Yeah, this is exciting - I'd much rather have it as a plugin for Obsidian though! I have my workflow with that, all the features I need. Having some separate AI notes app isn't what I would like to use.
Tried Obsidian for a while, loved a lot about it, but....mmm.
Obsidian out of the box is a bit limited; plugins are great and add tons of features, but then you start hitting issues with plugin maintainers abandoning plugins you rely on, or needing to make a decision between three different plugins that all do the same thing slightly different. Depending on your use case and expectations that may not be a big deal, but I really missed not having what I personally saw as core features not being officially supported.
(Also, FWIW, the sync service is a bit pricy for what it is. I get that it's how they're trying to monetise it, but...I would have preferred another pricing model, even if the total cost was just as high.)
I've personally switched to Trilium Notes which I'm finding nicer. One element I particularly like is that it has first class suport for notes being able to exist at multiple places in a tree simultaneously. I know it's a very personal thing, but for me personally being able to file notes in multiple locations "clicks" in a way that tags didn't.
Cool, can't wait to try it out. Would love to move to obsidian fully, as of now I'm also using Joplin for my main set of notes.
btw this plugin really reminds me of a piece of software that I had seen here sometime. An infinite zooming/nesting of notes was the main concept of it, does that ring a bell for anyone?
I've moved from Evernote to Obsidian this year and like it so far. It reminds me of code editors, it was clearly inspired by them.
The markdown notes and attachments are just plain files on my disk, they can be backed up and synced across devices. On Windows and iOS the iCloud sync works well. The notes are available offline on my phone which is a must-have feature.
I don't use many plugins, but it's great that the app is extendable like that. I've written a small syllable counter plugin myself and it was pretty easy to find my way around. Unfortunately the official docs are... lacking, so poking around other people's code was the best way to see what's what.
Obsidian is basically a "markdown renderer + code coloring with some extra search and other features" too.
Notes in Obsidian are just regular markdown files that sit in a directory on your hard-drive. The notes can be version controlled with Git, synced with Dropbox, etc.
I recently switched my note taking to Obsidian. I’d floated amongst apps, including Notion, Bear, Simplenote, and most recently Craft. When Craft started acting up, I decided it was time to redo my setup.
The standard advice for Obsidian is either to not touch the plugins, or install 100 of them after watching 50 hours of YouTube videos. It is possible to easily get into an obsidian rabbit hole for sure, but I did find a happy medium and I’m thrilled with my current setup. It’s not perfect but it’s quite workable.
Some of the quirks are tables - and it looks like that’s getting fixed. Thrilled about that. The mobile app is pretty wonky too but that’s not a huge priority.
Despite the quirks I’m more organized with my daily notes and project setup using obsidian than any app prior.
Great to see the team is continually updating an already great app.
I recently dived more into obsidian (coming from Bear) and I must say I really like it so far.
I'm not using the personal knowledge management bit too much yet, but as a note taking app it's great.
Moreover, the plugin ecosystem (which I've just started exploring) is excellent!
I.e. there's a plugin for downloading highlights from your Kindle books, which also creates referencable refs for each highlight and lets you easily embed them in other notes. Cool stuff.
It's also impressive that most plugins work on the mobile app too.
Open plugins are meaningless when the platform itslelf isn't open.
There are also lots of markdown centric note software so its not too much of a draw for obsidian.
Personally I'd never use a proprietary note app, having to switch if the company shutters is too much, at least FOSS apps can be forked. Though, I've not heard anything bad about the obsidian team, maybe they open source it if they shut down. They also don't seem like the type to rugpull their customers. But you know how many companies people have said that about.
This thread gave me flashbacks to the Evernote 10 controversy that happened nearly two years ago.
I didn't use Evernote that much prior to the fallout, but when that happened I was hesitant to continue using it. I fell into a rabbit hole of searching for note apps, and I decided to use OneNote for that (as well as Apple Notes). Then I ran into Obsidian[0] and after looking at its features on noteapps.info[1], I decided to bite the bullet and use it. And wow, I don't regret it one bit.
I did use it a good amount in the past, but with the release of its mobile app and the amount of plugins we have now, I've been using it as my daily knowledge management app for several months now. It's also completely based on local markdown files, so you're not as locked in compared to other apps. It's completely free as well. You do have to pay if you want to use their own syncing service, but again, it's based on local files so you can easily sync by making your vault a Google Drive folder or some other method (some even use Git to sync their files!)
And I cannot stress how fantastic the community is enough. There are so many amazing plugins and people have done so much crazy shit with their notes. The community is also extremely helpful and welcoming.
Eleanor Konik runs a newsletter called Obsidian Roundup[2], which basically summarizes any recent plugins, discussions, shared workflows, events, etc. that happened in the week. She also has a page for Obsidian resources[3].
In the past year I've been on a journey of note-taking / personal knowledgebase:
- Trillium Notes [0]
- Joplin [1]
- others I can't remember
- Obsidian [2]
- Emacs/org-mode
- Logseq [3]
- and now back to Obsidian again
Logseq was really promising in concept - pulls a lot of cool concepts in from the others and supports org files. But I found it to be incredibly slow and laggy with my existing mixed org/markdown files. Unusably so, so I ditched it quickly.
Obsidian has come a long way from where it was a year ago in terms of community plugins. There's some crazy stuff you can do with plugins like obsidian-dataview [4], obsidian-itinerary [5], quickadd [6], obsidian-Kanban [7]. It's no Emacs in terms of customizability, but it's pretty damned close. And Obsidian doesn't have the random freezes and random "oops I accidentally deleted a huge chunk of nested notes" that org-mode constantly exposed me to. I'm loving Obsidian (again). As long as you don't mind JavaScript for plugins and closed source core app, it's a super-powerful and performant option worth checking out.
The biggest thing Obsidian lacks right now that SuperNotes 2 seems to offer is good sharing / collaboration between people - for me, I just want to be able to have shared notes with my partner, but sharing with a team would be great, too. I'm not the target audience for SuperNotes 2, but it is good to continue to see competition in this space - the innovation it drives is exciting.
If it ever comes to needing an Obsidian replacement I'd hope it can aim for compatibility with the plug-in ecosystem, at least initially. No idea how difficult a target that would be. Either way, I certainly worry about my data in Obsidian less than I worry about Evernote, OneNote, or Apple Notes, even with a couple of non-standard markdown additions.
Since it's not VC backed I'm hopeful about Obsidian building a long-term sustainable business without having to turn shitty, but who knows. I should sign up for Sync and give them some money.
I would very much appreciate the same for RUNE if you feel motivated.
I'm looking now to choose the obsidian plugin that helps me take advantage of the vast amount of notes I have created with obsidian over the last few years.
The notes are very much markdown files. There is a very small number of extensions the Obsidian developers created (e.g., a syntax for linking to a specific paragraph within a note) that are not markdown, but it's very easy to not use them.
I'm using the exact same folder of markdown notes in parallel with Obsidian, The Archive, 1Writer, Calca, TableFlip, Python scripts, and Keyboard Maestro macros I have written and everything works flawlessly together.
To me, the killer feature of markdown notes is not the future-proofing, but this kind of seamless interoperability.
We're in a golden age of note taking so I'd check out some of the stuff in the "second brain" space. Obsidian, in particular, is like an IDE for notes that you can customize (e.g. note templates, YAML front matter, plugins that will parse the frontmatter and generate tables dynamically, etc)
Just had a look at it. It's ok but there are some serious limitations in comparison to Obsidian which would make it unsatisfactory for me:
- No command palette
- No block inclusion
- Notes appear to be stored in databases rather than just as markdown notes on the file system. Backup of markdown notes seems to create a flat group of folders with randomly generated file names.
Same. Been using Obsidian for a year now and it's been great so far. I use obsidian-git plugin to backup my notes to a private git repository and for syncing notes.
I like that this is editor agnostic, but I also think that obsidians killer feature is the effortless linking between notes.
That seems to me like it would be much easier to do with an editor plugin.
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