Groups.
• tinktank 6y ago
  This is a great idea.
• tsp 6y ago
  Not very impressed with this, because: - Rendering of files takes quite long (a couple of seconds) - Interface looks dated - Graph view is not very usable, it just shows a bunch of words. No idea how to get any meaning out of this. - Backlinks did not update in my test Typora [0], another markdown editor is light-years ahead with the basic features – being able to edit markdown files and search through them all at once. I appreciate the competition, tho. Good to have another option. The price is quite high for such an editor in my opinion. More polished note-taking apps like Bear [2] or Notion [3] https://www.notion.so/ https://www.notion.so/ are even cheaper. They are proprietary, so not using markdown files directly, but I think it is fair to compare them anyways. [0]: https://typora.io/ https://typora.io/ [1]: https://bear.app/ https://bear.app/ [2]: https://notion.so https://notion.so
  • ericax 6y ago
    Hi there! It certainly doesn't sound normal for the app to take a few seconds to open files. Would you join our community to give us a chance to debug the issue? https://obsidian.md/community https://obsidian.md/community We're still currently in beta so we'd really appreciate all the help we can get to polish any hiccups in the app. As for the editing experience, we're only about 3 months in so there's a lot of catching up to do, and Typora-level editing experience is something we're shooting for.
• agambrahma 6y ago
  Probably worth mentioning that if you're looking for "all this and more", try out Tinderbox (https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/) too. - local storage - notes can be "namespaces" within documents - "zip links" that are the equivalent of the `[[...]]` style common to both Obsidian and Roam, showing Inbound, Outbound and "suggested" links, for each note - ad-hoc linking between notes on top of all this - switching between "plain notes" and a Map view, or an Outline view, or a Timeline view - viewing the resulting graph in different ways, auto-arranging it, etc. - Ad-hoc "decorators" (colors, labels, tags, icons) for notes - Ad-hoc "backgrounds" on all or portion of the graph view - Ad-hoc "note queries" (that allow you to collect notes matching certain metadata, having certain text etc) - ... and more that I haven't found time to use yet :-)
  • dcsan 6y ago
    looks very polished. but depends on an XML fileformat. While basically text the appeal of something based on simple to edit .md files is strong...
  • pandatigox 6y ago
    Ive been trying to get into tinderbox but there is no easy manual to follow. how do you get started with tinderbox?
• DenisM 6y ago
  So how is this different from being another local/serverless wiki?
• ahel 6y ago
  I tried it today. I already had a directory full of .md and .adoc so it was nice to see those in a new editor. But of course the graph is just a bubble of unlinked dots. I did started to link some but I don't see the benefit. Took a shower and my enthusiasm got cold: how can I know my data is safe aka not getting uploaded somewhere? There is an AutoUpdate feature after-all. :(
  • ericax 6y ago
    We'll add an option to disable auto-update soon! If you don't trust us, technically you can also use firewall rules to block internet access (or monitor network and see what Obsidian is doing).
• Karunamon 6y ago
  Minor gripe: The planned extras do the dark pattern of "per month, billed annually". It's either $4 a month or $48 a year. If you're charging me $48, you're charging me $48. Obfuscating that is scummy.
• crooked-v 6y ago
  Four bits of feedback: 1. How do I select the font to use? The variable-width default font feels entirely out of place for me with Markdown. 2. This could dearly use integration with Prettier (https://prettier.io https://prettier.io) or a similar tool for those of us fussy with formatting details. 3. The lack of Multimarkdown syntax like cross-references (http://fletcher.github.io/MultiMarkdown-5/cross-references.html http://fletcher.github.io/MultiMarkdown-5/cross-references.h...) is painful for those of us with elaborate note-keeping. It's doubly painful that Obsidian apparently has its own invented syntax instead of using what's already been around for years and years with MMD. 4. How in the world do I link between files? Nothing I do works, and there's no help document and not even a "copy as link" on the right click menu.
  • ericax 6y ago
    Sorry for the confusion! Help docs are in Settings > Help.
    • crooked-v 6y ago
      It's kind of gross that the only way to use that is to have it pollute your file space, rather than just having a document to open. Also, on Mac it should be under the actual Help menu, the same way that there should be an Obsidian -> Preferences... menu item (hotkey cmd+,) to open settings. Conventions are important!
      • ericax 6y ago
        Totally agree! Still quite some work ahead of us (We're about 3 months from first line of code). Ideally the help docs can be opened as its own vault and can be a nice testing ground for a new user to play around with the functionality.
    • crooked-v 6y ago
      Also, I'm annoyed that this labels itself as supporting Markdown, but apparently can't actually handle actual proper Markdown links between files. This is kind of a sticking point for me, because one app after another has gotten this wrong (see Ulysses' bizarro link editing, for example), and I'm just not going to use an app if it wants to make me convert all my files to a proprietary version of the syntax.
• pedrocx486 6y ago
  I was an user of their Windows app until recently, had to stop using when they added the license for business use. Sadly, the company I work for only allows in their computers software they bought with their money (I can request them to buy software for me, but it can't be software under 'pre-release', has to be an stable software.) because of the audits they get, so to avoid problems related with piracy they decided to block softwares with user-owned licenses. And since I used to use both at work (mostly for personal notes) and on my personal time, I moved to completely to another solution. (My own thing, made in (get ready for it) Electron.)
• dudeinhawaii 6y ago
  Great idea! I have to admit the UI reminded me of what I do presently -- VSCode + notes in a folder in Markdown. I'll take it for a test-drive and see how it compares to VSCode + git. If it speeds things up, I'll be a buyer! Bear in mind that what it looks like you're competing directly against is an editor (VSCode) + versioning (Git) + sync (GoogleDrive/OneDrive). That's probably a harder sell to a techy individual since those are all free (or already subscribed to) but if you make the editing and management process better, seamless, hassle-free, I'd buy the editor (like pyCharm, goLand, Sublime or Linqpad).
• dcsan 6y ago
  This looks really cool, but: Is there a reason this doesn't work with plain markdown links? I have a local working kbase already as a bunch of markdown files. If I use the obsidian markdown importer I guess it will destroy any links in that KB for any viewer or rendered that does NOT support GFM style [[links]]. Perhaps related to how Obsidian uses backlinks? Ideally I could use Obsidian for structuring links / overview of a Knowledge base, and plain page editors for actually editing individual content pages. As it is though it can't be a combined/overlay usage, it has to be a cold turkey switch.
  • ericax 6y ago
    Plain Markdown links should work just fine in Obsidian, but you might need to convert space characters to "%20" according to Markdown spec, since space is not allowed.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• roel_v 6y ago
  Is it possible to do inline video, or is it possible to write a plugin that does it? I have a highly specific note taking application in mind, if you'd like to have a somewhat concrete use case for a specific market and you'd like to talk that over with me, feel free to contact me. (I'm using tiddlywiki now) I think this is in general a problem with note taking apps - their market is too broad. Not many people want to 'take notes', they want to 'track the research for my book' or 'track references of the papers I write' or 'collect recipes'. It takes an engineer's mind to naturally abstract that into 'note taking'.
  • ericax 6y ago
    Yes! You can use the embed syntax ![[video.mp4]] to embed videos in Obsidian. The video should show up in preview mode. I think you would really enjoy our active discord community where a lot of people share and discuss their use cases and specific workflows. https://obsidian.md/community https://obsidian.md/community
• prostheticvamp 6y ago
  Counteroffer: I use Kiwi to create a personal wiki on my phone. It sits in a Dropbox folder I always have open as a project in Sublime. It’s also the folder that my NotePlan app uses - so my todo list, calendar, and wiki are all the same set of markdown files. It’s super portable (just a pile of markdown docs in a Dropbox folder), does knowledge base management, and ties my knowledge base directly into my todo/project management/time management. And it costs peanuts (kiwi is buy-once; I don’t remember what I paid for NotePlan). People remember wikis, right? “Interconnected markdown” isn’t some new feature, and sure isn’t worth a monthly subscription fee.
  • johntash 6y ago
    Can you link to the Kiwi you're talking about? I found https://github.com/danielwertheim/Kiwi https://github.com/danielwertheim/Kiwi but it hasn't been updated in 7+ years, so I'm not sure if it's what you're talking about.. NotePlan looks interesting though. It's not free, but it's on my list of things to try now.
    • prostheticvamp 6y ago
      https://github.com/landakram/kiwi https://github.com/landakram/kiwi I don’t know when it was last updated, but as far as I can tell, it’s feature-complete for my needs (with zero lock-in). I actually just tried out OP’s Obsidian and ... it’s nice. In my workflow it would replace Sublime, as the desktop wiki editor sitting on my existing folder of wiki files. There isn’t any of the lock-in I was getting concerned about from peoples posts here, and personal use is free. I’ll continue to play with it.
• DrStartup 6y ago
  Exactly what I’ve been looking for. Will there be extension support?
  • ericax 6y ago
    Yes, once we get close to a stable v1.0 release we'll be opening up a plugin API!
• ceocoder 6y ago
  This is very cool! Any plans on making it work in org files?
• scrypter 6y ago
  I want to say that I clicked on this without any intent to actually download this, but decided to solely due to the fact they understand the fear of cloud services shutting down, getting bought or changing their privacy policy.
• ohthehugemanate 6y ago
  I don't understand your target audience: > In our age when cloud services can shut down, get bought, or change privacy policy any day, the last thing you want is proprietary formats and data lock-in. Concerned about proprietary lock-in when it comes to file format, but not when it comes to software. Seems like you could make some technical gains without losing audience by getting consistent. You could ditch the "open standards based file storage that you manage yourself" idea and gain flexibility to do your own thing there. I bet people would expect you to handle sync in that case, but that's not so bad. Alternatively you could go open source for functional parts of the app and build a development community to support you and your users.
• sneak 6y ago
  I use Standard Notes which doesn’t charge extra for encryption or sync, and, most importantly, is open source/free software. Closed source cryptography is dangerous, and should be avoided whenever possible.
• Osyris 6y ago
  This seems pretty neat, however it looks like it freezes up when I open a vault inside of WSL. I can't make new files at all. Worked fine on a regular Windows folder.
• nightowl_games 6y ago
  love this. may I suggest you go open source and then charge a low monthly fee for your sync service? open source really solidifies the "forever" tagline and I'd consider paying <5$ month (I'm Canadian & not paid nearly as well as many ppl on here...) also I'm not stingy on the "open source" vs "source available" stuff. Im just a code hoarder. i know your going against cloud integration but cloud + mobile has to be a consideration
• mstijak 6y ago
  Shameless plug here after a failed HN post. For people interested in taking many quick notes using markdown please check https://tdoapp.com https://tdoapp.com. The app allows you to organize tasks into boards and lists and use keyboard to quickly navigate. Also, CSS and regular expressions are used to highlight tasks. The code is available on GitHub - https://github.com/codaxy/tdo https://github.com/codaxy/tdo
• rhlala 6y ago
  This is really the best, just what i wanted, already moved all my notes there, I just miss one thing, working with images and making area screenshots, was easy in evernote, just use the hotkey and select the area and a new note with the image get created, Now, i am using greenshot for trying to replicate this, i set my favorite save folder into Obsidian, Problem is , an image get created, if i want to write some stuff down , i have to create a note, insert the image. Would be perfect, if we could set a 'special' folder, and all images coming inside get automatically a note created, (the real picture is in attachment folder) Or we can right click or a picture and convert to MD note, Resizing images in preview too, i think it is important. Thank you for your work.
  • luckman212 6y ago
    I like your ideas about images/new notes. Would help a lot moving to this from Evernote which currently has very good support for image editing / annotation.
• durbodert 6y ago
  df
• durbodert 6y ago
  Landing page looks like a cheap knock off of https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/
  • fastball 6y ago
    The inspiration does certainly seem quite strong. Geez even the wireframe graphic thing is the same.
• sandGorgon 6y ago
  do you also plan to support asciidoc ?
• satoshikenzo 6y ago
  Very interesting! I'm glad to see more development in the field of Personal Knowledge Management. There's a lot of cool features Obsidian has which are essential to me: 1. Markdown 2. Ability to create a Zettelkasten 3. Backlinks What it currently lacks for me is: 1. native iOS app (one app for all note-taking. This is why I can't see myself using Roam Research right now, despite it being a pretty cool project) Good job to the dev team and will keep a closed eye on this project :)
• HNBRN 6y ago
  Brilliant tool ! I started to put all my notes there. However I cannot figure out how to display a note at the bottom of the screen (below another one as in the featured page ?)
• peterwwillis 6y ago
  I've come to accept that Markdown is time-consuming and difficult for documents more complex than a README. I now truly appreciate Wikis with WYSIWYG interfaces and complex macros. Would love to see extensions to Markdown to give it more complete functions/macros, without any Jinja-esque "markdown programming". If Markdown supported a modified HTML4.01 without all the unnecessary syntax fluff, that would do for most of my needs, and I could use a WYSIWYG to craft/organize the rest.
• poryg0n 6y ago
  It undoubtedly looks great, but it's hard not to be a bit put off by their landing page which seems, just slightly, inspired by https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/
• mehdix 6y ago
  I used to use Zim in the past, however recently I've switched to writing Markdown files and tracking the with Yadm. Works perfectly.
• Chris2048 6y ago
  How does this compare to TiddlyWiki?
• jpettersson 6y ago
  The app looks promising! If I understand the license correctly there's no way of trying it out for free in a commercial setting. The only use-case I would have for this is as a work tool, but since the license requires me to pay up front I'm not going to try it. A trial period or similar would be nice.
  • ericax 6y ago
    Updated the pricing page to reflect the trial period, sorry about the oversight!
• tkainrad 6y ago
  My first impression is very good. With one exception: The .desktop file that is generated on Linux has the wrong StartupWMClass set. The correct one would be lowercase obsidian (VS Obsidian). Because of this, the application cannot be added to the favorites which is important for me to be able to start it via a super+NUM shortcut.
• M5x7wI3CmbEem10 6y ago
  does anyone know a simple app that allows hyperlinking between notes? I want to create a roam-style knowledge base, but this looks a bit too heavy for my purposes.
• mmchicago 6y ago
  I like what I see with Obsidian in my test drive but it's a proprietary tool with a license that only protects the company, no terms of service, no privacy policy or even a statement about data usage and collection. I get that the md files are stored locally, but I have no way of knowing what information about my files is collected and stored. I'd like to use it but I'll need a little more on the transparency side of things.
  • ericax 6y ago
    Nothing is stored on our servers. The app does not upload anything at all.
• geraltofrivia 6y ago
  Obsidian is a crazy project, and I would recommend you all to give it far more weight when deciding to use it or not. Before I switched to Notion earlier this year, I used to maintain my notes in a Github repository. A folder with a bunch of markdown and txt files. I then used some editor like Sublime Text to easily switch between pages and to write. And sometimes, I would render them using a combination of [Markserv](https://www.npmjs.com/package/markserv https://www.npmjs.com/package/markserv) (to convert Markdown to static HTML files), and [Live Reload Addon](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live-reload/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live-reload/) to pull those HTML files from disk every second. It was ugly, but it worked for me for years. Obsidian fits this workflow perfectly. I use Notion now, but I believe it's got too many bells and whistles, syntactic sugar, and non-native text editing experience, which makes me focus more on the interface than the content. I'm making the shift back to my previous way of managing notes/knowledge (going to take weeks), only because of this Application. I recommend you keep a close eye on it. I am not in any way involved with the project.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• SimplGy 6y ago
  This is a beautiful app, thank you for making it. I can't find how to use a fixed-width font: are community themes the right way to accomplish that? Markdown is a whitespace sensitive format, it might be that fixed pitch is a candidate to be a first class setting, even the default.
• wojtekkru 6y ago
  How well does it handle large repos?
  • luckman212 6y ago
    Also would like to know this. Currently have over 10k notes in Evernote, looking to move elsewhere but Electron makes me worry about poor performance with such a large data set.
• operon 6y ago
  I use Ullysses+Delineato for a combination of notes+diagrams to organize my thoughts and now I am feeling like a dactylographer using a word processor for the first time.