Obsidian (Note Taking) - Not the game studio

I've just been using Orgzly and syncing notes through SyncThing.

I'm Really Feeling It said:

It might be a person-to-person thing, but the more lightweight and the less "customizable" and hectic a thing is the better it is for note-taking in my opinion. Comes off like the techbro version of diaries tween girls drown in washi tape and printouts.

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It basically is. The more time you have to blow messing around with the fancy setup and layout of a journal or "second brain" the less you actually need it for anything worthwhile.

I actually use the shit out of it for grad school. Someone mentioned earlier in the thread that it can easily become a procrastination cause rather than helping your productivity. If I had a dollar for the times i've seen people fall for trying to optimize their "productivity tools" rather than actually just sitting down & getting work done I would have at least 10 dollars. That said like with anything you want to find a workflow that is intuitive & out of the way for you. For me using headers, subheaders, linking, etc is VERY useful for referencing my own notes I take from meetings/classes and experiments/labwork. I ended up using it for my own personal things as well like making notes on my hobbies, cooking, calorie counting, tracking my workouts, and a whole host of other things.

I've tried using this tool but have a tough time sticking with it. I've always been a bad note taker, which is probably the real culprit though. It is nice to have them from time to time though, especially if I have a decently complex tasks I need to do every 6 months or so.

The thing I like about it is that while you can add in plug-ins and such, it's really just a bunch of markdown files and an editor for them. It keeps things simple, and allows you to focus more on putting in information instead of wasting a ton of time on formatting.

The great thing about Obsidian is all the data sits in plain-text markdown files, which you can open in anything and take with you anywhere.

Drone said:

For the hell of it: here's some recs for publicly-available plugins!

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Thanks for this. I gave Obsidian a go when it was first getting really popular and gave up quickly as it felt unintuitive and the knowledge graph they love so much seemed pointless. It especially didn't help many of its advocates are pretentious fags acting like you have to upload your entire brain for it to work properly.

My current method of storing notes looks like this

For anything code related (like JSON data from web scraping where I need the ability to reformat)

My system is terrible and I've been trying to find something that is as convenient as opening a new tab in Notepad++ and typing away, while being organized so I'm not constantly losing things, multiplatform, not spyware and not a buggy mess with missing features.

Attempt #1 was AppFlowy, which is basically a FOSS clone of Notion, I posted about it here and my opinion of it further soured after that. Self hosting is too buggy to use with sync issues galore and now my self-hosted installation is screwed and I can't update it.

#2 was Joplin. It ticks most boxes and supports WebDAV syncing. Notes are Markdown files so +1 for portability, but I found the UI annoying and autistic. Navigation pane doesn't show actual notes, just notebooks you gotta click on before seeing notes, super weird. I gave up after creating a task board required a plugin, configuring it with a YAML code block then linking it to a table that created a bunch of empty notes for each item.

#3 is Siyuan, which is made by a Chinese dude and is sort of like Obsidian meets Notion in terms of implementation and feature set. It works ok but its syncing features are paywalled and it's super chinky with things like WeChat integration built natively into the application rather than as an extension.

This is all to say that I'll give Obsidian a go again and loaded up most of those plugins you recommended plus Kanban and Iconize. I'm already liking the Kanban plugin, it's 100x more intuitive than the Joplin one and Iconize makes it super easy to add Simple Icons etc. The git plugin seems rough, for the initial commit I found it easier to do it in CLI but maybe it's better when you're automatically pushing changes.

I tried "digital zettelkastan" in it but ended up just doing daily notes. It's only slightly better than slamming everything into new text files in Notepad++ (I still do this too) but I suppose it depends on what you need your notes for. The knowledge graph is gay unless you actively tag shit, which I rarely do.

I haven't seen NotesNook mentioned yet, but that is another potential alternative. They seem to want to be the Proton of note taking.

Can't you just use the 'Sticky Notes' program on Windows?

Also, if you're taking notes for an educational reason, typing them doesn't do shit. Its much preferably to use a pen/paper due to the tedium, as that will help you remember it more.

It's been my go-to note taker for over 3 years now, and it pretty much carried my college years. It's not the magic tool for memorization personal knowledge management autists claim it to be, but it's amazing at making you putting the things you're learning in perspective. It's especially good for learning things with many moving parts nobody ever bothered categorizing properly.

I've also found out the hard way that archives in Obsidian and the like are pretty much useless if you don't have a philosophy backing up the arrangement and structure of your articles, though, as just winging it turns massive archives into garbage spaghetti you don't even feel like revisiting. My go-to has always been the Zettelkasten Method, because it's simple and flows nicely with the things I've done and am doing so far.

I still don't see the point of graph view (the general view, not local graph view) beyond sending screenshots of your archive for karma on Reedit. Seriously, what the hell is the use of this when one of my biggest archives looks like this:



I'm genuinely puzzled. It's not like it even counts the amount of articles written inside the whole archive file, too.

The Zotero integration + Omnisearch + OCR plugins make it almost perfect for me. The feature that is most appealing to me is the ease of switching, due to use of markdown files. OneNote was an absolute bitch to export my data from, as someone who used it for years due to a lack of better alternative.