Obsidian (Note Taking) - Not the game studio

[CEO of Pickles]

Any thoughts on Obsidian and if it's good or not?



Only real frame of reference I have is coworkers using OneNote (Microsoft ) and a video of a neovim ape struggling.

 

[HyperboreanRightsActivist]

Better than beshitsda (only barely)

 

[snowdunes]

I use Obsidian, retards will shill Logseq and ignore that it tanks the computer more than the alleged spyware. Until the FOSS niggers fix a simple text editor that does not have more bloat than a chrome browser, I will stick with proprietary Obsidian.

Spoiler: Might as well share my goto text shit

• ONLYOFFICE for spreadsheets (LibreOffice looks too old for me)
• Draw io for simple figures/graphics flowcharts.
• TeX Live + Lyx or TEXMAKER for stuff that actually requires mathematical formulas and symbols.
• MuPDF or Okular for viewing PDF's + other ebook files (MuPDF also works on Android.
• Pandoc for converting documents.

If I ever need more, I just give up.

 

[PositiveMonk]

Not familiar with Obsidian but I've been using Joplin for about a year now and I really enjoy it.

 

[Chaos Theorist]

i just write things down on the back of home bargains receipts

 

[Insuficiencia renal]

I started using it a couple of weeks ago, it has an addictive quality to it, it scratchs the same itch as playing factorio for me.

 

[Skeletron Prime]

I used Obsidian for playing Book of Hours because, before updates, that game used to be practically unplayable without some kind of note-taking. I never used the canvas feature at all but I can see how it would be useful.

I had two major beefs. One was that making certain text different colors for organization purposes was retarded. I wanted to color certain tags, and this required digging into custom CSS, figuring out how the tag was referenced (two ways and only one worked), and then having to do an entry for every subtag of that tag (ex. If I had #Edge/2 and #Edge/4, they both had to be CSS customized). There was no add on that could just color a tag in the color you wanted, and I had to do this for...about 50ish tags.

The other problem was that in doing all of that, I had to look at the Obsidian forums for help in addressing the tags, and they have the worst fucking policy in regards to locking threads after a certain length of time, so trying to find answers inevitably ended up stumbling across a bunch of dead threads where nobody got an answer.

All in all I probably was just better off using Excel or Word like a good goy because at least I don't need to jump through hoops to color some fucking text. The links to other notes was probably the feature I used most and I'm sure I could find that elsewhere.

 

[Pol Poggers]

Obisidian is a procrastination tool. Not one person I know using it has increased their productivity. Instead they sit and spend hours watching videos and "optimizing" their settings/plugins. Note that the goal always seems to be wasting time on tinkering, instead of having more time for their actual work (i.e. spending the least amount of time possible notetaking).
If you aren't nigger brained (the linking information feature) you could just use a note pad and pencil (the canvas feature) that you carry around (the snyc feature).

 

[Major Discord]

Obisidian is a procrastination tool. Not one person I know using it has increased their productivity. Instead they sit and spend hours watching videos and "optimizing" their settings/plugins. Note that the goal always seems to be wasting time on tinkering, instead of having more time for their actual work (i.e. spending the least amount of time possible notetaking).
If you aren't nigger brained (the linking information feature) you could just use a note pad and pencil (the canvas feature) that you carry around (the snyc feature).

Most people misunderstand the goal of using such tools and end up, as you say, in a tinkering hellhole. Obsidian is good for what it is - making a small knowledgebase about a niche subject you are into. I have made such a knowledgebase and it is useful, since when I or someone has some question, I can pull up Obsidian and immediately find the information that I noted several months ago.

That said, I use Obsidian because it has nice mobile app and I need it, since when I am bored I open random notes to look through them and remember. If the mobile apps existed, say, for OrgRoam of Emacs, I wouldn't use Obsidian.

People who tinker a lot in obsidian, build their daily schedules in etc. are dumb. Usually the ones who do this are the people who never need to have a schedule.
Obsidian's sync service is also not necessary. It works very well with syncthing.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Jake Alley uses it, so it must be good.

Right?

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

I used it since it has a nice phone app too compared to Joplin, i saw a couple of heavily autistic videos do breakdowns of different note taking apps (Joplin, Obsidian, VimWiki, and a couple more im probably missing) and it all seems very autistic and the differences seem to be more based on how well you personally like some shit.
From what ive seen, there is a whole rabbithole just for taking notes and people take this shit too seriously, atleast i got the excellent Syncthing out of the entire saga, Ive used that extensively to get shit between computers and phones. I use it to directly bypass making an obsidian account just for their sync service (and paying for it too)

https://syncthing.net/

I think this is one of the better videos on the subject, it directly shits on people who spend more time fucking around with copying something from the internet on how to be more productive while giving you a primer on some notable open source note apps

Which lead to me stumbling this other hyper autistic person with an obsession with "hacking your brain" aka tuning his life to be as autistic and min-maxed as possible, the first video gave me a clue this guy was extremely fucking autistic but the 2nd one made me laugh

Spoiler: the other one

This note-taking productivity rabbithole seems to be the tech-retard equivalent of new age health shit like sunning your asshole, at-least vitamins sometimes work

 

[Skeletron Prime]

Syncthing

Jesus Christ why had I not heard of this before, thanks

Thread tax: formatting tables in Obsidian is terrible. There's an add-on that is practically required for it to be more usable.

 

[Unarmed Gunman]

It's awesome, but as others have mentioned it can take time to get it set up right. Just settle on a loose system and go, don't spend infinite time on all the possible options. You can turn it into a personal Wikipedia with all of the tags and linking options though. Far superior to One Note.

 

[rebel]

I use Obsidian, retards will shill Logseq and ignore that it tanks the computer more than the alleged spyware. Until the FOSS niggers fix a simple text editor that does not have more bloat than a chrome browser, I will stick with proprietary Obsidian.

but da poor FOSS developers can't pay to make a good app. Also, let's ignore the commits that the developers refused to put in because of ego. BUT MAKING AN APP IS SO HARD FOR A LONE PROGRAMMER FOSS is awful.

 

[Sprate Header]

Note-taking-cels be seething over remember-everything chads.

 

[Kalsarikännit]

If you aren't nigger brained (the linking information feature) you could just use a note pad and pencil (the canvas feature) that you carry around (the snyc feature).

This. The only limit is handwriting, I suppose. But I assume you use apps like this to take notes that only you will be looking at, rather than showing other people.

 

[Jones McCann]

I've never had to use anything more than a md file in a git repo or a pen and paper to keep track of things, at my most autistic I would send messages in a personal discord server so I wouldn't forget something and then formalize it later. If you need to do in depth research maybe obsidian could help but I agree with others saying it's usually procrastination, just get a nice notebook and a pen and be a pen and paper chad.

 

[Drone]

Been using Obsidian for a few years. It plays nice with Git, doesn't care if you edit notes in another editor, doesn't actively force you to use their cloud services, and isn't spyware. It's all that anyone could ask for from a dedicated piece of notetaking software. It's also got a built-in Vim mode.

With sufficiently large vaults, the graphs make you feel schizophrenic as you glance at it and realize that 80% of what you write about is somehow connected with everything else in some way, shape, or form. It adds an extra layer of hilarity to internet drama that can't be properly expressed in words.

Strong recommend. It's not for everyone, but I'm confident in shilling it to those who take notes.

It's also very hackable. The plugin API is fairly nice to work with despite being webshit. It's made my migration away from Emacs for notetaking fairly painless. Plugins simply working on mobile (most of the time) is also a nice plus.

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

Spoiler: Plugin recs

• TfTHacker's BRAT - Obsidian makes it painful to manage any plugin that isn't listed in their official repo. This plugin fixes that by making it easy to fetch plugins from any arbitrary GitHub repo. Only problem: it's hardcoded to only recognize GitHub repos. All the alternatives are years out of date, and the only thing saving the plugin from being trash is the distinct lack of plugin authors using anything other than GitHub.
• esm's Obsidian Map View - Nice to have for travel and research. Getting GPS integration working for it on mobile is a bit of a pain in the ass, but as someone who goes outside a lot, I've found that it's worth it.
• Luke Leppan's Better Word Count - Lets you see how many words and characters are in your selection, instead of always showing the note's total word/char count. It's dumb that this isn't Obsidian's stock behavior. Quite handy for drafting posts for platforms that have character limits, such as Discord.
• PJ Eby's Pane Relief - Obsidian's stock UX for tab management on desktop is simply shit. You'll see what I mean if you use Obsidian for more than 10 seconds. This fixes that.
• Obsidian Tasks - It's notetaking software. You're very likely gonna end up using it as a to-do list. This massively reduces the amount of manual Ctrl+C -> Ctrl+V work you need to do for that.
• NothingIsLost's Hover Editor - Lets you write into hover-over previews without needing to open up a whole pane for 'em. Comes in handy more often than you'd expect.
• Tony Grosinger's Advanced Tables - 1.6 million downloads, yet this somehow isn't included by default. This plugin makes it possible to format tables without the risk of succumbing to the urge to bash your head against one.
• Obsidian Full Calendar - Fuck it, why not let Obsidian replace whatever spyware you're currently using for a calendar.
• Obsidian Git - This suffers the issues that almost all Git UIs face. It's overly opaque, and debugging it is painful when it inevitably fucks up. But on the bright side, it isn't too awful as a timesaver when managing your vault as a Git repo. It thankfully plays nice with arbitrary remotes (you aren't forced to use GitHub). However, the JS implementation of Git it uses for mobile is incredibly scuffed; you practically need Termux on-hand just so you can use the real Git whenever isomorphic-git shits itself (which is very often if your vault's large enough).

 

[seri0us]

That looks wonderful to use on a tablet

 

[I'm Really Feeling It]

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.