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.
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
Itās 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.
Iām not angry either.
Iām not sure Obsidian is for me. If they supported Office files ā even to the limited extent DevonThink does ā Iād be more likely to use it. And even there, Iām 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.
When I went looking for what I call a āthought 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 didnāt like using iAWriter or 1Writer to edit notes when on my iPad. More than once, I had issues where a note Iād been editing in Obsidian could be opened and edited, but not saved in iAWriter.
I believe that Roamās focus on blocks (bullets) as the smallest linkable unit of thought (versus Obsidianās 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.)
Thereās an extended comparison on my personal site, if youāre interested. For now, Iāll just say I loved the spirit and friendliness of the Obsidian user group ā¦ but Roam had the features and universal access I needed.
FYI @times_reader just posted a nice writeup about Obsidian here. Itās in German, but you can read an English translation here.
Hey thank you! Just out of curiosityā¦ how were you able to find it so quickly after publishing?
Information was stored in Obsidian
I see, thank you very much for subscribing!
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.
Hereās a great review by Nick Milo:
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
I think the one thing consistent about markdown editors is their inconsistent implementations of markdown.
I love Markdown, but Gruberās 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 donāt think a consistent implementation of Markdown is even possible at this point.
We need a Markdown Open Standard.
Hopping on this thread a little late
Anyone tried Foam with VSCode?
Personally I was really interested in this ālinked noteā app philosophy-thing so I went to āshopā for options:
Iām pretty comfortable with VSCode so went with option #3. Electron > web but not by much.
Am real interested about other opinions though.
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 ānon-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 āsemantic 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.
Another VSCode option is Dendron - which has the added benefit of being open source with a very responsive developer:
Hmm! Iāve noticed a familiar name over on the Obsidian forumsā¦ Perhaps weāll see some talk about Obsidian on MPU soon.
Grin.
Iāve been on a bit of a spirit quest with this stuff. Weāll be covering it at length with this weekendās episode. Of course I explained how Obsidian doesnāt do block references and two hours after we stopped the recording, Obsidian added block references.