Obsidian for thinking and knowledge management

But there is a paradox as I see it

The developer emphasizes to the moon how important links are - and I agree. Yet it is basically a walled garden with much difficulty linking it to other applications or other sources of information.

Not angry

More like hoping they add more of a focus on linking bidirectionally to other sources of information

Itā€™s a beta - so they are seeking input.

I think the rest of the app is stunning in execution. It would really be a shame for such a great piece of software to be missing a key feature.

Obsidian to me right now is like a browser which does an amazing job at viewing local .html files but is unable to to connect to the web in order to view .html from the rest of the world.

Iā€™m not angry either.

Iā€™m not sure Obsidian is for me. If they supported Office files ā€” even to the limited extent DevonThink does ā€” Iā€™d be more likely to use it. And even there, Iā€™m still not sure. Wiki-izing my documents may be one of those things that seems great in theory but is not so useful in reality.

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When I went looking for what I call a ā€œthought processor,ā€ I ended up with two options: Roam and Obsidian.

I really, really, really wanted Obsidian to win.

For me, though, two things tipped the scales:

  • I didnā€™t like using iAWriter or 1Writer to edit notes when on my iPad. More than once, I had issues where a note Iā€™d been editing in Obsidian could be opened and edited, but not saved in iAWriter.

  • I believe that Roamā€™s focus on blocks (bullets) as the smallest linkable unit of thought (versus Obsidianā€™s emphasis on linking pages) offers real advantages in terms of finding useful, meaningful connections between ideas.

(Obsidian has recently incorporated the ability to link to headers within a page, which is close, but not quite the same.)

Thereā€™s an extended comparison on my personal site, if youā€™re interested. For now, Iā€™ll just say I loved the spirit and friendliness of the Obsidian user group ā€¦ but Roam had the features and universal access I needed.

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FYI @times_reader just posted a nice writeup about Obsidian here. Itā€™s in German, but you can read an English translation here.

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Hey thank you! :sweat_smile: Just out of curiosityā€¦ how were you able to find it so quickly after publishing?

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Information was stored in Obsidian :joy::joy::joy:

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Your RSS feed!

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I see, thank you very much for subscribing! :relaxed:

Obsidian has added support for block links (and embeds) in its current Insider Build (v0.9.5+), and I would expect the feature will eventually make it into regular release.

Hereā€™s a great review by Nick Milo:

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The technique Obsidian uses will add characters to the plain text .md file. This does not follow any commonly-used markdown syntax, and so the Obsidian files that have the extra characters will be a bit less portable to other editors in the sense that other editors will not have intelligence to parse the extraneous characters in a meaningful way. It will be like the junk at the end of this paragraph. ^junk

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I think the one thing consistent about markdown editors is their inconsistent implementations of markdown.

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I love Markdown, but Gruberā€™s original spec was not the most tightly written. There are ambiguities that were never clarified. All of the extensions and additional functionality that have accreted over time have not improved the situation. I donā€™t think a consistent implementation of Markdown is even possible at this point.

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We need a Markdown Open Standard.

Hopping on this thread a little late :slight_smile:

Anyone tried Foam with VSCode?

Personally I was really interested in this ā€œlinked noteā€ app philosophy-thing so I went to ā€œshopā€ for options:

  1. Roam Research: pricey (IMO) subscription (i donā€™t like it, but maybe you do), web app only, kinda ā€œcultishā€ which freaks me out a little, no concrete security/backup system (has this been changed?)
  2. Obsidian: free (yay), built on local markdown files (yay), no support for native light/dark mode (why you bully me Obsidian), no tabs, doesnā€™t support advanced keyboard shortcuts (like āŒ˜K āŒ˜), Electron (argh)
  3. Foam + VSCode: free (yay), local markdown files (yay), has autocomplete snippets (yay), has native light/dark mode support (yay), advanced keyboard shortcut support, tab support, Electron (argh)

Iā€™m pretty comfortable with VSCode so went with option #3. Electron > web but not by much.

Am real interested about other opinions though.

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I have been learning Framemaker recently to use in a book project I am working on.

The learning curve is steeper than Markdown because you need to define all of the terminology. In other words, XML is completely ā€œnon-semanticā€ and you need to define what syntax you want for each effect.

But the result is:

(1) Complete flexibility and ability to customize it to function as you wish

(2) Very easy to share your ā€œsemantic definitionsā€ with others - so there is never a problem of incompatibility between versions and you have full ability to move the document to another editor/viewer in the future.

I know it will not happen, but I do wish XML had taken off in recent times rather than Markdown.

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Another VSCode option is Dendron - which has the added benefit of being open source with a very responsive developer:

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Hmm! Iā€™ve noticed a familiar name over on the Obsidian forumsā€¦ Perhaps weā€™ll see some talk about Obsidian on MPU soon.

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Very fun! Hope youā€™re enjoying playing around with Obsidian @MacSparky.

Grin.

Iā€™ve been on a bit of a spirit quest with this stuff. Weā€™ll be covering it at length with this weekendā€™s episode. Of course I explained how Obsidian doesnā€™t do block references and two hours after we stopped the recording, Obsidian added block references.

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