What I was left wondering about is why would you use Obsidian over Devonthink which seems much more powerful and provides a lot of the linking capability inherently and has integrated cross platform applications
I have way too many silos of information. Even with hook and linking I’m trying to simplify rather than add another silo.
I think it comes down to backlinks.
DT now has back links. Personally I find Obsidian a much more pleasing environment for writing, and has many tools and plugins designed specifically for that end. DT remains a document manager made first for browsing and cataloguing, not creating (even if it’s possible).
Agree. Still loving DEVONthink. Hopefully they’ll improve writing aspect of it. Maintaining both Obsidian and DT for the moment.
Yep. Agee. DEVONthink excels at search and revealing related documents – especially documents that are related to the selected note. I have far more data in various file types within my databases then I would ever insert into Obsidian. But, with selected Obsidian folders indexed in DEVONthink I can work with the notes in those folders (and add to them if needed) alongside the rest of the documents in the database.
I have always felt that DEVONthink excels at storage and discovery, but not at capture.
(And Obsidian mobile is far better than anything DEVONthink to Go will ever do for note taking.)
As I noted in this post, I am sticking with Craft for my work related notes. However, after listening to the Deep Dive podcast twice, while coincidently reading the HBR classic article Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt at the same time, I’m going to give Obsidian a try exclusively for summarizing book and research material and for idea generation.
I’m an Obsidian Catalyst subscriber. Does anyone know how I can get access to the Obsidian beta mobile app? In the meantime I can use 1Writer but I’d like to give the Obsidian mobile app a spin.
Thanks!
If you do not have your Discord badge, then DM @silver (Erica Xu).
Thank you, much appreciated!
For me, it’s mostly that when working quickly, Obsidian’s [[ autocomplete is faster and neater than DT’s ctrl+cmd+e autocomplete. I’m not using it to edit files in every DevonThink database, but there are two where it really helps.
In the forthcoming DEVONthink update (now in beta) the app supports [[ for autocomplete. In DEVONthink Preferences > WikiLinks, enable both WikiLinks > Automatic and WikiLinks > Square Brackets [[…]]. With that setting, typing [[something will present a list of document candidates for autocomplete meeting that search criterion.
(No doubt, I am misunderstanding your comment. If so, sorry.)
Ok, I know in advance that for many on this forum, this short success story will be hardly worth mentioning but for me, it is a small successful step forward.
I’m experimenting with using Obsidian only for idea and concept capture and generation. I wanted to use Drafts to make notes if possible instead of 1Writer or iAWriter. I found an Action in the Action Directory but it was not successfully sending the Draft note to Obsidian. So, with fear and trepidation I opened up the action editor, examined the script, made a change and low and behold, it worked! A minor victory for me in my first ever attempt to do anything with a script.
Not much I know but “one small step … for Barrett” 
UPDATE: I have also managed to integrate Draft, DT, and Obsidian with the option to use iA Writer. This will be easier once I have access to the Obsidian mobile app. but for now, this works.
That is great news! The little bit of speed really helps me in rapidly-changing note-taking situations when I need to be doing good thinking in the present as well as have good documentation.
I wrote about that here, just yesterday
With this very important correction:
tldr: They’re complementary.
Loved this episode and also gave it two listens. I’m convinced more than ever that I want to migrate my data out of Roam. I’ve been following the development of Craft closely, especially as I’m a heavy iPad user, but this episode has tipped me into Obsidian.
I’ve imported all my Roam data into Obsidian and ran the markdown importer plugin to fix tags and todos, but now I’m wondering if it might be better just to archive all the data exported from Roam into an archive folder. Did anyone else just start a fresh with Obsidian? Maybe just picking things out of the archive as needed?
Also is it worth the effort to convert all the daily note titles to match the Obsidian format?
Feeling slightly overwhelmed and a bit messy now I’ve dumped everything into Obsidian.
You can configure Obsidian’s Daily Note name format in Obsidian > Settings > Plugin options > Daily notes > Date format. So, you can configure that to look like what you used in Roam.
Thanks, that’s an idea! Unless there is any advantage to using the simpler Obsidian format rather then the long date format from Roam. Might have a think on that one. Thanks again.
My cynical side wonders how long Obsidian will last before something new comes out? Perhaps my reticence in jumping on the Obsidian bandwagon is that this is all too familiar. Oh yes, I remember the buzz with Roam Research and Notion that where last years favourites. Then there was Bear and then there was Dynalist and Workflowy, oh and don’t forget NValt and hey, NVultra is just around the corner. There seems to be no end to this and my hard disk is littered with information from many disparate systems. Perhaps this is why I’m more reluctant?
That of course doesn’t mean that Obsidian is bad or shouldn’t be used. However, it also doesn’t mean it’s going to solve your information management problems! We’ll just transfer our notes out of our current system and the benefit is we will clean up a lot of cruft, but then the cruft will build up in our new system. That is, until we move it on to the next silver bullet.
I’m beginning to wonder if our attention is in the wrong place? Having done this a few times, maybe more thought needs to go into what I’m actually collecting and why I’m collecting it? I wonder if Luhmann (father of the Zettelkasten) found that the friction of handwriting notes and needing to store them by hand actually weaned out what shouldn’t be collected and increased the quality of his repository? Now we want and have slick Keyboard Maestro shortcuts and TexExpander snippets that ensure our effortless collection of whatever takes our fancy. But are we also inadvertently reducing the quality of what we collect and hiding gems in a mass of informational noise?
Software is always going to change. Who remembers WordStar? Because of that, it’s a good idea to use software that enables an exit strategy. Who remembers being locked into Bento?
Immersing oneself in junk collecting has nothing to do with software. Software might make it easier, but it doesn’t cause the disorder.
G.R.R Martin does 
(True story – he writes, or at least used to – write on it, on a machine without Internet, even well into the 2010’s.)
I am a big collecter of stuff but I do always have a reason for what I collect. What Obsidian is doing for me is much better linking and much better visualization of those links, my constellation of references.
I also have implemented an inbox in my Obsidian vault so everything I collect or initially create goes there. I have toprocess stuff out of it just like I process email, or any other digital inputs. I do find that some of what initially seemed worth collecting never maes it out of the inbox into the real system and takes a trip to the trash instead.