11 ms·

Show HN: A highly opinionated, fully functional Obsidian vault

258 points by _bramses 4y ago

A few months ago I noticed that I was quickly approaching my 10GB sync limit for my daily driver vault. I considered deprecating some of the heavier files and images, but I was worried how it would affect the integrity of my vault. Instead, I took the opportunity to think to myself -- what would the perfect vault look like? I began to write down some of the key philosophies and strategies I use in my driver vault which led to indispensable plugins, which led to more indispensable philosophies and on and on it went. I've chronicled these results into a fully working vault template that includes templates, dataviews, macros, scripts, and powerful but simple and intuitive structural elements. This vault is truly a condensation of all of my knowledge pertaining to Obsidian (the README is very long), so please do give it a go! I promise you'll like what you see!

deafpolygon 4y ago
I get more done in Emacs and org-mode, at this point.
Terretta 4y ago
This is indeed highly opinionated, but one choice in particular may block half the potential userbase — stopping to think on capture: Zettelkasten "Unique Note Creator" - Is this note atomic? - What will I link it to? Stopping to ask yourself where to file things is likely to cause half of users to not capture them at all. - - - INTERRUPT-based WORKFLOW The philosophy overview examples suggest this is using ISO8601 as the unique filename, which can be great, as then the notes are connected by time which will tend to group things with things worked on at the same time. But the default workflow suggests author is using Luhman plugin for Zettelkasten Luhman IDs (effectively a `1a2b3c` nested outline numbering scheme) which require a conscious organization at capture time: https://github.com/Dyldog/luhman-obsidian-plugin https://github.com/Dyldog/luhman-obsidian-plugin This delights one class of filer, while breaking train of thought during capture for another class of filer. I have not tested this vault myself, as I have my own "highly opininated workflow". The main thing I do is try to make capture and self-organization frictionless, then rely on a minimal structure (auto topic categories + time) to find or "garden" them later. - - - FRICTIONLESS WORKFLOW Very roughly, I capture any manual notes of interest using Daily Notes, while capturing any web reading of interest using Markdownload extension that slurps the original page into Obsidian as a stripped down Markdown `.md` file, where filename is ISO8601 + URL Title. I classify those using Google topic classifier v2, and recently am working on adding summaries with GPT-3 text-davinci-003, but recursively, where for articles more than 3500 tokens I'll summarize each subsection then summarize the summaries for an overall summary.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Mizza 4y ago
This is wild. I use Obsidian.. as a bunch of folders with text notes. The simplicity of the system is what works for me. But awesome to see somebody take the exact opposite approach.
mmastrac 4y ago
TIL: https://github.com/IdreesInc/Waypoint https://github.com/IdreesInc/Waypoint I feel like there's a huge amount I don't know about Obsidian after reading just a few files in this repo.
Scandiravian 4y ago
One thing I miss after switching from macos to Linux is Alfred. It seems like this setup eliminates a ton of friction, but it might be difficult to replicate when using Android + Linux I'm obviously still going to try because this looks amazing. Great work!
dumbmrblah 4y ago
Hypothesis: people who use these “second brain” knowledge systems spend more time writing about using them, then actually using them. Disclaimer: I use obsidian myself
- EliasWatson 4y ago
  I disagree personally, but I don't use Obsidian like most people. The majority of my notes just have a couple sentences. I mainly make notes about new project ideas, cool things I find online (eg. a note for each new programming language I discover), and cheatsheets (eg. a bash scripting cheatsheet). I probably spend 15 minutes total writing in Obsidian each week. I'm not writing down things that I don't have difficulty remembering or things that are very easy to search for online. Obsidian is a place for me to store info that I might want later but would have difficulty finding/remembering again.
- psychomugs 4y ago
  This is the note-taking version of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) in practically any hobby, e.g. camera bodies and lenses for photography, instruments and software for music. After the initial honeymoon phase, you realize that achieving that idyllic lifestyle advertised by the new gear actually requires work instead of purchase or download. The only antidote is to actually start using the damn thing.
- j7ake 4y ago
  Apple notes is good enough for me. Can Obsidian users defend why not simply use Apple notes ? Learning curve and friction way lower
  - steveklabnik 4y ago
    I don't use a Mac, so Apple Notes is not available to me.
- seanosaur 4y ago
  I've dubbed this "theoretical productivity"[1] and also fall into this trap. I keep thinking that just moving to a different app/system with X feature will make this 100x better for me. That goldilocks app/system doesn't exist and is always a moving target. Spending time on solving these problems mean I'm not thinking/writing/completing the things I really want to, hence the "theoretical" nature. 1: There's a good chance this is already a term with a different meaning. If that's the case I don't mean to rip it off, it's just what sounded good at the time.
choward 4y ago
Obsidian is still closed source, right? I thought they were talking about open sourcing it at some point.
- taink 4y ago
  I think they pledged to free it when they stop working on it, but that's about it. One of the developers posted a message[1] on their forums when they were asked about it, and their stance was pretty much "we don't see a good enough value in open sourcing our software". I am unaware of further developments. [1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/11 https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1...
  - jamesgeck0 4y ago
    > they pledged to free it when they stop working on it Source, please? To my knowledge, while this has been mentioned, they have not actually made such a pledge.
    - taink 4y ago
      Ah, maybe you're right; I skimmed through the thread a long time ago and I think they said they would open-source it and write a privacy policy. I'm pretty sure they did write the privacy policy but I may have remembered incorrectly about the pledge.
- darkteflon 4y ago
  It’s all just text files, though. There’s no risk of lock-in.
  - choward 4y ago
    The investment you put into learning a piece of software isn't free.
  - imperfect_blue 4y ago
    This is true for every note-taking app with an export functionality. And it really isn't good enough. The entire reason you use Obsidian or Notion or Anytype or Capacities.io or Logseq, or anything more powerful than a set of markdown files in the first place, is that you care about the relationships between the notes and the rich functionality that comes with them - sorting, search, linking, reminders, etc. None of this is easily exportable into another app. The series of markdown files that make up Obsidian is not a substitute for the Obsidian software, nor are the relationships easily rebuilt in another app.
tantalor 4y ago
This was really fun to read without know what "obsidian" is and I can happily report that by the time I got to the end I still had no idea what it is. A ha, found it on another website: > Obsidian is a Markdown-based note-taking and knowledge base app. https://help.obsidian.md/How+to/Format+your+notes https://help.obsidian.md/How+to/Format+your+notes
- astrange 4y ago
  I thought it was going to be about Fallout New Vegas.
  - DaniDaniel5005 4y ago
    I thought it was a new Minecraft block ;)
    - melony 4y ago
      The founder of Obsidian is a former Minecraft modder.
  - Temporary_31337 4y ago
    I was a little disappointed, as I thought it would be instructions on how to make actual, physical vault from obsidian. I made a knife from obsidian. It’s brittle but very sharp. I only really use it to open envelopes.
    - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
      Ok - I want details, youtube video and how to guide :-)
      - astrange 4y ago
        How about jello, paper and bismuth? https://youtube.com/@kiwami-japan https://youtube.com/@kiwami-japan (not all at once)
un1crom 4y ago
life well lived is a series of personal obsessions shared without expectation of an audience. well done. may an audience manifest around your knowledge of knowledge.
- darkteflon 4y ago
  > life well lived is a series of personal obsessions shared without expectation of an audience I like that. Is that a quote or original?
- Brajeshwar 4y ago
  Yes, I love this. I have started to just share openly and since the last few years, I have even removed all comments, analytics, social-shits from most of my websites. I just don't worry about what others think. However, some people went out of their ways to find how to contact and there is always that trickle of emails thanking, or in most cases offering to sell something. :-) Let's help and propagate more of this idea -- share your personal obsessions -- I might just get inspired.
- nullandvoid 4y ago
  I saved this quote, thanks (couldn't find an original reference as someone else notes). This resonated pretty well with the hours I've put into side projects, and the philosophy I try to maintain to keep moving forward.
localghost3000 4y ago
breadchris 4y ago
i used to try to create obsidian workflows, but i found them very challenging to keep up. i used to think i wanted configuration for my note taking so I could capture all the ways I wanted to interact with the information i stored. Even though i initially rejected it, i have ended up embracing logseq and it’s seemingly odd way of working. I have grown to love the daily journal being front and center as I find it removes mental overhead when it comes to figuring out what to take notes about. I just put everything in there! I don’t think, i just take notes. When i store information, i write some contextual information to help me retrieve it the next time i look for it. When i search and can’t find it right away, i add more context to the note to help me find it faster next time. I think it works for me because i don’t like the pressure of writing a structured note, but when I do take the time to write, it’s because i am excited about it and I end up streaming my consciousness in an almost blog like post (as I am doing now, i love writing about note taking). I work at an OSS company so fortunately all my notes I publish online: https://breadchris.com https://breadchris.com and i find it so freaking liberating to be able to share my haphazard ideas with others lol. having spent a decent amount of time looking at this stuff, my biggest recommendation is to try things out for a bit, and find habits that stick. I found a way to make note taking addicting, and other people i’ve got on the band wagon have found it addicting as well so I think logseq is a worthwhile thing to try out. I haven’t put it together yet, but I would like to put together the workflow (more like a mindset, less workflow) that I follow. Good luck to those looking for a way that works for them for taking notes! I would love to hear about what people have tried, I have a lot of ideas to share.
- teedeepee 4y ago
  Tried your website on Chrome 108.0.5359.125 (Win 64-bit), and it displayed nothing but a teal background, until I turned off the Decentraleyes 2.0.17 extension (which was reporting and blocking 542 locally-injected resources). FYI.
Brajeshwar 4y ago
This is brilliant. Thanks for this, I'm going to be looking around to see what I can steal and improve mine. I have crashed Obsidian so many times when I tried to load up everything. Here is my most current implementation; - Vault (Home / Personal) is about everything for our family, and I. This is a folder inside Dropbox. So, we have everything there. Suddenly at a hospital, and the wife said, bring out the first list of vaccinations when our kid was born -- bam, I got it. :-) - Vault (Work) is the Google Drive Folder that I have everything about our Company. These days, most of my work is just writing, and more writing. They are good archives and I don't have to re-say or say a little with the writings as a backup for async reference for anyone. - Vault (dev folder) is usually shared by Sublime Text and Obsidian. These days, I'm left with just writing more and more in MarkDown either as content, documentation, or more contents that gets converted to other outputs. To maintain sanity, I have very few must-have plugins and the current vaults are all on "Minimal" themes with different color schemes making it easy for me to just toggle my Vaults. I once tried to maintain a common ".obsidian" folder and symlink to it but that was a bad idea - the vaults are better off mostly being unique with shared preferences. For the notes management I have PARA[0] at the root and everything inside them, with few rules broken to make it easier for sharing, especially with the work content. 0. PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive) - here is an article with details - https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/ https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/
- suumcuique 4y ago
  >To maintain sanity, I have very few must-have plugins and the current vaults are all on "Minimal" themes with different color schemes making it easy for me to just toggle my Vaults. I once tried to maintain a common ".obsidian" folder and symlink to it but that was a bad idea - the vaults are better off mostly being unique with shared preferences. My solution to maintaining seperate vaults for personal/work notes has been to make a sandbox vault where I can test/configure plugins and if I'm happy with the result I run a little script that I can point at a "real" vault that: * backs up the current config of the target vault incase I screw up * `rsync`s the sandbox .obsidian and meta folders (containing templater templates etc.) to the target vault This leaves me free to experiment with plugins without getting in the way of my day-to-day notetaking.
adham-omran 4y ago
Only did a cursory read and I love it already. I tried sharing my own thoughts a while back but it was a first pass kind of post, this is much more complete. I'll be digging into this later!
Ruq 4y ago
I love how Obsidian has evolved and grown to such an extent that merely showing off what you do with it is enough in itself.e
pflenker 4y ago
Thanks for sharing! How long have you been working with it? My biggest issue these days is that many tutorials or guides seem to be written at a point where the setup is still fairly new and not really tested thoroughly. Some drawbacks only materialize over time.
AB1908 4y ago
This is an example of what I came to call a PKM Docker. Easily replicable setups for others. I have a feeling stuff like this could be useful for students where they use a per subject setup of sorts. Probably a terrible idea though.
MrOrelliOReilly 4y ago
Great addition! Like others, I find it helpful to review how smart people are using Obsidian and related tools to create a second brain. I know it’s popular to critique these posts as onanism when we should just “get things done”, but Obsidian really has allowed me to accomplish all sorts of productivity flows that I’d have needed custom software for previously. It’s OK to wax about your favorite tools when you’re actually using them :) One thing I’d note is that language models like Chat GPT really do seem to me to be the next frontier in productivity apps. The author mentions using it to simplify search, but you could also imagine a model that recommends related notes in your Zettelkasten or automatically creates links to relevant Wikipedia pages, etc. It’s an exciting area and I hope the author shares what they uncover next year!!
xcambar 4y ago
I really like seeing how others use Obsidian. As an Obsidian user and a (neo)vim user, I think there's a lot of overlap in why you should invest just-enough-time to make it work for you. Disclaimer: after 10+ years of vim and too much time customizing it, I ended up with LunarVim an I'm very happy with it.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
I try hard to take notes, but usually end up with a line or two. Maybe this is me, maybe the noise/information ratio of the meetings I am in - I do not know. I use and like Obsidian but do not have enough substance to make it big. One thing that I really, really miss in Obsidian is the ability to tag blocks. Not only lines, but whole blocks. This would be a fantastic solution for my 2/3/4 lines of notes - I would just go for daily notes and tag the blocks, and automatically merge them in a single page (per tag). I so much would like that that I am considering trying to write a plugin myself.
- skelpmargyar 4y ago
  I use Obsidian for things that I can't or don't feel like remembering. Whenever I take notes on subjects, I often find myself forgetting the notes I took quickly. I tried different methods, refreshing methods, and more. But I found that by just doing the homework or practice problems I would remember the information for years. I still use Obsidian for a lot of things, journaling, pictures, etc. But not for recording information that if it was really that important to me I would just remember myself.
  - BrandoElFollito 4y ago
    I am in the same boat and this is why I have high hopes in tagging as I am more likely to remember a general tag that keywords of notes. I have always relied a lot on memory and on documentation. My approach was that I need to know where to find things rather that always have the information handy. This means that I look-up a lot (I started before the Google era and the relief digital search brings is insane) and end up remembering the really important things. I sometimes find on Stack Overflow my own questions I forgot I asked and now have the same problem :) This is also why I like to follow-up on such questions, enhance answers etc.
- aeonik 4y ago
  Use Logseq. it supports tagging blocks, and it also supports markdown or org formats. I use org mode as my format and this has the added advantage of allowing all my source code blocks in my notes to be directly executable from emacs. All my notes now also double as a Jupyter-like note books, but for any major language. I can even mix and match languages in a single note file.
oxff 4y ago
I have to say that there is a strong ngmi energy in this kind of obsession.
- mxgrn 4y ago
  What's ngmi?
  - nivertech 4y ago
    Not Gonna Make It
mif 4y ago
I use Obsidian with a few of the mentioned plugins but struggle to get more than a really well organized view of the various projects I work on. Obsidian is great for its flexible ways user can interact. And sometimes I wonder whether thinking too much in those various philosophies makes you think better thoughts, or just makes you bend your thoughts so to fit into the system.
s3000 4y ago
>Visitors can meander around your thought garden [1], stopping to marvel at the hydrangeas, or beelining straight for the mini pagoda and water feature in the corner. What good is a thought garden if visitors cannot offer feedback? There should be an ActivityPub interface to collect feedback and links to other gardens. Thoughts should be able to grow on their own. Otherwise, it's not a garden but a sculpture park. [1] https://publish.obsidian.md/bram https://publish.obsidian.md/bram
samsquire 4y ago
At one point I tried creating what is Notion/Obsidian style system in 2013. I called it "living documents". here's one of the last surviving screenshots of living documents version 1. https://github.com/samsquire/interface-experiments/blob/master/living-document-editor.png https://github.com/samsquire/interface-experiments/blob/mast... The system accepted RDF N3 triples and it queried Jena Fuseki database to render graphs with d3. You could introduce facts into the system with the three boxes at the top. if you changed them, they would autocomplete and change the graph view. You could insert references or links into the document by typing them. (not shown in the screenshot) I have the code trapped in a JSBIN SQLite file. It's somewhere in here https://github.com/samsquire/jsbin https://github.com/samsquire/jsbin It uses KnockoutJS. Living documents v2 has a screen cast of it here https://github.com/samsquire/live-interface/blob/master/screencasts/screencast1.mp4?raw=true https://github.com/samsquire/live-interface/blob/master/scre... I believe the shareable and transcluding features of Notion or Obsidian are similar. The screencast shows transclusion and programming language syntax detection with a beyesian classifier - the arbitrary insertion of documents into other documents and they all update in real time. It uses Pouch (and CouchDB) to synchronize data between tabs. It's written in AngularJs 1 so it's legacy and I couldn't get it working when I tried to get the code working. Similar to this long README.md, my note keeping strategy is similarly to create GitHub repositories and edit README.md. In the top right of a GitHub README.md is a table of contents button which is only displayed as an icon. You can even search the headings. When I get to 100-500 entries I create a new repository and add a number to the repository name. This means I can share my journal whenever I get to a milestone and people can check for updates since my last journal by going to the next numbered journal. (For example, I shared "ideas" on HN in 2013 but shares of ideas2 ideas3 and ideas4 are yet to be shared around properly. The titles are all pretty similar.) I keep my notes and journal in the open and public. My old wikidpad based wiki (samsquire/idea-wiki) is publically accessible on GitHub and my journal of 700 entries is available on GitHub. I write in the open to add value. I am deeply interested in the mechanism of doing things and when it comes to code I am more interested in the structure of the code than the types. I write about futuristic software, architecture and desktop features, multithreading, parallelism, asynchrony and concurrency. I am currently working on a multithreaded programming language which has its own compiler that targets my switch based interpreter. It is a toy at this time but that's what my journal is filled with inspiration from. I write about what I'm doing and what I plan to do and any thoughts I have along the way.

258 points by _bramses 4y ago

deafpolygon 4y ago

I get more done in Emacs and org-mode, at this point.

Terretta 4y ago

This is indeed highly opinionated, but one choice in particular may block half the potential userbase — stopping to think on capture: Zettelkasten "Unique Note Creator" - Is this note atomic? - What will I link it to? Stopping to ask yourself where to file things is likely to cause half of users to not capture them at all. - - - INTERRUPT-based WORKFLOW The philosophy overview examples suggest this is using ISO8601 as the unique filename, which can be great, as then the notes are connected by time which will tend to group things with things worked on at the same time. But the default workflow suggests author is using Luhman plugin for Zettelkasten Luhman IDs (effectively a `1a2b3c` nested outline numbering scheme) which require a conscious organization at capture time: https://github.com/Dyldog/luhman-obsidian-plugin https://github.com/Dyldog/luhman-obsidian-plugin This delights one class of filer, while breaking train of thought during capture for another class of filer. I have not tested this vault myself, as I have my own "highly opininated workflow". The main thing I do is try to make capture and self-organization frictionless, then rely on a minimal structure (auto topic categories + time) to find or "garden" them later. - - - FRICTIONLESS WORKFLOW Very roughly, I capture any manual notes of interest using Daily Notes, while capturing any web reading of interest using Markdownload extension that slurps the original page into Obsidian as a stripped down Markdown `.md` file, where filename is ISO8601 + URL Title. I classify those using Google topic classifier v2, and recently am working on adding summaries with GPT-3 text-davinci-003, but recursively, where for articles more than 3500 tokens I'll summarize each subsection then summarize the summaries for an overall summary.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Mizza 4y ago

This is wild. I use Obsidian.. as a bunch of folders with text notes. The simplicity of the system is what works for me. But awesome to see somebody take the exact opposite approach.

mmastrac 4y ago

TIL: https://github.com/IdreesInc/Waypoint https://github.com/IdreesInc/Waypoint I feel like there's a huge amount I don't know about Obsidian after reading just a few files in this repo.

Scandiravian 4y ago

One thing I miss after switching from macos to Linux is Alfred. It seems like this setup eliminates a ton of friction, but it might be difficult to replicate when using Android + Linux I'm obviously still going to try because this looks amazing. Great work!

dumbmrblah 4y ago

Hypothesis: people who use these “second brain” knowledge systems spend more time writing about using them, then actually using them. Disclaimer: I use obsidian myself

EliasWatson 4y ago
I disagree personally, but I don't use Obsidian like most people. The majority of my notes just have a couple sentences. I mainly make notes about new project ideas, cool things I find online (eg. a note for each new programming language I discover), and cheatsheets (eg. a bash scripting cheatsheet). I probably spend 15 minutes total writing in Obsidian each week. I'm not writing down things that I don't have difficulty remembering or things that are very easy to search for online. Obsidian is a place for me to store info that I might want later but would have difficulty finding/remembering again.
psychomugs 4y ago
This is the note-taking version of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) in practically any hobby, e.g. camera bodies and lenses for photography, instruments and software for music. After the initial honeymoon phase, you realize that achieving that idyllic lifestyle advertised by the new gear actually requires work instead of purchase or download. The only antidote is to actually start using the damn thing.
j7ake 4y ago
Apple notes is good enough for me. Can Obsidian users defend why not simply use Apple notes ? Learning curve and friction way lower
- steveklabnik 4y ago
  I don't use a Mac, so Apple Notes is not available to me.
seanosaur 4y ago
I've dubbed this "theoretical productivity"[1] and also fall into this trap. I keep thinking that just moving to a different app/system with X feature will make this 100x better for me. That goldilocks app/system doesn't exist and is always a moving target. Spending time on solving these problems mean I'm not thinking/writing/completing the things I really want to, hence the "theoretical" nature. 1: There's a good chance this is already a term with a different meaning. If that's the case I don't mean to rip it off, it's just what sounded good at the time.

choward 4y ago

Obsidian is still closed source, right? I thought they were talking about open sourcing it at some point.

taink 4y ago
I think they pledged to free it when they stop working on it, but that's about it. One of the developers posted a message[1] on their forums when they were asked about it, and their stance was pretty much "we don't see a good enough value in open sourcing our software". I am unaware of further developments. [1] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/11 https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1...
- jamesgeck0 4y ago
  > they pledged to free it when they stop working on it Source, please? To my knowledge, while this has been mentioned, they have not actually made such a pledge.
  - taink 4y ago
    Ah, maybe you're right; I skimmed through the thread a long time ago and I think they said they would open-source it and write a privacy policy. I'm pretty sure they did write the privacy policy but I may have remembered incorrectly about the pledge.
darkteflon 4y ago
It’s all just text files, though. There’s no risk of lock-in.
- choward 4y ago
  The investment you put into learning a piece of software isn't free.
- imperfect_blue 4y ago
  This is true for every note-taking app with an export functionality. And it really isn't good enough. The entire reason you use Obsidian or Notion or Anytype or Capacities.io or Logseq, or anything more powerful than a set of markdown files in the first place, is that you care about the relationships between the notes and the rich functionality that comes with them - sorting, search, linking, reminders, etc. None of this is easily exportable into another app. The series of markdown files that make up Obsidian is not a substitute for the Obsidian software, nor are the relationships easily rebuilt in another app.

tantalor 4y ago

This was really fun to read without know what "obsidian" is and I can happily report that by the time I got to the end I still had no idea what it is. A ha, found it on another website: > Obsidian is a Markdown-based note-taking and knowledge base app. https://help.obsidian.md/How+to/Format+your+notes https://help.obsidian.md/How+to/Format+your+notes

astrange 4y ago
I thought it was going to be about Fallout New Vegas.
- DaniDaniel5005 4y ago
  I thought it was a new Minecraft block ;)
  - melony 4y ago
    The founder of Obsidian is a former Minecraft modder.
- Temporary_31337 4y ago
  I was a little disappointed, as I thought it would be instructions on how to make actual, physical vault from obsidian. I made a knife from obsidian. It’s brittle but very sharp. I only really use it to open envelopes.
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    Ok - I want details, youtube video and how to guide :-)
    - astrange 4y ago
      How about jello, paper and bismuth? https://youtube.com/@kiwami-japan https://youtube.com/@kiwami-japan (not all at once)

un1crom 4y ago

life well lived is a series of personal obsessions shared without expectation of an audience. well done. may an audience manifest around your knowledge of knowledge.

darkteflon 4y ago
> life well lived is a series of personal obsessions shared without expectation of an audience I like that. Is that a quote or original?
Brajeshwar 4y ago
Yes, I love this. I have started to just share openly and since the last few years, I have even removed all comments, analytics, social-shits from most of my websites. I just don't worry about what others think. However, some people went out of their ways to find how to contact and there is always that trickle of emails thanking, or in most cases offering to sell something. :-) Let's help and propagate more of this idea -- share your personal obsessions -- I might just get inspired.
nullandvoid 4y ago
I saved this quote, thanks (couldn't find an original reference as someone else notes). This resonated pretty well with the hours I've put into side projects, and the philosophy I try to maintain to keep moving forward.

localghost3000 4y ago

breadchris 4y ago

i used to try to create obsidian workflows, but i found them very challenging to keep up. i used to think i wanted configuration for my note taking so I could capture all the ways I wanted to interact with the information i stored. Even though i initially rejected it, i have ended up embracing logseq and it’s seemingly odd way of working. I have grown to love the daily journal being front and center as I find it removes mental overhead when it comes to figuring out what to take notes about. I just put everything in there! I don’t think, i just take notes. When i store information, i write some contextual information to help me retrieve it the next time i look for it. When i search and can’t find it right away, i add more context to the note to help me find it faster next time. I think it works for me because i don’t like the pressure of writing a structured note, but when I do take the time to write, it’s because i am excited about it and I end up streaming my consciousness in an almost blog like post (as I am doing now, i love writing about note taking). I work at an OSS company so fortunately all my notes I publish online: https://breadchris.com https://breadchris.com and i find it so freaking liberating to be able to share my haphazard ideas with others lol. having spent a decent amount of time looking at this stuff, my biggest recommendation is to try things out for a bit, and find habits that stick. I found a way to make note taking addicting, and other people i’ve got on the band wagon have found it addicting as well so I think logseq is a worthwhile thing to try out. I haven’t put it together yet, but I would like to put together the workflow (more like a mindset, less workflow) that I follow. Good luck to those looking for a way that works for them for taking notes! I would love to hear about what people have tried, I have a lot of ideas to share.

teedeepee 4y ago
Tried your website on Chrome 108.0.5359.125 (Win 64-bit), and it displayed nothing but a teal background, until I turned off the Decentraleyes 2.0.17 extension (which was reporting and blocking 542 locally-injected resources). FYI.

Brajeshwar 4y ago

This is brilliant. Thanks for this, I'm going to be looking around to see what I can steal and improve mine. I have crashed Obsidian so many times when I tried to load up everything. Here is my most current implementation; - Vault (Home / Personal) is about everything for our family, and I. This is a folder inside Dropbox. So, we have everything there. Suddenly at a hospital, and the wife said, bring out the first list of vaccinations when our kid was born -- bam, I got it. :-) - Vault (Work) is the Google Drive Folder that I have everything about our Company. These days, most of my work is just writing, and more writing. They are good archives and I don't have to re-say or say a little with the writings as a backup for async reference for anyone. - Vault (dev folder) is usually shared by Sublime Text and Obsidian. These days, I'm left with just writing more and more in MarkDown either as content, documentation, or more contents that gets converted to other outputs. To maintain sanity, I have very few must-have plugins and the current vaults are all on "Minimal" themes with different color schemes making it easy for me to just toggle my Vaults. I once tried to maintain a common ".obsidian" folder and symlink to it but that was a bad idea - the vaults are better off mostly being unique with shared preferences. For the notes management I have PARA[0] at the root and everything inside them, with few rules broken to make it easier for sharing, especially with the work content. 0. PARA (Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive) - here is an article with details - https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/ https://fortelabs.com/blog/para/

suumcuique 4y ago
>To maintain sanity, I have very few must-have plugins and the current vaults are all on "Minimal" themes with different color schemes making it easy for me to just toggle my Vaults. I once tried to maintain a common ".obsidian" folder and symlink to it but that was a bad idea - the vaults are better off mostly being unique with shared preferences. My solution to maintaining seperate vaults for personal/work notes has been to make a sandbox vault where I can test/configure plugins and if I'm happy with the result I run a little script that I can point at a "real" vault that: * backs up the current config of the target vault incase I screw up * `rsync`s the sandbox .obsidian and meta folders (containing templater templates etc.) to the target vault This leaves me free to experiment with plugins without getting in the way of my day-to-day notetaking.

adham-omran 4y ago

Only did a cursory read and I love it already. I tried sharing my own thoughts a while back but it was a first pass kind of post, this is much more complete. I'll be digging into this later!

Ruq 4y ago

I love how Obsidian has evolved and grown to such an extent that merely showing off what you do with it is enough in itself.e

pflenker 4y ago

Thanks for sharing! How long have you been working with it? My biggest issue these days is that many tutorials or guides seem to be written at a point where the setup is still fairly new and not really tested thoroughly. Some drawbacks only materialize over time.

AB1908 4y ago

This is an example of what I came to call a PKM Docker. Easily replicable setups for others. I have a feeling stuff like this could be useful for students where they use a per subject setup of sorts. Probably a terrible idea though.

MrOrelliOReilly 4y ago

Great addition! Like others, I find it helpful to review how smart people are using Obsidian and related tools to create a second brain. I know it’s popular to critique these posts as onanism when we should just “get things done”, but Obsidian really has allowed me to accomplish all sorts of productivity flows that I’d have needed custom software for previously. It’s OK to wax about your favorite tools when you’re actually using them :) One thing I’d note is that language models like Chat GPT really do seem to me to be the next frontier in productivity apps. The author mentions using it to simplify search, but you could also imagine a model that recommends related notes in your Zettelkasten or automatically creates links to relevant Wikipedia pages, etc. It’s an exciting area and I hope the author shares what they uncover next year!!

xcambar 4y ago

I really like seeing how others use Obsidian. As an Obsidian user and a (neo)vim user, I think there's a lot of overlap in why you should invest just-enough-time to make it work for you. Disclaimer: after 10+ years of vim and too much time customizing it, I ended up with LunarVim an I'm very happy with it.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

I try hard to take notes, but usually end up with a line or two. Maybe this is me, maybe the noise/information ratio of the meetings I am in - I do not know. I use and like Obsidian but do not have enough substance to make it big. One thing that I really, really miss in Obsidian is the ability to tag blocks. Not only lines, but whole blocks. This would be a fantastic solution for my 2/3/4 lines of notes - I would just go for daily notes and tag the blocks, and automatically merge them in a single page (per tag). I so much would like that that I am considering trying to write a plugin myself.

skelpmargyar 4y ago
I use Obsidian for things that I can't or don't feel like remembering. Whenever I take notes on subjects, I often find myself forgetting the notes I took quickly. I tried different methods, refreshing methods, and more. But I found that by just doing the homework or practice problems I would remember the information for years. I still use Obsidian for a lot of things, journaling, pictures, etc. But not for recording information that if it was really that important to me I would just remember myself.
- BrandoElFollito 4y ago
  I am in the same boat and this is why I have high hopes in tagging as I am more likely to remember a general tag that keywords of notes. I have always relied a lot on memory and on documentation. My approach was that I need to know where to find things rather that always have the information handy. This means that I look-up a lot (I started before the Google era and the relief digital search brings is insane) and end up remembering the really important things. I sometimes find on Stack Overflow my own questions I forgot I asked and now have the same problem :) This is also why I like to follow-up on such questions, enhance answers etc.
aeonik 4y ago
Use Logseq. it supports tagging blocks, and it also supports markdown or org formats. I use org mode as my format and this has the added advantage of allowing all my source code blocks in my notes to be directly executable from emacs. All my notes now also double as a Jupyter-like note books, but for any major language. I can even mix and match languages in a single note file.

oxff 4y ago

I have to say that there is a strong ngmi energy in this kind of obsession.

mxgrn 4y ago
What's ngmi?
- nivertech 4y ago
  Not Gonna Make It

mif 4y ago

I use Obsidian with a few of the mentioned plugins but struggle to get more than a really well organized view of the various projects I work on. Obsidian is great for its flexible ways user can interact. And sometimes I wonder whether thinking too much in those various philosophies makes you think better thoughts, or just makes you bend your thoughts so to fit into the system.

s3000 4y ago

>Visitors can meander around your thought garden [1], stopping to marvel at the hydrangeas, or beelining straight for the mini pagoda and water feature in the corner. What good is a thought garden if visitors cannot offer feedback? There should be an ActivityPub interface to collect feedback and links to other gardens. Thoughts should be able to grow on their own. Otherwise, it's not a garden but a sculpture park. [1] https://publish.obsidian.md/bram https://publish.obsidian.md/bram

samsquire 4y ago

At one point I tried creating what is Notion/Obsidian style system in 2013. I called it "living documents". here's one of the last surviving screenshots of living documents version 1. https://github.com/samsquire/interface-experiments/blob/master/living-document-editor.png https://github.com/samsquire/interface-experiments/blob/mast... The system accepted RDF N3 triples and it queried Jena Fuseki database to render graphs with d3. You could introduce facts into the system with the three boxes at the top. if you changed them, they would autocomplete and change the graph view. You could insert references or links into the document by typing them. (not shown in the screenshot) I have the code trapped in a JSBIN SQLite file. It's somewhere in here https://github.com/samsquire/jsbin https://github.com/samsquire/jsbin It uses KnockoutJS. Living documents v2 has a screen cast of it here https://github.com/samsquire/live-interface/blob/master/screencasts/screencast1.mp4?raw=true https://github.com/samsquire/live-interface/blob/master/scre... I believe the shareable and transcluding features of Notion or Obsidian are similar. The screencast shows transclusion and programming language syntax detection with a beyesian classifier - the arbitrary insertion of documents into other documents and they all update in real time. It uses Pouch (and CouchDB) to synchronize data between tabs. It's written in AngularJs 1 so it's legacy and I couldn't get it working when I tried to get the code working. Similar to this long README.md, my note keeping strategy is similarly to create GitHub repositories and edit README.md. In the top right of a GitHub README.md is a table of contents button which is only displayed as an icon. You can even search the headings. When I get to 100-500 entries I create a new repository and add a number to the repository name. This means I can share my journal whenever I get to a milestone and people can check for updates since my last journal by going to the next numbered journal. (For example, I shared "ideas" on HN in 2013 but shares of ideas2 ideas3 and ideas4 are yet to be shared around properly. The titles are all pretty similar.) I keep my notes and journal in the open and public. My old wikidpad based wiki (samsquire/idea-wiki) is publically accessible on GitHub and my journal of 700 entries is available on GitHub. I write in the open to add value. I am deeply interested in the mechanism of doing things and when it comes to code I am more interested in the structure of the code than the types. I write about futuristic software, architecture and desktop features, multithreading, parallelism, asynchrony and concurrency. I am currently working on a multithreaded programming language which has its own compiler that targets my switch based interpreter. It is a toy at this time but that's what my journal is filled with inspiration from. I write about what I'm doing and what I plan to do and any thoughts I have along the way.