That was unsuccessfully tried a while back. I commented on it here …
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I woke up one morning to seeing Nick Milo’s video on block references and said, “WHAT THE!” I seriously didn’t expect it, but they did it. Silver and Licat (Obsidian devs) sure move fast.
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The fact that they do all this with plain text files in the file system just blows me away. It’s a testament to their talent, as well as the macOS file system.
I guess with the prevalence of SSDs now, it’s like files are stored in “slow memory.”
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What does this have to do with the macOS file system? (And don’t forget the feature also works on Windows.)
It’s a clever – but fragile – solution. Should be used very enthusiastically. And carefully.
Fragile only in that it won’t render in other systems, but not in that it breaks everything 
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Maybe nothing, it was an offhand remark made in a casual conversation.
I didn’t realize Obsidian was available on Windows too, that’s cool. Fortunately the only thing I need Windows for now is playing Train Simulator.
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Dang, thought you had secret insider info 
And Linux! I’m running it seamlessly on my cross-platform setup. It’s great.
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Damn, read this too early today now I feel like a 5Y old on Xmas eve having to wait until Sunday afternoon.
This IMHO is the most exciting area in apps currently.
Besides watching the excitement of these tech innovators you have the big Elephant that took a long stop at the watering hole now stampeding into the race trying to catch up to the cheetahs.
@MacSparky this area is moving faster than even your scheduled podcast publican schedule but I think everyone is enjoying the quest and will appreciate any insights that MPU will discover.
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From what I’ve seen of the Big Elephant’s recent v10 release, I think the Elephant got its compass broken and ran back to the old, dry waterhole. They will never catch up with the new note making methods and supporting technologies.
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@D_Rehak I agree about getting excited about this stuff. Right now I am finding DEVONthink + Obsidian to be pretty powerful. It is crazy how fast everything is iterating.
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jumping in here since @justindirose asked what questions we have and since you were on Roam for a while…how best to prep our Roam database for export to Obsidian? Migrating has left me with a very messy vault, with paragraphs that show up in red font (code blocks?), folders that I didn’t want from having naming conventions such as Topic/sub-topic, etc… or perhaps there’s a keyboard maestro script in there to clean it all up? (paging @macsparky and @ryanjamurphy)
I should probably ask this in the obsidian forum come to think of it…
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I brought over a very limited amount of data. I just wanted the experience of working in Obsidian. Pasting Markdown in OB though is a great jumping off point. Also I really like their template system.
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Ta! Perhaps it’s not either Obsidian’s or Roam’s fault by my very own for having a messy Roam in the first place…
so far I have isolated a few issues (for posterity’s sake):
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Indentation: if you have a lot of indented blocks (think 1.1.2.1), you will either want to unindent them in Roam and then replicate the indentation in OB or just be happy without indentation (or find some clever way to translate multilevel indentation to OB markdown. Anyone know this, let me know, pretty please!) Note: just had a look, and some notes are absolutely fine, while others are not, go figure)
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file/note names: if you have a lot of notes with names such as “topic/sub-topic” you will want to rename them to something like “topic-subtopic” as other wise you will have a folder called “topic” and within it a file/note called “sub-topic” (unfortunate if you have things like “course1/week1” “course2/week1”)
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block embeds: tricky, and don’t work without some manipulation. I haven’t found a solution, my guess is to do a query on ‘embed’ and then change all block embeds to ‘replace with text’ or ‘text with alias’, which would at least give you a way to find the page it originally came from to re-create the embed. perhaps mark as quote?
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tags: replace with [[ ]] via markdown importer or leave as tags, and just use the files that Roam created (belt and suspenders, potentially very messy…)
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attributes: no idea. I’m thinking it could be helpful to turn these into pages via double-bracketing them, so that you could find, via the backlink pane, all ‘author’ notes (for example). I have not tested this, any help appreciated.
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italicised page names: I have a lot of those for film/book/etc titles. they don’t work. unitalicise before export and try not to feel too bad for using the wrong formatting
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fuzzy date creation via Roam42: again, no idea - anyone?
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templates via Roam42: use the builtin templates function of Obsidian! yay!
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iOS integration: that’s a whole other conversation…
if anyone has solutions or further migration issues please let me know. I’m currently just using a testing vault but would love to migrate permanently.
NB: I will post this same in the obsidian forum as it seems like that’s where it actually belongs - apologies for cross-posting!
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I cancelled my roam subscription today to be an obsidian insider!
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Are you working with your files in iCloud drive, Dropbox, or neither?
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I’ve been using Obsidian for a day. I’ve tried it before but I want to give it a good workout.
My first impression is that it is an extremely nice app, and it shows how great Electron can work, and how great it looks, when people take care developing with it.
I love using a daily note as a dashboard for my day’s work. It’s a productivity enhancer and it creates a “have done” record that almost writes itself.
I don’t know if I’m going to stick with Obsidian. It seems likely to me that the things I can do in Obsidian that I’d find worth doing are things I can do in DevonThink. Blocklinks maybe?
On the other hand, if Obsidian is just a subset of DevonThink, but with a more easy to use and attractive style, I can stick with Obsidian AND index the documents with DevonThink. Best of both worlds!
I created an [[Obsidian]] hyperlink in my daily note today and now I think I will cut-and-paste this comment into Obsidian and make a new page out of it!
I can imagine myself flipping between Obsidian and DevonThink. Using Obsidian as a front end to DevonThink, and using DevonThink’s URL schema to link to Word documents and PowerPoints and other formats that Obsidian does not support.
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I have not been able to implement it but it’s exactly what I intend to do. I find Obsidian insanely powerful when it comes to build content, link and view it. It really is a laboratory for thought because every interaction has been thought to be as frictionless as possible. I’ve really started building something serious yesterday in Obs, just intended to collate random notes I have, and almost of its own accord, ideas began to form (which does not happen in linear apps like Ulysses or Scrivener and even Tinderbox). I intend to give this a few weeks of experimentation for I’m very impressed by the fluid freedom this brings.
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I’m going a bit overboard with this, but why not. I index bits and pieces (folders) of an Obsidian vault in different DEVONthink databases. I set up the same Obsidian vault as an External Folder in Ulysses. I also drag files from the vault into TheBrain 12 as indexed files. So, I’m using Obsidian as the data hub for other apps that do some things better than Obsidian, and I’m using Obsidian for things that Obsidian does better.
For example, I rewrote the script DEVONthink provides that creates a daily markdown note, so that my version captures the day’s headlines, weather, and other daily readings that matter to me. The daily note is indexed back to Obsidian so I can do some edits there when I want to link to other content inside Obsidian. The same script that creates the note each day will append a time-stamped section to the current day’s note for adding info during the day.
I have Keyboard Maestro shortcuts to trigger the above.
This is all a bit crazy, but if the best tools for particular jobs can access a common data source, then that’s they where technologies were honed by their developers – and the Mac is a great platform for this.
Edit: the key takeaway – the macOS filesystem is a better data hub than any app.
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