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Love love love obsidian. The tool is aesthetically pleasing, built-in vim mode surprisingly well (a few minor glitches with the cursor blinking) — but above all

Love love love obsidian. The tool is aesthetically pleasing, built-in vim mode surprisingly well (a few minor glitches with the cursor blinking) — but above all else, the plug-in community takes the cake. Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "second brain." Previous note taking applications I've tried in the past (e.g. Zettlr, Bear) lacked the vibrant developer community that Obsidian has cultivated. Hats off to the founder and the Obsidian team! [0] - https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com/p/stop-zettelkasten-literature-notes https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com/p/stop-zettelkas...

parrot987 4y ago
TIL that obsidian has vim mode... I love it even more now.
- mystickphoenix 4y ago
  even better, it asks you to type a specific vim command before enabling it. Great "here there be dragons, are you a dragonslayer?" UX choice, and fun easter egg too ;)
  - hoosieree 4y ago
    That's brilliant and super fun.
emptyparadise 4y ago
Wow, CloudWatch for note metadata metrics. Notebook organization systems are serious business!
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > Notebook organization systems are serious business! If that's what it takes to make someones system effective so be it. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well and all that. What's a better alternative in your opinion?
  - emptyparadise 4y ago
    If it works, it works. Just surprised by the infrastructure involved.
- itsmemattchung 4y ago
  I'm very very very disorganized by nature. Some people I know seem to be organized at birth. All the systems I put are really just mechanisms are really aspiration, ways for me to emulate their behavior, keep me accountable, and gamify it a bit.
  - emptyparadise 4y ago
    That's awesome. Personally I found that I end up spending too much time on configurations and tinkering with the notes, so I end up going for the simplest system I can.
    - monkmartinez 4y ago
      There it is! I am with you 100%. All of these massive plugin systems are a giant time suck. You spend soooo much time just setting things up only to forget the little stuff you need to do when something breaks. Every plugin I have installed requires some level of configuration. The more feature rich plugins (with no surprise there) are basically apps in and of themselves. I keep hearing praise about this being a simple app, but I found it to be very fiddly if you want more than just markdown rendered in your editor. Lots and lots of time to get things working/configured. Sync has been a massive PITA for me with Obsidian. Unless you are willing to pay, there is going to be pain there eventually. I had similar problems with OneNote, but those sync problems have mostly disappeared. Further, OneNote's handwriting experience is really good. It is very easy to export all notes from OneNote to Markdown with Pandoc, so while I may be "locked" in, I can "get out" if I want. Edit: So thank you Obsidian for helping me convert my notes in OneNote to markdown to try you out! I now have a verified escape hatch if I should ever need it. However, I am not sticking around. Too much trouble for little stuff and OneNote is just a really good all arounder.
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
Another metric idea for you: "Time taken after creation to search for and open this note again" This can show how useful your notes are and which are most useful.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  > how useful your notes are While I think it's an interesting metric, it wouldn't capture the utility of my notes for me (emphasis on "for me", since everyone's probably different when it comes to notes). Often, the act of writing the note helps better commit what I'm writing to memory. At a super rough estimate I'd say that 80% of the utility of note-taking is the act of producing the note itself, and only 20% of the utility is being able to refer back to specific facts.
  - just_boost_it 4y ago
    That's definitely an exponential distribution. I'm a data scientist and I keep going back to a few key notes over and over and adding little bits. I tried to track things like ideas, tasks, and just journaling, but it just didn't fit right. It's unbeatable for my work related stuff though, and the key things for me were mathjax support and being able to paste screenshots directly onto the page. Fantastic product.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      Oh, I 100% agree that there would be some kind of exponential falloff in which notes I go back to. I just, again, for me personally, gain a lot of value from writing the notes even that I never go back to revisit. So for me personally, the metric is interesting, like I said, but doesn't capture "how useful" a note is, because I have most of my utility outside of that use case.
      - cgriswald 4y ago
        I don't go back to notes because: 1. I have it committed to memory. 2. I never needed it. I have no way to discern whether either (1) or (2) will happen as far into the future as you care to specify; so it's mostly a moot point. In any case, I will sometimes just do random walks through my notes, wikipedia style, and find a lot of value in it.
mikae1 4y ago
Did you try https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/? I've had not reason to pick freemium Obsidian over open source Logseq.
- MikeTheGreat 4y ago
  I tried both and am using Obsidian now. I wanted to use logseq (I felt good about "Obsidian, but open source") but when I tried to find some text in a page I was writing it didn't work. I'm a total logseq noob but as far as I could tell I needed to install an extension/plugin to search through the page, which was weird. Plus, the plugin didn't work for me (I typed in the thing to search for, clicked "go find it" and nothing happened, I think - it's been a while and I didn't use it much). I kinda boggled my mind that logseq wouldn't have a 'Find' feature for finding text in the page I'm editing. Please tell me that I missed something obvious so that I can feel dumb for missing that obvious thing but happy that I can take another look at logseq :)
  - soulofmischief 4y ago
    Ctrl+K or the macOS equivalent provides a universal search dialog with a toggle for page-only search. The UX is extremely lacking, but it's open source, gaining steam, and they recently closed $4mil in funding so I expect it to massively improve over the next two years. Notably, page search should function without needing a dialog+overlay, and should support highlighting/navigating every match.
    - MikeTheGreat 4y ago
      Thanks! I'm excited to hear that there's support for expanding it. And I'll definitely go back and take another look at it! :)
  - cldwalker 4y ago
    Cmd-K to find any line in your notes and Cmd-shift-K to find any line in your page. Starting with 0.8.3 there is also a native find-in-page feature, https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/Find%20in%20page https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/Find%20in%20page, which can search anything that is visible including results of queries

parrot987 4y ago

TIL that obsidian has vim mode... I love it even more now.

mystickphoenix 4y ago
even better, it asks you to type a specific vim command before enabling it. Great "here there be dragons, are you a dragonslayer?" UX choice, and fun easter egg too ;)
- hoosieree 4y ago
  That's brilliant and super fun.

emptyparadise 4y ago

Wow, CloudWatch for note metadata metrics. Notebook organization systems are serious business!

ParetoOptimal 4y ago
> Notebook organization systems are serious business! If that's what it takes to make someones system effective so be it. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well and all that. What's a better alternative in your opinion?
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  If it works, it works. Just surprised by the infrastructure involved.
itsmemattchung 4y ago
I'm very very very disorganized by nature. Some people I know seem to be organized at birth. All the systems I put are really just mechanisms are really aspiration, ways for me to emulate their behavior, keep me accountable, and gamify it a bit.
- emptyparadise 4y ago
  That's awesome. Personally I found that I end up spending too much time on configurations and tinkering with the notes, so I end up going for the simplest system I can.
  - monkmartinez 4y ago
    There it is! I am with you 100%. All of these massive plugin systems are a giant time suck. You spend soooo much time just setting things up only to forget the little stuff you need to do when something breaks. Every plugin I have installed requires some level of configuration. The more feature rich plugins (with no surprise there) are basically apps in and of themselves. I keep hearing praise about this being a simple app, but I found it to be very fiddly if you want more than just markdown rendered in your editor. Lots and lots of time to get things working/configured. Sync has been a massive PITA for me with Obsidian. Unless you are willing to pay, there is going to be pain there eventually. I had similar problems with OneNote, but those sync problems have mostly disappeared. Further, OneNote's handwriting experience is really good. It is very easy to export all notes from OneNote to Markdown with Pandoc, so while I may be "locked" in, I can "get out" if I want. Edit: So thank you Obsidian for helping me convert my notes in OneNote to markdown to try you out! I now have a verified escape hatch if I should ever need it. However, I am not sticking around. Too much trouble for little stuff and OneNote is just a really good all arounder.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago

Another metric idea for you: "Time taken after creation to search for and open this note again" This can show how useful your notes are and which are most useful.

ncallaway 4y ago
> how useful your notes are While I think it's an interesting metric, it wouldn't capture the utility of my notes for me (emphasis on "for me", since everyone's probably different when it comes to notes). Often, the act of writing the note helps better commit what I'm writing to memory. At a super rough estimate I'd say that 80% of the utility of note-taking is the act of producing the note itself, and only 20% of the utility is being able to refer back to specific facts.
- just_boost_it 4y ago
  That's definitely an exponential distribution. I'm a data scientist and I keep going back to a few key notes over and over and adding little bits. I tried to track things like ideas, tasks, and just journaling, but it just didn't fit right. It's unbeatable for my work related stuff though, and the key things for me were mathjax support and being able to paste screenshots directly onto the page. Fantastic product.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    Oh, I 100% agree that there would be some kind of exponential falloff in which notes I go back to. I just, again, for me personally, gain a lot of value from writing the notes even that I never go back to revisit. So for me personally, the metric is interesting, like I said, but doesn't capture "how useful" a note is, because I have most of my utility outside of that use case.
    - cgriswald 4y ago
      I don't go back to notes because: 1. I have it committed to memory. 2. I never needed it. I have no way to discern whether either (1) or (2) will happen as far into the future as you care to specify; so it's mostly a moot point. In any case, I will sometimes just do random walks through my notes, wikipedia style, and find a lot of value in it.

mikae1 4y ago

Did you try https://logseq.com/ https://logseq.com/? I've had not reason to pick freemium Obsidian over open source Logseq.

MikeTheGreat 4y ago
I tried both and am using Obsidian now. I wanted to use logseq (I felt good about "Obsidian, but open source") but when I tried to find some text in a page I was writing it didn't work. I'm a total logseq noob but as far as I could tell I needed to install an extension/plugin to search through the page, which was weird. Plus, the plugin didn't work for me (I typed in the thing to search for, clicked "go find it" and nothing happened, I think - it's been a while and I didn't use it much). I kinda boggled my mind that logseq wouldn't have a 'Find' feature for finding text in the page I'm editing. Please tell me that I missed something obvious so that I can feel dumb for missing that obvious thing but happy that I can take another look at logseq :)
- soulofmischief 4y ago
  Ctrl+K or the macOS equivalent provides a universal search dialog with a toggle for page-only search. The UX is extremely lacking, but it's open source, gaining steam, and they recently closed $4mil in funding so I expect it to massively improve over the next two years. Notably, page search should function without needing a dialog+overlay, and should support highlighting/navigating every match.
  - MikeTheGreat 4y ago
    Thanks! I'm excited to hear that there's support for expanding it. And I'll definitely go back and take another look at it! :)
- cldwalker 4y ago
  Cmd-K to find any line in your notes and Cmd-shift-K to find any line in your page. Starting with 0.8.3 there is also a native find-in-page feature, https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/Find%20in%20page https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/Find%20in%20page, which can search anything that is visible including results of queries