I Use Obsidian

I went down this rabbit hole for about six months last year. The hook is easy if you're working in IT (hint: it's in the name). The first two months were quite enlightening as I learned about Zettelkasten, PARA, Second Brain, Obsidian, Roam, LogSeq, etc. I even did a side journey into bullet journaling (it appears that craze is dying now).

Towards the end of my journey, I couldn't help but feel I was getting pulled into a cult. I would watch certain Youtube personalities famous in this area and realize they are talking in a language that doesn't make sense. To the uninitiated, it sounded fascinating, but the more I learned, the more I realized a majority of it was cyclical.

Perhaps this is an overly pessimistic view, but nowadays I just write stuff in a daily Logseq journal and move on. No organization, mind maps, second brains, thought galaxies, idea mitochondria, etc. Just a little bit of English spread across a few bullets.

I've been a big fan of Obsidian for years. Once I started teaching myself how to write long-form fiction, I tried at least six different tools. When you're doing zero-to-one work, "magic" tools will fuck you up every time.

The beauty of Obsidian is that there isn't any magic. Write markdown, stick it in a folder and do nothing. Or you can write markdown, organize a nest of folders and tags and do a lot.

I didn't know how to write long-form fiction, and I determined that the last freaking thing in the world I wanted was a tool that imposed a process or recipe. God, recipe-driven fiction is a POS. So I started with nothing and added and removed structure as necessary to teach myself. I even set up a second folder to add all of my research and how-to trials and errors as I went along. Way cool.

Just finished my first novel at ~700 pages. My currect system is still more complex than I need, but I'm learning. Along the way I wrote a build pipeline where I just write in Obsidian, run a script, and end up with pdfs, ebooks, interactive website, etc. I've even got it almost all the way through the desktop publishing part that comes at the end. Probably need another year for that.

If those folks start adding any kind of lock-in (I know they won't) or beginning over-engineering the UI, I'm out. And guess what? I can take my markdown elsewhere. And my pipeline still works! It's a beautiful thing.

I use far, far too much Obsidian, building cataloging systems in the sky. Tools tend to engage your imagination of what you might need to do instead of what you actually need. But with Obsidian, I don't need to go down the garden path. I can pull that crap back out. I couldn't have learned writing with any other tool. Obsidian allowed me to make structural and Information Architecture mistakes and iterate without locking me in somewhere. Love the tool, guys! Keep doing nothing!

This is just way too complicated and too structured for me.

Tagging and searching is better for my brain, otherwise I'd keep optimising the folder structure endlessly and never get anything done.

What if I have a note that relates to two different folders? Where does it go? Do I copy it to both? Keep it on one and link from the other? What if it relates to a third one later down the line?

I've just got my Second Brain category which is stuff I keep forgetting and/or want to keep a local copy of (like how to set up iwd on Debian or how to bootstrap a deb-based Linux machine from scratch to where I want it to be)

Then I have my Daily Notes, Hyper-O shortcut automatically opens Obsidian with today's daily note. This is where I just jot down a few bullet points about what I did at work and in my personal life. Just enough to have something searchable if I want to figure out when did I do something. No purple prose, just strict business with #tags if relevant. Maybe some #todo's.

I envy individuals who organize their digital information in this way. Yes, I can practice discipline. Yes, it is possible. And it has always been (and continues to be) an uphill battle to keep my information tidy in this way, when my is scattered at best.

I've been using Obsidian for a few weeks. It fits my note-taking style (Markdown and wiki) and I want to like it, but honestly it's a struggle.

My main issue with Obsidian is the steep learning curve because Obsidian is not self-contained; it needs many plug-ins, templates, and customization. I tried to keep things simple but it seems that to be useful you need Better BibTeX, Zotero, Zotero Integration, Pandoc, DataView, and so forth. All of these have their own learning curves and configuration, so it's a slog to get started. Obsidian seems designed for people who enjoy extensive customization and tweaking.

My second issue is that Obsidian is very free-form, so you need to decide on an "ideology" of how to use it. Do I want to go with Zettelkasken or Johnny Decimal or organize in folders or organize with tags or use Maps of Content? So far I feel like I'm ending up with a mess of notes, which isn't really helping me.

I started using Zotero at the same time. I highly recommend Zotero. It's essentially a PDF organizer and document citation system. Before Zotero, I had piles of PDFs in various directories and I couldn't find the information I wanted. Now I click in my browser and Zotero downloads the PDF, does OCR, auto-generates a detailed citation, makes everything searchable, and lets me annotate PDFs and take notes. Zotero is straightforward and has been a big help to me.

Zotero and Obsidian are commonly used together, but I haven't got the hang of the integration, so I'm open to suggestions. Specifically, I have notes and annotations in Zotero. Then I import everything into Obsidian and have a copy of the record in Obsidian. Now I have duplicated data. How do I keep things in sync? Should I be doing all my note-taking in Obsidian, or use Zotero's notes for a first pass through the document, or keep some notes in each?

After doing a lot of productive journaling with a lot of productive tools. I keep coming back to something that is just simple plain text files in apps that have barely any formatting (except MD because that's just there these days) and the apps that are snapping fast and robustly stable. It was NV (-> nvAlt) for a long time and then Simplenote (well, with hiccups and finally had to let go of it) and now I am giving Bear/FS Notes that chance (will settle on one; my tilt is towards the FOSS+non-subscription). These stick - the kinda "plainish note taking apps". Nothing else does. Definitely not the Zoplins and the Obsidians.

To me it seems all this "productivity" and "workflow magic and shit" talk is just for that - "the talk". And then there's a fancy "folder naming system". Right. I did try to understand the why of it. Didn't happen. But then I guess I am not even close to the power note takers these apps are supposed to be aimed at.

This has worked for me (anything more (complicated) and it just becomes friction and within few days):

- Open the app

- Write a new note or add to/edit an existing one

- That's it; at least the mere mortal version of it

I gave up on Obsidian and just use Foam (https://foambubble.github.io/foam/) and/or vimwiki. I just can’t get into overwrought, arbitrarily designed organization schemes or proprietary apps (Foam-managed content is just plain Markdown, so I can easily do without it—it provides the absolute bare minimum for easy linking of notes without proprietary markup).

Does anyone use obsidian for editing and managing emails? I have some email templates I need to adapt and send over and over (including file attachments and embedded links). I’d love a way to store and manage them from within obsidian without having to awkwardly copy paste into outlook, use an old Chrome plugin to convert the markdown to html, and manually attach the files. (My idiotic current scheme until I have a chance to “get myself organized”.)

I use org-roam, absolutely love it.

Tip: Select the text on the website and you'll be able to read the yellow boxes.

Is there a free/easy way to use this on my iPhone yet?

I would love to get away from apple notes siloed on my phone and ms onenote siloed on my computer

I own https://Nestful.app which I made for myself.

Nestful is first and foremost a "what should I do next" todo app, but I've found I've been using it instead of Obsidian, even though the note-taking features are much less superior.

This made me wonder if some people are document people, and some are list people. If such a classification exists, I'm definitely the latter.

IF the author of the blog reads this thread, the highlighted text on your blog on this machine (Win10/ Firefox) is unreadable. It's a very light grey text on yellow background.

How well does Obsidian work with org-mode?