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I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it co

• nylonstrung 1y ago
  I highly recommend Siyuan as an alternative, it has many the best features from obsidian plugins included by default
  • TheFuzzball 1y ago
    Coming from Logseq... this looks ideal for me.
  • barbazoo 1y ago
    I can’t believe my eyes. Is that the self hosted notion alternative many of us have been looking for?
  • ujkhsjkdhf234 1y ago
    SiYuan doesn't have canvas. Obsidian Canvas is great for diagrams.
  • Wolfbeta 1y ago
    Dev has a history of installing cryptominers in his previous projects and rootkitting people into starring and forking his projects. https://www.v2ex.com/t/534800 https://www.v2ex.com/t/534800
    • shunia_huang 1y ago
      I think the difference here is that Siyuan is fully open source, which means you have more confidence here. Thanks for bringing this history up, and I think everyone should be careful when downloading a new version for this product, or better build by themselves after checking out the recents commits with some AI tools.
• Eji1700 1y ago
  I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be. A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch". Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy. Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two. Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be. Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear. Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way? I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile. I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this. Edit- To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.
  • azeirah 1y ago
    The default search is not great and the syntax of the dataview plugin is not amazingly well designed. Even the author of dataview admitted to that. The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik
  • Waterluvian 1y ago
• clickety_clack 1y ago
  I just use it as a personal wiki, so plugins are overkill for me. I was basically using it as a way to basically have txt files with latex and it fits the bill.
  • Ezhik 1y ago
    One of the best things about Obsidian is that even all this new stuff is done through built-in plugins and can just be turned off.
• dimitri-vs 1y ago
  It's not you, it's the productivity influencers making you think it's "supposed to be" more than what it is: a nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files. I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing). Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative links and weird plugins that break the premise of having universal markdown files. Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
  • Nathanba 1y ago
    > nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files wow okay, I kept thinking that there must be more to it, why does it only list my files that I can already see in my filetree on the left, like what's the point? I was expecting to see something like what Atlassian has in Confluence (which was also far more intuitive to create btw) https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a-database/ https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a...
  • dustincoates 1y ago
    While I agree that the zettle-nerds take it way too far, I disagree with this: > Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes. I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my "<Project> Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).
• AstroBen 1y ago
  Start with the problem you're trying to solve and use the features to solve it. Don't just try to cram its features into your life
• muppetman 1y ago
  There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them. Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want. But don't install Obsidian and then spend hours adding addons. You'll get overwhelmed, confused and wondering why all the Influenzers are saying it's CHANGED THEIR LIFE. It hasn't.
  • cloud_watching 1y ago
    Obsidian is amazing because it is a notepad with pretty colors and the graph that gets everyone's attention. The graph is often the most overhyped and underused thing there. It looks complicated and that's the selling point of all that ecosystem around productivity systems and all that. The appearance of deep complexity and work. I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134
    • JonChesterfield 1y ago
      It's _also_ a notepad that runs on android and synchronises mostly successfully with machines elsewhere. I'm ignoring the plugins entirely but getting lots of use out of the text synchronisation across multiple machines.
      • muppetman 1y ago
        This is one thing I love about it too, Obsidian Sync is very well done and great for moving text files around the place easily.
        • dtkav 1y ago
          Obsidian Sync is a really solid (and complementary) product.
• hifikuno 1y ago
  I was kinda similar when I first started using it. I watched heaps of videos and had so many plugins installed but I was never really sure if I was doing it "right". Then one day I got annoyed and uninstalled every plugin and just went back to basics. I only reach for plugins when I feel something is missing, but honestly the only plugins I use are Style Settings which let's me customize the theme a bit more and Calendar so I can have... well... a calendar. I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!
  • theshrike79 1y ago
    Linter and Templater are the two I can't live without. The rest are just nice to have.
• BenFranklin100 1y ago
  You’re not the only one. I invested months on Obsidian before walking away and returning to OneNote. It’s advertised as a ‘second brain’ but at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer. You can’t even manually sort notes and folders. Directory Opus can do that and more. Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.
  • kid64 1y ago
    Breakage is the best-case scenario. Mass data exfiltration is the bigger concern. The community plugin system is both an unacceptable security risk, and a necessary part of achieving even a baseline level of usability. Imagine the scale of theft that must already have taken place.. the targets may never even know. The fact that Obsidian falsely claims to audit this cesspool is hilarious.
    • BenFranklin100 1y ago
      It is an hilarious claim. They don’t have enough resources to implement critical features, much less waste developer time auditing every random Tom, Dick, or Harry plugin contribution.
      • kid64 1y ago
        I can count their staff on one hand. And at any given time, half of them are busy playing D&D. No vision or leadership.
  • jve 1y ago
    > at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer For me it's a feature.
    • BenFranklin100 1y ago
• crossroadsguy 1y ago
  If all you need is just daily/one-off notes/jottings then Obsidian is not at all something you might want to use. Because, as excellent and a powerful tool it is for right purposes, even w/o its horde of plugins, it will be an overkill for just note taking. My assumption is based on just this comment of yours but you might want to try simpler note taking apps - that just does one thing - note taking, nothing else. Preferably a plain text note taking app for your OS. When I was looking for nv->then->simplenote replacement Joplin and Obsidian didn't even stay on the radar for more than a few mins.
  • bccdee 1y ago
    Idk—I use Obsidian all the time & I don't even [[link]] my notes, much less need a database feature like this. Regardless of how many features it has, it is also simply a good markdown editor at heart.
  • zevon 1y ago
    Debatable. I use Obsidian specifically because it can be relatively minimalist and it's easy to get the view I want and use 99% of the time: List of files on the left, main note window (sometimes with tabs and/or split) in the middle and a calendar that can jump me to a daily note on click on the right. You can't make such relatively small UI adjustments in the more minimalist note-taking apps, so even if you may not use all of the functions and plugins, Obsidian can still be a relevant choice.
• profsummergig 1y ago
  Off topic, but I discovered this recently: http://tangentnotes.com/ http://tangentnotes.com/ Similar to Obsidian, but offers good code syntax highlighting in markdown files. I found it useful for reading code in markdown.
  • tietjens 1y ago
    You can also create a code block in markdown and then write the language type at the top. This also creates highlighting. ‘’’go {your code} ‘’’
    • profsummergig 1y ago
      Thanks for this tip. I've seen this feature off and on in some online code editors. I didn't know this was a (universal?) Markdown feature. Is it supposed to work universally in all Markdown editors (e.g. VSCode's Markdown view)?
      • tietjens 1y ago
        I know it works in Obsidian. I believe it also works in VSCode.
  • wiether 1y ago
    > Supports ... code blocks with syntax highlighting. Based on the documentation and the screenshot next to it, I don't see how it differs from Obsidian on this point. A Markdown code block in Obsidian is going to be highlighted as expected. Actually it appears that they both relies on Prism to achieve this : - https://help.obsidian.md/syntax#Code+blocks https://help.obsidian.md/syntax#Code+blocks - https://github.com/suchnsuch/Tangent/blob/main/apps/tangent-electron/package.json#L59 https://github.com/suchnsuch/Tangent/blob/main/apps/tangent-...
    • profsummergig 1y ago
      I've used Obsidian and Tangent. For whatever reason, I've found Tangent's code highlighting brighter, more colorful, and (maybe hence?) more easily readable. Obsidian is more muted. Steve Jobs would have preferred Obsidian.
• dmje 1y ago
  Just use it how you want to use it. For me, a bit of structure is enough - too much and it becomes unwieldy. But don’t let anyone tell you it’ll either save your life or become your “second brain”, that’s all bullshit. Just stick with no plugins or a small and solid set of ones you love. For me probably the only absolutely critical plugin is omnisearch, but YMWV. My other advice is that it’s fine to boot up new vaults for other things. I’ve got two main vaults - a sort of work KB and a journal. But then I’ve got a bunch of smaller ones - songs I’m writing, courses I’m making, writing. Don’t be told that you’ve got to get some kind of universal thing that does everything. This is also b/s and often pedalled by the productivity wonks.
• bryanhogan 1y ago
  Obsidian can do a lot, but in the end it should be a tool to help you do other stuff. Just use it for what you want to use it. And if you want to explore plugins, themes, snippets, etc., think what about what you want to do, then find solutions for that. It can be fun to explore various features and extensions, but set limits and try to keep things simple rather than complex.