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I like Obsidian, too, having recently switched over from 9 years of OneNote (the fact that there's a tool to import my OneNote notes helped a lot). The most im

I like Obsidian, too, having recently switched over from 9 years of OneNote (the fact that there's a tool to import my OneNote notes helped a lot). The most important tip for getting started with Obsidian, in my mind, is to absolutely ignore all of the Obsidian "power users." I'm 99% convinced that no one actually uses zettelkasten seriously, but even if so, it's overkill for when you're just checking out the app. And, please, don't buy one of these $500 Obsidian courses. It's just not necessary. With that said, I have started extending out my own setup, and one of the plugins that I like the most is DataView, which allows me to automatically link to other notes, or pull in tagged text, or to-do items. It has allowed me to really take daily recaps reliably for the first time ever, because, even if I have nothing to write, I at least have a repository of what I was doing for that day.

rthkljlkrj 3y ago
The plugin ecosystem for obsidian is insanely large, and I say that not in a good way. I agree, just ignore all of that. Plain files and internal links, that's it.
- PurpleRamen 3y ago
  More specifically, Obsidian shows me, at this moment, 1382 plugins available from the app itself. Some more are probably not available there. And an insanely large amount of them also seems to be already broken, abandoned or having a rather poor quality or just duplicating each other's features with a slight twist in flavor. I guess, it's now big enough, that having some pre-selection of high quality-plugins accessible from within the app, would make sense.
- rchaud 3y ago
  It feels like WordPress. Core product is solid but minimal in features, expectation is for plugin developers to provide the rest. WordPress was FOSS though.
jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
Because who doesn't love running random github repos in a root process?
- aosaigh 3y ago
  No mention of Github repos in the parent comment.
  - jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
    All Obsidian plugins are just cloned github repos
    - lloydatkinson 3y ago
      Really? Shit that’s terrible. I need to review what plugins I’m using.
      - jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
        Yeah it's really sad. I just wish I could pin each plugin to a commit hash. It would be incredible and so easy to do.
ssgodderidge 3y ago
100% agree. The barrier to using Obsidian can seem intimidatingly high before jumping in. I tried and failed a few different systems before I just started using the daily notes as scratch pads. From there, I figured out more and more slowly over time. I’m now at a kind of system that works for me, but probably won’t work for anyone else. This is the way.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Obsidian has the sama problem as Bullet Journaling does. It's really simple and not complicated unless you want it to be, but then you watch a video about one Mega User who is really into the System and get demoralised by the amount of crap and whizbangs you see.
  - al_borland 3y ago
    One thing I appreciate about Ryder Carroll‘s original explanation about bullet journals, was that it was pretty simple. It seems it was the Pinterest and other such social media folks who complicated it. I use a semi-bullet journal method in my Obsidian notebook for work, but it’s even more basic than what Ryder Carroll outlined and I don’t care that much. Not caring is extremely helpful.
    - theshrike79 3y ago
      I have a similar thing, I was a semi-regular BuJoer some years ago but then I noticed that even though I did enjoy the physical action of writing stuff down - I forgot to write things down eventually. The time from idea to finding my notebook and the correct place to write something down was too long. Now my system is geared towards minimal friction from "crap, I need to remember this" to actually storing it in Obsidian. Currently I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that activates when I double tap the key on the left side of 1 on my keyboard, which then will activate Obsidian (or start it if needed) and brings it to the front with a QuickAdd dialog where I can write down whatever I was thinking about. QuickAdd will then append it to an Inbox file with a timestamp. I might take a look at it later or maybe not, but at least it's written down _somewhere_ =)
klum 3y ago
Agreed on the power-user stuff and the courses. I use Obsidian in a simple way, but it's nice that the extensibility and the community is there. Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried. As mentioned elsewhere, users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. I don't think most of those drive-by open-source commenters have thought about the work that goes into running an open-source project. In other words, on some theoretical plane I'd like Obsidian to be an open-source native app, but in reality those things haven't bothered me at all. The app is as simple as I want it to be, as complex as I need it to be, and it's regularly improved in a thoughtful way.
- georgejfrick 3y ago
  You can paste images now as of the latest version; it was driving me crazy as well. Even in older versions you can drag an image in but that was an extra step.
- rubslopes 3y ago
  > users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. Completely agree. Not everything needs to be open-sourced. If I'm looking for a framework/library to build something upon, sure, I'll prioritize open-source. But -- and this may be a hot take -- for a consumer-oriented software, sometimes a great vision trumps community development.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  > Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried. Dude, VSCode is a freaking IDE, running all sorts of processes in the background (at least one terminal, language servers, type checkers, linters and formatters, possibly extensions, etc.) whereas Obsidian is just a text editor.
  - klum 3y ago
packetlost 3y ago
You definitely can't just jump into zettelkasten, but it is actually used in various modified forms. I've been doing so for years and know of a number of others that do as well.
- JoeJonathan 3y ago
  On the other hand, I'm a professional academic, and I haven't ever met a highly productive scholar who uses ZK.
  - packetlost 3y ago
    Yeah, most of the academics I know have a pile in OneNote or mountains of paper notebooks. I don't know if zk is good for research tbh, but I do think you can take some ideas from it. I personally use "bullet journaling" + a modified zk method. I'd be curious to hear what the "highly productive" academics you know use.
BenFranklin100 3y ago
As a heavy OneNote user, I was stymied by Obsidian for a long while as the mental models are different. OneNote is best thought of as an actual paper notebook, where pages can inserted, re-arranged to one’s liking, images pasted into the page, etc.. Obsidian is better thought of as a sophisticated overlay to the file system. It’s ultimately more powerful than OneNote, but does have some frustrating limitations for the OneNote/Notion/Scrivener user as not being able to manually sort notes. For now I’m using both but ultimately will switch to Obsidian as it develops (hopefully) further.
behnamoh 3y ago
I tried it a few times but had to stop because: 1. Obsidian imposes its own take on Markdown. For instance, why can't we disable "indent using the tab key"? It's so annoying to accidentally indent/quote text while pressing tab to do something like "accept autocomplete suggestion". Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/40868/30 https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/... 2. I had to install tens of plugins to give Obsidian the features I needed, which felt too hacky and unstable in the long term. 3. I don't want to learn a new set of keyboard shortcuts for simple things like expand/collapse the sidebars. You can customize lots of things but at that point, why not stay in your IDE (e.g., VSCode) and simply add Vim Wiki extenions?
- rigmarole 3y ago
  Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understand the passion for our tools!) #3 I'd likely be using my IDE (nvim) as well, except that I rely a lot on media and attachments for my work. And I just like to have dashboard/Kanban style views of things.
  - geoelectric 3y ago
    In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments. I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say. All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports. Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed. As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over. But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.
sergiomattei 3y ago
I don’t use Obsidian, but I use wikilinks in markdown. Recently I wrote a lightweight alternative to Dataview, which renders directly into the markdown itself. It’s a lightweight standalone script that embeds any references and builds those “recaps” in a more portable way. In case anyone is interested, let me know: https://twitter.com/matteing/status/1746598313745371263 https://twitter.com/matteing/status/1746598313745371263
- JHonaker 3y ago
  Yea, throw the link to it out here. I was about to write something similar, so you’d save me the trouble! ;)
  - sergiomattei 3y ago
    What's your email?
ddanieltan 3y ago
OP here. Absolutely! I didn't want to go too in-depth into plugins because I wanted to emphasise Obsidian's basic features but DataView is also a plugin that I love!
nullandvoid 3y ago
If you want to setup a zettelkasten like system for free, with minimal effort / requirement on any plugins (just "templater" will be helpful) I highly recommend https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-part-1/ https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-... No affiliation, just a happy user for over a year now. If you take kindle highlights when you read, the https://github.com/hadynz/obsidian-kindle-plugin https://github.com/hadynz/obsidian-kindle-plugin plugin is amazing for auto generating source files with those highlights in (and other templated sections you wish to include in a review).
bloopernova 3y ago
I tried zettlekasten and found I just didn't use it enough to justify the effort involved. Instead I just have an org-mode folder that I dump documents in. I search across them with Deft in Emacs. Sure, the links between documents can be incredibly useful to some people, but I've found I'm more chaotic than that.
- mklepaczewski 3y ago
  I just use "search" on my Obsidian notes, and that's enough for me. Instead of zettelkasten, I would prefer to have AI hooked to my notes, which I can query like "Find my notes about Symfony request life cycle". I don't think it would be a life changer, just a nice addition.
- safety1st 3y ago
  I have read a bit about Zettelkasten and watched a video explaining it, and to me it feels like a pretty random collection of mostly good ideas on organizing information. Right up there with drinking coffee on exactly two specific days per week... https://zettelkasten.de/posts/practical-integration-deep-work/ https://zettelkasten.de/posts/practical-integration-deep-wor... I think this stuff is esoteric and personal enough that we are under no obligation to follow it to the letter.
  - jslakro 3y ago
    Esoteric and personal are both adjectives I didn't find before to describe what Zettelkasten represents. That kind of thing that you need to visit again and again until you realize it doesn't fit to your own way of thinking
- kstrauser 3y ago
  I’ve written off Zettelkasten. It’s not for me. It seems to be optimized for turning notes into publications, but that’s not my own goal behind taking notes. For me, good ol’ wiki style interlinking is much more useful (and vastly easier). I use the “Map of Content” ideas to have a few quick indexes, like “Current work projects” or “orders from restaurants we like”, but that’s about the most formal organization I do. If I had a career in writing, I might seriously consider Zettelkasten. But even then, I’d be cautious with its output. I’ve seen some results that looked like it was great for shoving words onto paper, so long as you don’t worry about the quality of the end result.
smusamashah 3y ago
As a OneNote person for two years now, how do you deal with the added friction of linear notes in Obsidian (or any other plaintext based tool)? In OneNote I can just dump down anything literally anywhere (because each page is an infinite canvas). It feels as easy as having a pen and random free papers. But with my notes increasing, I do want to have some way to manage this data which OneNote fails at. I can do basic text/OCR search but that's it. There is no linking etc. All note management is manual. I usually search for an actual open source OneNote alternative (with easy jottable infinite canvases) every 6 months or so. Obsidian has added Canvases but they are definitely not a OneNote alternative at the moment.
- vondur 3y ago
  I use OneNote at work, but it's just for mostly plain text and a few images pasted here and there. However, OneNote seems to get really flaky when the Notebooks themselves become too big or have too many PDF attachments inserted.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  I never understood the appeal of infinite canvas. Something about it makes me feel like I'm not in full control of my notes/documents. I like it when the information is clearly structured.
  - smusamashah 3y ago
    I don't use the width of the canvas, but what I do love/appreciate is the way I can click anywhere and start writing. It feels as easy as pen and paper. I can go in any direction. It doesn't have to be infinite canvas in practice, just allow enough width and length to let you put down your cursor anywhere and start writing/pasting images or whatever you wish.
    - mey 3y ago
      Obsidian added a Canvas document type in the last year that you may be interested in. https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas
KolenCh 3y ago
One tip I’d have is to go easy on plugins. One can try to explores what are available, but when committing (to have it enabled and relying on it) be cautious about its implications on performance and startup time (there is a setting that can show you plugin load time at every startup.) And as you scales the number of plugins and files, test it on multiple platforms. P.S. I learn this the hard way that each time I open Obsidian on iPhone (14 Pro which is not slow) it will hangs indefinitely without being able to open a file. On iPadOS it is ok albeit slow to start. I suspect it is related to having too many files (including git and git sub modules) inside and relying on iCloud sync. But basically I tested out things works great on Mac without constantly checking how well it works on iPhone and then now I’m in a situation it’s difficult to roll back some of the decisions I made.
- al_borland 3y ago
  This is good advice for anything that supports plugins. Web browsers, VS Code, whatever else. Plugins can be useful, but too many is almost always a problem.
- Jakob 3y ago
  iCloud removes files from local storage randomly and downloading them again is very slow and gets stuck often. I think that is the main reason why obsidian hangs at the start on the iPhone. I have not yet figured out, how to keep iCloud files reliably on local storage on iOS. It seems independent of free storage and file size and is driving me mad. Very sad that Apple does not succeed in syncing files. The same issue was there with iTools, mobile me, and now iCloud.
  - KolenCh 3y ago
    People using Obsidian Sync said it solves these issues (I guess by using a database rather than directly via file I/Os.) There are other solutions via plugins too. E.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, or GitHub. There was a post earlier in HN which is a reimplementation of Obsidian Sync, but it seems their reversed engineering uncovered something not secure there and Obsidian soon made a patch breaking that. There might be workarounds to fix it, but I haven't closely follow it. When I have the time to do the refactoring and cleaning, I will probably choose one of these alternatives (or even an alternative of Obsidian if there are better solutions for me.)
fzil 3y ago
> And, please, don't buy one of these $500 Obsidian courses. It's weird how there's even a large enough market for all of these in the first place.
- rchaud 3y ago
  It started with Notion and Roam. There's a whole cottage industry of courses designed to make you "master" these tools. A lot of their users are in school or university, and given that the marketing of these tools is all about improving productivity, I can see why those courses sell.
jasonpeacock 3y ago
"I'm 99% convinced that no one actually _understands_ zettelkasten" Fixed that for you ;) For real, anyone interested should go read the original book (How to Take Smart Notes[1]) and you learn that it's not about creating backlinks between your notes (that's just a wiki or personal knowledge base). It's about capturing ideas inspired by your reading, etc. and linking them other ideas. Yes, building your own personal knowledge base can be very powerful, but that's something different. [1] https://a.co/d/5Ntl43P https://a.co/d/5Ntl43P
- douglaskayama 3y ago
  I kind of understood Zettelkasten only after I implemented it with slip notes in analogue form. I had read How to Take Smart Notes, zettelkasten.de, watched several videos, etc., but I only got more confused. Then I read Antinet Zettelkasten, by Scott Scheper, implemented the system on paper, and finally I understood the system. Now I could go back to Obsidian and implement my Zettelkasten in Obsidian again in a way that would be much more straightforward than what I had tried the first time (and honestly, sometimes I think of doing that because of the convenience of digital). But I enjoy writing on paper and using my fountain pens.
- 121789 3y ago
  That was one of the worst books I’ve ever read. I went into it expecting practical advice and found mostly vague hyperbolic promises of the magical benefits. If the hypothesis was that this note taking method produces lower effort, higher quality output, then the author either didn’t use the system or the book is evidence against its effectiveness
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    Thank you. Those are my thoughts exactly. The title was wrong: it should've been "Why to Take Smart Notes". I'd already decided I was interested before I ever bought the book and I wish it hadn't wasted 3/4 of pages trying to further convince me. I finished it and still had no idea how to practically implement the magical system it described. I've also never read a book so packed with redundancy.
dist-epoch 3y ago
Zettelkasten was created for a world which didn't have computers. People are cargo-culting it today without thinking if it still makes sense. Zettelkasten author would not have created it today, because it makes no sense when you have much more efficient ways to index/search information with a computer.
- funcDropShadow 3y ago
  What many people ignore from Ahrens description of Luhmann's Zettelkasten, is that it isn't an indexing system to find pre-existing knowledge/texts. It is the place where he stored his own insight, his own summaries, his own formulation of ideas he found somewhere. The book quotes Luhmann even before the table of contents with "One cannot think without writing." Strictly speaking, this is obviously not true. Metaphorically speaking it is something that many proficient authors have concluded as well. They need to write in order to make progress. And then Luhmann used this one space of notes, the Zettelkasten to work on all his publications. This allowed him to find shared ideas between different projects of him. I've got the impression that many tried Zettelkasten as the one true note taking system just dumped stuff they found in blog articles into pages in their storage system for later retrieval. Nothing is wrong about that, but that is not Luhmanns idea of Zettelkasten.
SnowingXIV 3y ago
Me too, one of my favorite pieces of software (I've been using Obsidian for a few years now). The fact that there are courses is hilarious, but anyways. I found it enjoyable to start from the absolute bare install and add notes like a regular to-do. Eventually adding up additional plugins that you need. My use case is daily software engineering notes, and I have a simple button/command that creates a new note for the day in a specific format. I love that there isn't so much extra junk that came along with the big note taking apps. Other than that, I have vim mode and a few other things, but not much. Themed it to match the rest of my setup and terminal, it feels like an easy extension to the workflow. I have a few folders broken out for commands and constants I like to refer back to (and can search for!) Maybe a neat one-liner. Plenty of code snippets.

rthkljlkrj 3y ago

The plugin ecosystem for obsidian is insanely large, and I say that not in a good way. I agree, just ignore all of that. Plain files and internal links, that's it.

PurpleRamen 3y ago
More specifically, Obsidian shows me, at this moment, 1382 plugins available from the app itself. Some more are probably not available there. And an insanely large amount of them also seems to be already broken, abandoned or having a rather poor quality or just duplicating each other's features with a slight twist in flavor. I guess, it's now big enough, that having some pre-selection of high quality-plugins accessible from within the app, would make sense.
rchaud 3y ago
It feels like WordPress. Core product is solid but minimal in features, expectation is for plugin developers to provide the rest. WordPress was FOSS though.

jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago

Because who doesn't love running random github repos in a root process?

aosaigh 3y ago
No mention of Github repos in the parent comment.
- jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
  All Obsidian plugins are just cloned github repos
  - lloydatkinson 3y ago
    Really? Shit that’s terrible. I need to review what plugins I’m using.
    - jdksmdbtbdnmsm 3y ago
      Yeah it's really sad. I just wish I could pin each plugin to a commit hash. It would be incredible and so easy to do.

ssgodderidge 3y ago

100% agree. The barrier to using Obsidian can seem intimidatingly high before jumping in. I tried and failed a few different systems before I just started using the daily notes as scratch pads. From there, I figured out more and more slowly over time. I’m now at a kind of system that works for me, but probably won’t work for anyone else. This is the way.

theshrike79 3y ago
Obsidian has the sama problem as Bullet Journaling does. It's really simple and not complicated unless you want it to be, but then you watch a video about one Mega User who is really into the System and get demoralised by the amount of crap and whizbangs you see.
- al_borland 3y ago
  One thing I appreciate about Ryder Carroll‘s original explanation about bullet journals, was that it was pretty simple. It seems it was the Pinterest and other such social media folks who complicated it. I use a semi-bullet journal method in my Obsidian notebook for work, but it’s even more basic than what Ryder Carroll outlined and I don’t care that much. Not caring is extremely helpful.
  - theshrike79 3y ago
    I have a similar thing, I was a semi-regular BuJoer some years ago but then I noticed that even though I did enjoy the physical action of writing stuff down - I forgot to write things down eventually. The time from idea to finding my notebook and the correct place to write something down was too long. Now my system is geared towards minimal friction from "crap, I need to remember this" to actually storing it in Obsidian. Currently I have a Keyboard Maestro macro that activates when I double tap the key on the left side of 1 on my keyboard, which then will activate Obsidian (or start it if needed) and brings it to the front with a QuickAdd dialog where I can write down whatever I was thinking about. QuickAdd will then append it to an Inbox file with a timestamp. I might take a look at it later or maybe not, but at least it's written down _somewhere_ =)

klum 3y ago

Agreed on the power-user stuff and the courses. I use Obsidian in a simple way, but it's nice that the extensibility and the community is there. Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried. As mentioned elsewhere, users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. I don't think most of those drive-by open-source commenters have thought about the work that goes into running an open-source project. In other words, on some theoretical plane I'd like Obsidian to be an open-source native app, but in reality those things haven't bothered me at all. The app is as simple as I want it to be, as complex as I need it to be, and it's regularly improved in a thoughtful way.

georgejfrick 3y ago
You can paste images now as of the latest version; it was driving me crazy as well. Even in older versions you can drag an image in but that was an extra step.
rubslopes 3y ago
> users frequently ask for Obsidian to be open source, but the fully transferrable file format is enough for me. Completely agree. Not everything needs to be open-sourced. If I'm looking for a framework/library to build something upon, sure, I'll prioritize open-source. But -- and this may be a hot take -- for a consumer-oriented software, sometimes a great vision trumps community development.
behnamoh 3y ago
> Unlike VS Code, Obsidian is (for me) an actual example of an Electron app that feels fast. The quick open/command palette features are more responsive than similar features in native Mac apps I've tried. Dude, VSCode is a freaking IDE, running all sorts of processes in the background (at least one terminal, language servers, type checkers, linters and formatters, possibly extensions, etc.) whereas Obsidian is just a text editor.
- klum 3y ago

packetlost 3y ago

You definitely can't just jump into zettelkasten, but it is actually used in various modified forms. I've been doing so for years and know of a number of others that do as well.

JoeJonathan 3y ago
On the other hand, I'm a professional academic, and I haven't ever met a highly productive scholar who uses ZK.
- packetlost 3y ago
  Yeah, most of the academics I know have a pile in OneNote or mountains of paper notebooks. I don't know if zk is good for research tbh, but I do think you can take some ideas from it. I personally use "bullet journaling" + a modified zk method. I'd be curious to hear what the "highly productive" academics you know use.

BenFranklin100 3y ago

As a heavy OneNote user, I was stymied by Obsidian for a long while as the mental models are different. OneNote is best thought of as an actual paper notebook, where pages can inserted, re-arranged to one’s liking, images pasted into the page, etc.. Obsidian is better thought of as a sophisticated overlay to the file system. It’s ultimately more powerful than OneNote, but does have some frustrating limitations for the OneNote/Notion/Scrivener user as not being able to manually sort notes. For now I’m using both but ultimately will switch to Obsidian as it develops (hopefully) further.

behnamoh 3y ago

I tried it a few times but had to stop because: 1. Obsidian imposes its own take on Markdown. For instance, why can't we disable "indent using the tab key"? It's so annoying to accidentally indent/quote text while pressing tab to do something like "accept autocomplete suggestion". Obsidian's response to users' complaints about this was not reassuring: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/40868/30 https://forum.obsidian.md/t/option-to-disable-tab-to-indent/... 2. I had to install tens of plugins to give Obsidian the features I needed, which felt too hacky and unstable in the long term. 3. I don't want to learn a new set of keyboard shortcuts for simple things like expand/collapse the sidebars. You can customize lots of things but at that point, why not stay in your IDE (e.g., VSCode) and simply add Vim Wiki extenions?

rigmarole 3y ago
Those are all good points. But to be clear for point #1, the devs never responded to this feature request. What you see in that thread is a couple of the community moderators (myself included, and all of my replies are tempered with "and I'd like it too") discussing some of the reasoning for why it likely is the way it currently is, and mostly just trying to simmer strong accusatory language. (But I totally understand the passion for our tools!) #3 I'd likely be using my IDE (nvim) as well, except that I rely a lot on media and attachments for my work. And I just like to have dashboard/Kanban style views of things.
- geoelectric 3y ago
  In retrospect, you all did a decent job of evenly responding to my spicy comments. I will admit I assumed at least one of my direct responses was from someone involved directly with the development or design, or I probably wouldn’t have taken the confrontational stance I did. A year or so later, it does feel a bit accusatory, as you say. All said though, I also don’t use that forum anymore (though I sometimes land on it from Google searching for plugins or tips) and I certainly don’t submit bug reports. Obsidian’s biggest flaw remains, IMO, that there’s not a good way to report an issue with any confidence it’ll get an even chance of being addressed. As far as I could tell, at least at the time, if the devs didn’t jump on it immediately, it’d end up automoved to a graveyard before it could ever possibly get traction. When things felt like they started getting actively argued down without considering user stances, that’s what tipped me over. But, as I said in another comment, I eventually came back to Obsidian and renewed the commercial license so I could use it at work. It is a good system. I just think it’d be that much better with a more effective feedback loop.

sergiomattei 3y ago

I don’t use Obsidian, but I use wikilinks in markdown. Recently I wrote a lightweight alternative to Dataview, which renders directly into the markdown itself. It’s a lightweight standalone script that embeds any references and builds those “recaps” in a more portable way. In case anyone is interested, let me know: https://twitter.com/matteing/status/1746598313745371263 https://twitter.com/matteing/status/1746598313745371263

JHonaker 3y ago
Yea, throw the link to it out here. I was about to write something similar, so you’d save me the trouble! ;)
- sergiomattei 3y ago
  What's your email?

ddanieltan 3y ago

OP here. Absolutely! I didn't want to go too in-depth into plugins because I wanted to emphasise Obsidian's basic features but DataView is also a plugin that I love!

nullandvoid 3y ago

If you want to setup a zettelkasten like system for free, with minimal effort / requirement on any plugins (just "templater" will be helpful) I highly recommend https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-part-1/ https://reasonabledeviations.com/2022/04/18/molecular-notes-... No affiliation, just a happy user for over a year now. If you take kindle highlights when you read, the https://github.com/hadynz/obsidian-kindle-plugin https://github.com/hadynz/obsidian-kindle-plugin plugin is amazing for auto generating source files with those highlights in (and other templated sections you wish to include in a review).

bloopernova 3y ago

I tried zettlekasten and found I just didn't use it enough to justify the effort involved. Instead I just have an org-mode folder that I dump documents in. I search across them with Deft in Emacs. Sure, the links between documents can be incredibly useful to some people, but I've found I'm more chaotic than that.

mklepaczewski 3y ago
I just use "search" on my Obsidian notes, and that's enough for me. Instead of zettelkasten, I would prefer to have AI hooked to my notes, which I can query like "Find my notes about Symfony request life cycle". I don't think it would be a life changer, just a nice addition.
safety1st 3y ago
I have read a bit about Zettelkasten and watched a video explaining it, and to me it feels like a pretty random collection of mostly good ideas on organizing information. Right up there with drinking coffee on exactly two specific days per week... https://zettelkasten.de/posts/practical-integration-deep-work/ https://zettelkasten.de/posts/practical-integration-deep-wor... I think this stuff is esoteric and personal enough that we are under no obligation to follow it to the letter.
- jslakro 3y ago
  Esoteric and personal are both adjectives I didn't find before to describe what Zettelkasten represents. That kind of thing that you need to visit again and again until you realize it doesn't fit to your own way of thinking
kstrauser 3y ago
I’ve written off Zettelkasten. It’s not for me. It seems to be optimized for turning notes into publications, but that’s not my own goal behind taking notes. For me, good ol’ wiki style interlinking is much more useful (and vastly easier). I use the “Map of Content” ideas to have a few quick indexes, like “Current work projects” or “orders from restaurants we like”, but that’s about the most formal organization I do. If I had a career in writing, I might seriously consider Zettelkasten. But even then, I’d be cautious with its output. I’ve seen some results that looked like it was great for shoving words onto paper, so long as you don’t worry about the quality of the end result.

smusamashah 3y ago

As a OneNote person for two years now, how do you deal with the added friction of linear notes in Obsidian (or any other plaintext based tool)? In OneNote I can just dump down anything literally anywhere (because each page is an infinite canvas). It feels as easy as having a pen and random free papers. But with my notes increasing, I do want to have some way to manage this data which OneNote fails at. I can do basic text/OCR search but that's it. There is no linking etc. All note management is manual. I usually search for an actual open source OneNote alternative (with easy jottable infinite canvases) every 6 months or so. Obsidian has added Canvases but they are definitely not a OneNote alternative at the moment.

vondur 3y ago
I use OneNote at work, but it's just for mostly plain text and a few images pasted here and there. However, OneNote seems to get really flaky when the Notebooks themselves become too big or have too many PDF attachments inserted.
behnamoh 3y ago
I never understood the appeal of infinite canvas. Something about it makes me feel like I'm not in full control of my notes/documents. I like it when the information is clearly structured.
- smusamashah 3y ago
  I don't use the width of the canvas, but what I do love/appreciate is the way I can click anywhere and start writing. It feels as easy as pen and paper. I can go in any direction. It doesn't have to be infinite canvas in practice, just allow enough width and length to let you put down your cursor anywhere and start writing/pasting images or whatever you wish.
  - mey 3y ago
    Obsidian added a Canvas document type in the last year that you may be interested in. https://obsidian.md/canvas https://obsidian.md/canvas

KolenCh 3y ago

One tip I’d have is to go easy on plugins. One can try to explores what are available, but when committing (to have it enabled and relying on it) be cautious about its implications on performance and startup time (there is a setting that can show you plugin load time at every startup.) And as you scales the number of plugins and files, test it on multiple platforms. P.S. I learn this the hard way that each time I open Obsidian on iPhone (14 Pro which is not slow) it will hangs indefinitely without being able to open a file. On iPadOS it is ok albeit slow to start. I suspect it is related to having too many files (including git and git sub modules) inside and relying on iCloud sync. But basically I tested out things works great on Mac without constantly checking how well it works on iPhone and then now I’m in a situation it’s difficult to roll back some of the decisions I made.

al_borland 3y ago
This is good advice for anything that supports plugins. Web browsers, VS Code, whatever else. Plugins can be useful, but too many is almost always a problem.
Jakob 3y ago
iCloud removes files from local storage randomly and downloading them again is very slow and gets stuck often. I think that is the main reason why obsidian hangs at the start on the iPhone. I have not yet figured out, how to keep iCloud files reliably on local storage on iOS. It seems independent of free storage and file size and is driving me mad. Very sad that Apple does not succeed in syncing files. The same issue was there with iTools, mobile me, and now iCloud.
- KolenCh 3y ago
  People using Obsidian Sync said it solves these issues (I guess by using a database rather than directly via file I/Os.) There are other solutions via plugins too. E.g. Dropbox, Google Drive, or GitHub. There was a post earlier in HN which is a reimplementation of Obsidian Sync, but it seems their reversed engineering uncovered something not secure there and Obsidian soon made a patch breaking that. There might be workarounds to fix it, but I haven't closely follow it. When I have the time to do the refactoring and cleaning, I will probably choose one of these alternatives (or even an alternative of Obsidian if there are better solutions for me.)

fzil 3y ago

> And, please, don't buy one of these $500 Obsidian courses. It's weird how there's even a large enough market for all of these in the first place.

rchaud 3y ago
It started with Notion and Roam. There's a whole cottage industry of courses designed to make you "master" these tools. A lot of their users are in school or university, and given that the marketing of these tools is all about improving productivity, I can see why those courses sell.

jasonpeacock 3y ago

"I'm 99% convinced that no one actually _understands_ zettelkasten" Fixed that for you ;) For real, anyone interested should go read the original book (How to Take Smart Notes[1]) and you learn that it's not about creating backlinks between your notes (that's just a wiki or personal knowledge base). It's about capturing ideas inspired by your reading, etc. and linking them other ideas. Yes, building your own personal knowledge base can be very powerful, but that's something different. [1] https://a.co/d/5Ntl43P https://a.co/d/5Ntl43P

douglaskayama 3y ago
I kind of understood Zettelkasten only after I implemented it with slip notes in analogue form. I had read How to Take Smart Notes, zettelkasten.de, watched several videos, etc., but I only got more confused. Then I read Antinet Zettelkasten, by Scott Scheper, implemented the system on paper, and finally I understood the system. Now I could go back to Obsidian and implement my Zettelkasten in Obsidian again in a way that would be much more straightforward than what I had tried the first time (and honestly, sometimes I think of doing that because of the convenience of digital). But I enjoy writing on paper and using my fountain pens.
121789 3y ago
That was one of the worst books I’ve ever read. I went into it expecting practical advice and found mostly vague hyperbolic promises of the magical benefits. If the hypothesis was that this note taking method produces lower effort, higher quality output, then the author either didn’t use the system or the book is evidence against its effectiveness
- kstrauser 3y ago
  Thank you. Those are my thoughts exactly. The title was wrong: it should've been "Why to Take Smart Notes". I'd already decided I was interested before I ever bought the book and I wish it hadn't wasted 3/4 of pages trying to further convince me. I finished it and still had no idea how to practically implement the magical system it described. I've also never read a book so packed with redundancy.

dist-epoch 3y ago

Zettelkasten was created for a world which didn't have computers. People are cargo-culting it today without thinking if it still makes sense. Zettelkasten author would not have created it today, because it makes no sense when you have much more efficient ways to index/search information with a computer.

funcDropShadow 3y ago
What many people ignore from Ahrens description of Luhmann's Zettelkasten, is that it isn't an indexing system to find pre-existing knowledge/texts. It is the place where he stored his own insight, his own summaries, his own formulation of ideas he found somewhere. The book quotes Luhmann even before the table of contents with "One cannot think without writing." Strictly speaking, this is obviously not true. Metaphorically speaking it is something that many proficient authors have concluded as well. They need to write in order to make progress. And then Luhmann used this one space of notes, the Zettelkasten to work on all his publications. This allowed him to find shared ideas between different projects of him. I've got the impression that many tried Zettelkasten as the one true note taking system just dumped stuff they found in blog articles into pages in their storage system for later retrieval. Nothing is wrong about that, but that is not Luhmanns idea of Zettelkasten.

SnowingXIV 3y ago

Me too, one of my favorite pieces of software (I've been using Obsidian for a few years now). The fact that there are courses is hilarious, but anyways. I found it enjoyable to start from the absolute bare install and add notes like a regular to-do. Eventually adding up additional plugins that you need. My use case is daily software engineering notes, and I have a simple button/command that creates a new note for the day in a specific format. I love that there isn't so much extra junk that came along with the big note taking apps. Other than that, I have vim mode and a few other things, but not much. Themed it to match the rest of my setup and terminal, it feels like an easy extension to the workflow. I have a few folders broken out for commands and constants I like to refer back to (and can search for!) Maybe a neat one-liner. Plenty of code snippets.