Obsidian Bases
help.obsidian.md684 points by twapi 2 days ago
684 points by twapi 2 days ago
For those curious, this feature is just now publicly launching and before it was only available to people who paid for early access.
The Reddit thread has some good discussion about the feature
https://old.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/1mtxh52/obsidia...
On a side note, the docs don't seem to mention if this is possible but does anyone know how to use a template or set a default frontmatter (like created date) when using the "new" button in a Base?
The solution I used before bases is eh... pretty hacky.
```meta-bind-js-view {memory^inputText} as title --- const toShow = context.bound.title || "TKTK"; const str = `\`\`\`meta-bind-button label: New Project Idea - ${toShow} icon: "" hidden: false class: "" tooltip: "" id: "" style: primary actions: - type: templaterCreateNote templateFile: Templates/Project.md folderPath: Project Ideas fileName: ${toShow} openNote: true \`\`\``; return engine.markdown.create(str) ```
FYI On HackerNews you can use indentation (by 2 spaces) to indicate code snippets, not ```.
Is there a good AI plugin for Obsidian yet?
While not a plugin, I've had a great experience using the free tier of Gemini CLI over my md-repository. It's rarely run out of context, unlike with code repositories, and it's super easy to feed relevant context just by mentioning files.
I really enjoy Obsidian Copilot (by Logan Yang) https://github.com/logancyang/obsidian-copilot
Copilot, Smart Connections and Text Generator are all "good" AI plugins in Obsidian
There are plenty of AI plugins. I guess "good" just depends what your use case is. Let us know if you find one that works well though.
Good is a little more proscriptive than that. Its not hard to see the difference between the, we can call them gen1, ai functions and gen2/3 functions we have now. The difference between gpt-3.5 and NotebookLM.
But HN has spent the last 3 years with it's head in the sand wrt stochastic parrots so it tracks that how far we've come is not apparent
for those (like me) who didn't understand the feature : a base is a table where each row is a specific file in your vault, and each column is a proprety of this file.
Using a base you can manage, sort and filter your files and their propreties (ex add a rating, price, or deadline proprety to your files or only show files from my movie folder where my proprety is set to [this])
The base doesn't DO anything you couldn't do by hand, it just allows you to do it faster, as you could always modify a file propreties by hand in that file, or search for it using the search features.
The propreties you add are stored in plain text on top of your markdown files The base is stored in a very readable format similar to yaml to the .base file you can see in obsidian.
Here is the generated .base file for a test Movies folder : views: - type: table name: Movies filters: and: - file.folder == "All/Movies" order: - file.name - tags - Watch Date columnSize: file.name: 167
I found this out today when I went to go use it. To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed. I thought they’d be like tables on steroids.
I think there was (probably still is) a plugin that did something similar to bases that I tried before and didn’t really like conceptually.
I don't think they do that good a job of explaining what it is, but the Reddit post linked below included this comment which is helptful: "You know how when you search your notes for something, say a phrase? Well, Bases can basically hold a static search that automatically updates. And, instead of searching all over again, you just click into the Bases file and new notes are just there in the default table format.
On top of that, you can add other properties to the view, especially one like modified date, which updates every time you modify the file. This is useful for seeing which files you haven't looked at in a while. Old concepts often apply to new ones, but we sometimes forget to check back to make that connection explicit."
The first sentence of the documentation already says it: "turn any set of notes into a powerful database". It's really just that, basically. It's a database-view, where the vault is the database and the rows are your files. There is a fancy GUI for creating views, and it seems there is the ability for live-editing data from within the view. Basically a more user-friendly replacement for the very popular dataview-plugin.
Maybe it's a bit harder to understand, as it's a more mushy than the usual relational database.
> The first sentence of the documentation already says it: "turn any set of notes into a powerful database
No, horrible job at explaining. What does it mean to turn any set of notes into a powerful database? What does it mean to "turn"? Does it mean that a file will become a database? Or does it mean that a file can be interpreted as a database? And why set of notes? If I have a single note, can I turn that into a database too? Are the records of the database files, or items in a file? What is happening when I type ![[Untitled.base]]? Is the file where I typed that a database now? Or does that text assume that the file named Untitled must be a database?
They do a horrible job at explaining it.
I'd like a demonstration of what's powerful about it.
Like, why would I want to take advantage of this, and how? I'm with you here. I don't get it. I can stick data into SQLite and do all kinds of neat stuff. Why am I preferring a mushy database trapped inside Obsidian?
Well everything comes in shades. Lets say you write meetingnprotocols of your meetings down with obsidian. The markdown/freeform and cross-linkable text body of obsidian is perfect for this. But you'd now be able to have a bit richer search over the notes based on who was present. This allows relatively normal people to do that, without having to dive too deep into databases plus it already lives in the app where you take the notes.
As someone who uses Sqlite for a ton of things I don't think the exietence of sqlite makes this useless.
This is obviously for people for whom notes are a primary knowledge storage mechanism, and for whom that mechanism is obsidian.
I “could” stick data in SQLite but if I’m not then it’s quite useless to me.
> What does it mean to turn any set of notes into a powerful database?
You must be fun at parties. Complaining about everything, but not even bother to read the damn manual... It's explained on the third sentence on that site. Ok, to be fair, there is a big picture between those parts, and you have to follow some links for more details.
> And why set of notes?
Just curious, do you even know Obsidian? Have you ever used it? You read like someone who has no clue about this software, jump right in the middle of the manual, and then complain that you missed the tutorial.
Obsidian is a markdown-editor with knowledge base. Notes are its lifeline, and they have since nearly the beginning the option to put metadata into each note in a special section (in yaml), basically the header of the note. This metadata are now called properties. Bases is a feature building up on this metadata, offering a database-like experience for viewing and editing them in a specialized UI. The database, is the vault, the folder+subfolder containing the notes. Each note is a row in that database.
This is all explained in the documentation, if you just would read it...
Yes, but the average Obsidian user may or may not know what a database is an why they should care. As an engineer I like precise language, but we should not forget that multiple audiences require multiple levels of explainations.
Otherwise it is a bit like saying "all monads are functors" when trying to make your reader care for investing time and energy into understanding the concept of monads. The problem there of course is that explaination is circular: without the reader knowing what a monad or a functor is they can't understand the explaination.
A good explaination gives you the technically correct slogan in the beginning (for the advanced readers) and then explains the words and what you can do with such a database and why you should care. Many explainations skip the last step and leave that part as an exercise to the reader.
> Yes, but the average Obsidian user may or may not know what a database
You can't constantly optimize your communication for the least educated recipient. Obsidian is full of technical, specialized terms. If you don't know a word, research it.
And database as a concept is common knowledge today. Everyone will have the word heard in news at least, most will have a rough understanding of its purpose. And people using obsidian are usually not the most uneducated, there have a certain level of technical expertise. Most will also know and understand the dataview-plugin.
Yes, of course you can optimize your communications. Humans tend to donthat constantly, this is just a matter (or: a mirror) of your priorities. If you care you optimize your communications and don't do if you won't. Whether you care about a particular target audience or you don't is up to you and nobody else.
However, it isn't exactly rocket science and if one developes such a feature it makes sense to test it with multiple realistic usecases anyways, so why not just use those to show the users how it can be used?
Unless ofc a feature is developed in mental isolation by a recluse with a niche interest in the code without thinking about the potential use at all. But then it is probably more like a extracagant hobby than a serious project that others should rely on.
Another one: "Bases provides filtered and sortable table and card views of note Properties and Tags."
Related and Bases description: https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/76...
> The idea is that you can store properties, or metadata about the current file, in Obsidian notes. For example, if I have a note about Decoder, I might put the name of the host and a list of episodes. For each episode that I want to take notes on, I might write down which guests were on, what date it came out, or the episode number. What Bases allows you to do is visualize a certain kind of note as a table or eventually as a Kanban view or another type of view. So, it’s like a visualization layer on top of the data that you already have. We just make it really easy to create that database from the bottom up.
> It’s kind of like a backward database because all the data is already in there. You’re just looking at it and saying, “Show me all notes that have the ‘books’ tag,” for example, or a link to “Casey.” Then, I get a table and then I have all my metadata, which I can edit. It’s quite powerful if you’re someone who enjoys tracking books that you read, or the movies that you watch, the places that you go, the articles you’ve read. You can very easily create these structures or do project management.
Yeah it could have a better explanation. I added like three bases and always just got a list of "file name" and was wondering how to add different data. Was expecting something like MS access based on markdown tables. Maybe if the documentation would have an example of how you would create a collection of documents and then have a view on that with a base it would be clearer.
> And, instead of searching all over again, you just click into the Bases file and new notes are just there in the default table format.
Sounds like a View.
This seems useful for folks who use Obsidian as a personal CRM. I got some queries with data view that I'm going to see if this can replace:
https://blacksmithgu.github.io/obsidian-dataview/
I often want to answer questions like:
- When was the last time I chatted with this person - What did we talk about - Who haven't I spoken to in a while
Dataview can generate all of the data from Bases (and a whole lot more), but Bases is a lot easier to use as you can build queries in the GUI and the data comes out in nicely formatted table where you can edit the fields directly in the table rather than needing to load each data item one by one to make changes.
And still after using and making changes in the GUI the query is stored in a nicely formatted and editable YAML file.
This seems distinctly in opposition to what I believe makes Obsidian a great program, providing an excellent editing environment and extensibility for markdown. The more it ventures into these types of features, the more they're going to lose to applications that designed for this from day dot, like Notion and Anytype.
You can think of Bases as an editor and visualization layer for the YAML frontmatter in your Markdown files.
Frontmatter is not part of the original Markdown spec, but it became a standard way to add metadata to Markdown files long before Obsidian came along. I believe it started in 2008 with the introduction of Jekyll:
https://tom.preston-werner.com/2008/11/17/blogging-like-a-ha...
Frontmatter is supported by almost all SSGs and many apps like Obsidian add autocomplete and other QoL features around it.
Bases to me is exactly what you describe. A feature that provides an excellent editing environment and extensibility for Markdown files.
For example, my blog is a set of Markdown files compiled with Jekyll, that I edit in Obsidian. Now I can add a base in Obsidian that helps me see the state of different blog posts/pages, quickly sort/filter them, and edit their metadata. It helps me spend more of my time editing Markdown files, but at a higher level.
You've basically just added a custom language on top of Markdown, what is your plan for importing this into another editor in the future? How will it know to interpret it as a database?
By that rationale isn't Obsidian itself a language on top of Markdown?
Being able to view your Markdown files as a graph or show a list of backlinks is possible because Obsidian has some JavaScript to do that. Previously one could write other views with plugins, but bases make it easier for non-technical folks to create views.
The views are described in human-readable YAML, so recreating them in another tool is possible. That's effectively what many people are doing if they're converting views from Dataview to Bases. There are already tools that automate this: https://github.com/Quorafind/Bases-Toolbox
The output of views can also be converted to plain Markdown tables or CSV.
If you boil it down, bases are a visualization layer that is in service of creating and editing Markdown files — and that's what Obsidian has been since the start.
If you're not interested in this feature set you can disable Bases in core plugins :)
That's the thing. There's nothing really "custom" here. The files themselves are all still standard markdown with yaml frontmatter. The only difference is that there's now a nice, performant interface for getting an overview for all those files - something that you could fairly trivially make with a script, if you really needed to recreate it. And the file specifying what your views were is, itself, plaintext. There's no lock-in here, and the spec is open and well-documented.
It’s a markdown editor, but they can’t modify the markdown standard, so their scope is limited. All they can do is build features around it.
Having a database isn’t mutually exclusive with the core functionality. You can simply not use it.
To be very pedantic, "Markdown standard" is basically a blog post written over 20 years ago and never updated.
Everything more "advanced" like tables, to-do lists and multi-line code blocks aren't a part of the "standard" as it was written, but were added on top by different implementations (like CommonMark) which are now commonly-mistaken for the original Markdown.
My point being that this isn't something unique to Obsidian, pretty much everyone does it slightly differently while still calling it "Markdown".
> It’s a markdown editor, but they can’t modify the markdown standard,
They have several modifications of Markdown, everyone has. But not everything makes sense to implement in a flavour of Markdown. YAML is for structured data significant better than a freeform-format, especially when you're in the phase of building the foundation of a new feature-family.
The complain is valid, Markdown is for documents, free form, free flow, structured data are a very different use case, and while YAML is better for the job, it's still a different language with different smell.
But Obsidian is a tool for managing knowledge, always has been; it's not just a plain Markdown-editor. All those features which are going beyond simple flavoured text, have always been part of it's Core-Mission, just not materialized yet.
For me it's the opposite and I highly disagree.
Valuable features such as this make working with markdown files much better. It's overall a huge plus for working with Obsidian. It does not change the content of the markdown files themselves, so there's no lock-in or other potentials long-term problems. It allows me to move further away from Notion, which is a great thing, and I hope to see them be able to fully replace Notion Databases in the future.
Plus the config for the individual bases is plain text, so in theory the queries could be read and run in other software too.
I don't think it is because it just requires that you write frontmatter in YAML which is pretty human readable and common in certain markdown formats.
Your notes are still in markdown.
It's a plugin. It's not required, it's an optional extension.
That's like saying McDonald's is going to lose customers because they started selling coffee and muffins.
The “base” name appears to be misleading. I assumed this feature would add a structured data format to Obsidian, but it does not. This is exclusively a query engine for your existing markdown files.
An obsidian base is primarily defined as a code block in an existing markdown file. That code block defines a series of queries (filters, really) that produce a result set of markdown file names.
So… more a way to work with a large collection of markdown files than a relational database.
I'm with you. I think this should be a downloadable plugin, not a standard plugin.
I kind of wish they would slow down development and just polish what is already there. They are on this treadmill where they feel the need to keep adding new features, new maintenance burdens, bloating the product in every dimension.
In a few years somebody fresh will come along with a product that's a lightweight alternative. It sucks, but that seems to be the lifecycle of this kind of thing. For now, I've turned off automatic updates on Obsidian which isn't ideal either. :(
It is. You can disable it from core plugins. Obsidian has done more than anyone else for the PKM community without lock in, it’s quite disheartening to see so many complaints.
I'm disheartened too because they have done so much and I'm happy to pay my annual fee, but it seems obvious that they are headed in a direction that isn't for me.
What are you concerned about specifically? What bits of Obsidian should they work on polishing instead?
(not trying to be hostile, just curious as another Obsidian user who is excited by this feature because the current meta search functionality is really poor IMO and this is very much needed polish from my perspective)
I think the core note taking is pretty solid, what do you think they should be doing instead? I do think search can be improved, as well as keyboard centric flows and native pdf annotations. But aside from polishing, is there much missing from the app core features?
I think the app might be complete and that's not a bad thing. Obsidian doesn't need to become Notion.
They probably have lots of ideas for new products. They could start working on a follow up product or service.
I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it.
For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them.
Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.
But don't install Obsidian and then spend hours adding addons. You'll get overwhelmed, confused and wondering why all the Influenzers are saying it's CHANGED THEIR LIFE. It hasn't.
Obsidian is amazing because it is a notepad with pretty colors and the graph that gets everyone's attention. The graph is often the most overhyped and underused thing there. It looks complicated and that's the selling point of all that ecosystem around productivity systems and all that. The appearance of deep complexity and work.
I love how many just ended up here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44864134
It's _also_ a notepad that runs on android and synchronises mostly successfully with machines elsewhere. I'm ignoring the plugins entirely but getting lots of use out of the text synchronisation across multiple machines.
This is one thing I love about it too, Obsidian Sync is very well done and great for moving text files around the place easily.
I just have a notes folder in Syncthing and it seems to accomplish the same thing. Or is there more to Obsidian Sync that I don't know about?
This kind of file sync works but you can run into problems. Switching from one device to the other too fast and editing the same file can get you into trouble, for example. And all the other tradition file sync and conflict resolution issues in general. Also: If one of your devices runs iOS, you will probably have a bad/annoying day with any "sync your files outside the app you edit them in" solution.
The WYSIWYG markdown editor and wiki links are what I like about it. I’m not into the whole plugin lifestyle that seems to be a thing among the “productivity” crowd.
In the beginning I had my Obsidian folder in my iCloud, but had not so happy experiences regarding the conflict resolution.
I know it’s not the best place to end up, but I always end up back on Apple Notes. It’s has enough features, syncs across my devices, and is simple to use.
I really hate that article. Taskwarrior is infinitely better than a txt file. A txt file is the worst possible option for task management.
Now I'm using Emacs Howm for task management. It is based on text files and it is great. Org-mode is also great.
Also for anyone interested in trying Howm the guide for it was recently updated.
https://github.com/Emacs101/howm-manual
The cool thing about Howm is that it's note-taking and task management for lazy people. It predates org-mode (but it also works with it nowadays) and has a distinct way of linking notes by way of go-to and come-from links, think saved search and automatic backlink respectively. Also the way tasks are displayed and surfaced is pretty neat too, the guide/manual goes more in-depth but if you find stuff like org-agenda too complex you'll appreciate Howm's way of tracking and managing tasks.
> There is so much wankery around Obsidian, it's so cringleworthty. Obsidian is a nice/fancy editor for markdown files. That's all it is really. People have created so many addons to bolt so much stuff onto it, but that's all it is at its core. You can search your notes, you can tag them.
It is a simple markdown editor yes but it's the addons that make it so different. There's tons and tons of markdown notetaking apps, but this one just hit the right balance for me. End to End encryption, self-hosted livesync (I can see myself typing from another client), good mobile support, fast searching. Self-hosting is a must-have for me, even with end to end encryption.
The one thing I miss is a bit more security on Android (it would be great if the app offered an option to hide its files from other apps by locating them in the app's private storage area). And for it to start quicker, it has to load a whole browser on every open because it's an electron app even on mobile.
But overall it's great for me. Not earth-shattering but it just offers the right combination of features for me.
I don't really see what the 'wankery' is.
> Just use the _core_ addons of Obsidian. That's all you need. Then if you find you really are missing something, have a look in the community addons. You'll probably find what you want.
For me there are several third party addons that are invaluable. The livesync plugin first of all, it's really great sync and fully self-hosted. This is quite a complex thing to get working and one where so many other apps fall down.
ReadItLater for capturing websites is also pretty nice. And the copilot one for searching notes with RAG.
> it would be great if the app offered an option to hide its files from other apps by locating them in the app's private storage area
For what it's worth, you can do just that now. Not sure when it was introduced, but on the current Android version, you are prompted to select either "Device storage" or "App storage" when creating a new vault.
You can also change the location of existing vaults from app to device and vice-versa.
With that now available, the one thing missing for me is a biometric lock option. Or even any kind of locking at all. There's a community plugin for that, but it's quite unstable and no longer maintained.
On iOS any app can be set to a biometric lock by long-pressing the app icon. I believe some Android flavors have this feature, but not all. However I think it can also be done on Android using the "spaces" feature.
I use a Samsung device which unforunately doesn't have the app lock feature.
But it does have a "secure folder" which is more or less what you mean by "spaces", I guess.
The downside of the secure folder against normal app locking is that the apps are no longer seamlessly integrated with the launcher and other apps. It's definitely more secure but is ultimately overkill for my needs.
Oh great! I didn't know that was an option <3 I'll have a look. I originally installed it a couple years ago when I bought my phone.
Ps: Where do you see the feature to move an existing Vault? I don't see this option sadly
Sorry, I was mistaken about that aspect.
The option is available to move a vault from the app to the device storage, but not the other way around. At least not from within Obsidian.
But if you use a PC or a file manager that has full device access, you can manually copy the vault folder to the `/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/md.obsidian/files` directory.
I just tried that and Obsidian recognised it.
yea how about you do you, and live and let live
nobody cares what you think people "should" do
It's not you, it's the productivity influencers making you think it's "supposed to be" more than what it is: a nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files.
I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing).
Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative links and weird plugins that break the premise of having universal markdown files. Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
While I agree that the zettle-nerds take it way too far, I disagree with this:
> Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
I've actually found that having well-linked files _more_ important since I started pulling the vault into Cursor. The other day, for example, I was able to point to the page where I had aggregated links to all of my "<Project> Onboarding" notes and know that I was giving the right context when I asked it to help me brainstorm a six month plan. The alternatives were to instead put everything in a single note (not feasible), manually include each note as context (and hope I didn't forget one), or hope that Cursor found the right ones (unlikely).
> nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files
wow okay, I kept thinking that there must be more to it, why does it only list my files that I can already see in my filetree on the left, like what's the point? I was expecting to see something like what Atlassian has in Confluence (which was also far more intuitive to create btw) https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/create-a...
Start with the problem you're trying to solve and use the features to solve it. Don't just try to cram its features into your life
I think the one thing that really kills me is "consolidating" data is harder than it probably should be.
A simple thing I started with was "lets track movies and shows people recommend to me and I watch".
Ok, page for each rec, and then I can use props to tag them with things like if I watched them or not, who recommended them, genre's, and most importantly, if it's just for me, or also something the wife would enjoy.
Well....obviously I'd like to have a quick view on some page of the recommendations, and then ideally the recommendations that are tagged to include my wife so I can glance view between the two.
Thiiiiiis is not as easy as it should be. I'm writing this as some massive sql vquery on a couple billion records churns away. I'm not great (i'm much less impressive than that previous comment sounds in fact), but im way above beginner. I'm shocked at how hard this seems to be.
Tag searching is possible, but it gets ugly fast and sucks to constantly have to do and the bookmarks weren't clear.
Want to do queries, oh there's a plugin for that. Kinda odd but ok. Oh but wait those too are ALSO kinda of unintuitive (to me, i suspect it's a syntax and style I just haven't used to some extent), and why do I need to do a massive custom dataview query to just get what I feel should be built in? Why can't I just say "put in a query result for anything tagged with x and y", since that's what i'm typing out the hard way?
I haven't really "dug in" on this issue in awhile. I know they made some changes somewhat recently that allow some of this, but it seemed like it wasn't enough. It's baffling to me, because having a "dashboard" is the end goal of almost all these systems, and yet it seems so difficult in obsidian even for technically minded users. I can learn it, but god knows I don't need ANOTHER personal research project on my pile.
I'll admit that by griping about this i'm praying I get they "hey idiot" response below that explains how I should've done this.
Edit- To be clear, this new change certainly seems like it might help. It'll depend on how those views work in practice, and obviously appeals to me in my databasing mindset.
Remember, this is basically your own personal Wiki. You can either embrace and accept a rigid organizational structure or not. You are signing up for a lot of up front maintenance and design this way. The alternative is to heavily use links, tags, and other tools that make it easy to find data later.
For a personal knowledge base I think the latter approach saves time in the long run. I have clusters of well organized information. Well tagged and linked. I can always find my movie ideas, projects, and deep thoughts when I want them. I like the idea of just curating the clusters I care about. Just enough organizing. I then have a few highly connected entry points to my clusters. Often I find people don’t link enough in their Obsidian. It’s free and puts things in a more graph oriented layout that the tool can show you.
Edit: oh, also remember, these are text files. Grep still works. Also, we have very powerful CLI LLMs to summarize and categorize text data rapidly. Like “suggest 3 tags for this document based on <prompt magic here>. :)
No “hey idiot” but for what it’s worth: are you making things too complicated? It almost feels like you’re a bit distracted by all the dimensions of data you want to track. Could this all be one page with a bulleted list, each one might have sub bullets if you care to record things like who shared it and other notes? You can just Ctrl+F for “wife” when you need that sub query.
This is kinda where I get to "then why use obsidian?". Like to me the whole point is to kinda have some linking and clean notes organization, and i'm keeping it fairly simple (just some basic tags). But yeah I suspect a large part is trying to bend it into something it's not.
Yeah. All I use it for is a listing of some markdown files. I don’t use any online features. After a decade of experimenting I’ve found this very simple approach is perfect for me.
I’ve been using Obsidian at work for a few years now, and things like this are why I ignore almost all Obsidian content on the web. Everyone seems to create these really complicated setups, in the name of zettelkasten, that seem nearly impossible to maintain and use in real life. If I want to make a list of movies to watch, I use a simple checklist in one note and move on with my life. I keep Obsidian simple so it gets out of my way.
I tried going down the road like you’re talking about one for managing past, present, and future trips. It technically worked, but it was so fiddly that I hated using it. I just made a few folders instead.
I suppose now, if I wanted all the metadata you’re talking about, using a base would make the most sense. But I’d still need to be realistic about how I’m going to use it. Do I care enough about future sorting abilities to turn adding a movie to a watch list into a multi-field form, where I need to consider all these potential futures to fill it out, creating a lot of friction to the action?
The default search is not great and the syntax of the dataview plugin is not amazingly well designed. Even the author of dataview admitted to that.
The author started working on a new dataview-like plugin called datacore, but that project is stalled afaik
Hyperlinks are all you need: https://ezhik.jp/hypertext-maximalism/
I sorta agree, but i feel like i just want the "one more step" of dynamic content for this.
The hubs described are nice, but they don't always reflect larger changes. Updating a hub becomes a dependency that seems silly as I feel like that should be one of the easier things to keep up to date with a basic code overlay. It's one of the first things I wrote when messing with Obsidian, and part of why I really like dendron (easy refactoring, but it's got other issues).
I was kinda similar when I first started using it. I watched heaps of videos and had so many plugins installed but I was never really sure if I was doing it "right". Then one day I got annoyed and uninstalled every plugin and just went back to basics. I only reach for plugins when I feel something is missing, but honestly the only plugins I use are Style Settings which let's me customize the theme a bit more and Calendar so I can have... well... a calendar.
I think the real power of it is the fact you can extend as much, or as little as you want!
Linter and Templater are the two I can't live without. The rest are just nice to have.
I highly recommend Siyuan as an alternative, it has many the best features from obsidian plugins included by default
Dev has a history of installing cryptominers in his previous projects and rootkitting people into starring and forking his projects.
I think the difference here is that Siyuan is fully open source, which means you have more confidence here.
Thanks for bringing this history up, and I think everyone should be careful when downloading a new version for this product, or better build by themselves after checking out the recents commits with some AI tools.
I can’t believe my eyes. Is that the self hosted notion alternative many of us have been looking for?
If all you need is just daily/one-off notes/jottings then Obsidian is not at all something you might want to use. Because, as excellent and a powerful tool it is for right purposes, even w/o its horde of plugins, it will be an overkill for just note taking. My assumption is based on just this comment of yours but you might want to try simpler note taking apps - that just does one thing - note taking, nothing else. Preferably a plain text note taking app for your OS.
When I was looking for nv->then->simplenote replacement Joplin and Obsidian didn't even stay on the radar for more than a few mins.
Idk—I use Obsidian all the time & I don't even [[link]] my notes, much less need a database feature like this. Regardless of how many features it has, it is also simply a good markdown editor at heart.
Debatable. I use Obsidian specifically because it can be relatively minimalist and it's easy to get the view I want and use 99% of the time: List of files on the left, main note window (sometimes with tabs and/or split) in the middle and a calendar that can jump me to a daily note on click on the right. You can't make such relatively small UI adjustments in the more minimalist note-taking apps, so even if you may not use all of the functions and plugins, Obsidian can still be a relevant choice.
You’re not the only one. I invested months on Obsidian before walking away and returning to OneNote. It’s advertised as a ‘second brain’ but at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer. You can’t even manually sort notes and folders. Directory Opus can do that and more.
Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.
> at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer
For me it's a feature.
Breakage is the best-case scenario. Mass data exfiltration is the bigger concern. The community plugin system is both an unacceptable security risk, and a necessary part of achieving even a baseline level of usability. Imagine the scale of theft that must already have taken place.. the targets may never even know. The fact that Obsidian falsely claims to audit this cesspool is hilarious.
It is an hilarious claim. They don’t have enough resources to implement critical features, much less waste developer time auditing every random Tom, Dick, or Harry plugin contribution.
I can count their staff on one hand. And at any given time, half of them are busy playing D&D. No vision or leadership.
Obsidian can do a lot, but in the end it should be a tool to help you do other stuff. Just use it for what you want to use it. And if you want to explore plugins, themes, snippets, etc., think what about what you want to do, then find solutions for that.
It can be fun to explore various features and extensions, but set limits and try to keep things simple rather than complex.
I just use it as a personal wiki, so plugins are overkill for me. I was basically using it as a way to basically have txt files with latex and it fits the bill.
One of the best things about Obsidian is that even all this new stuff is done through built-in plugins and can just be turned off.
Off topic, but I discovered this recently:
Similar to Obsidian, but offers good code syntax highlighting in markdown files.
I found it useful for reading code in markdown.
> Supports ... code blocks with syntax highlighting.
Based on the documentation and the screenshot next to it, I don't see how it differs from Obsidian on this point.
A Markdown code block in Obsidian is going to be highlighted as expected.
Actually it appears that they both relies on Prism to achieve this :
- https://help.obsidian.md/syntax#Code+blocks
- https://github.com/suchnsuch/Tangent/blob/main/apps/tangent-...
I've used Obsidian and Tangent. For whatever reason, I've found Tangent's code highlighting brighter, more colorful, and (maybe hence?) more easily readable. Obsidian is more muted. Steve Jobs would have preferred Obsidian.
You can also create a code block in markdown and then write the language type at the top. This also creates highlighting.
‘’’go {your code} ‘’’
Thanks for this tip.
I've seen this feature off and on in some online code editors. I didn't know this was a (universal?) Markdown feature. Is it supposed to work universally in all Markdown editors (e.g. VSCode's Markdown view)?
Just use it how you want to use it. For me, a bit of structure is enough - too much and it becomes unwieldy. But don’t let anyone tell you it’ll either save your life or become your “second brain”, that’s all bullshit. Just stick with no plugins or a small and solid set of ones you love. For me probably the only absolutely critical plugin is omnisearch, but YMWV.
My other advice is that it’s fine to boot up new vaults for other things. I’ve got two main vaults - a sort of work KB and a journal. But then I’ve got a bunch of smaller ones - songs I’m writing, courses I’m making, writing. Don’t be told that you’ve got to get some kind of universal thing that does everything. This is also b/s and often pedalled by the productivity wonks.
Is there a way in Obsidian to have a virtual file separator like `---` in yaml documents?
For bases to work I need to split my stuff up into tiny documents but I'd prefer to have one big document with separate sections. For example I keep one document `book-recommendations.md` with many small sections for books I'd like to read. I can't search through that with bases unless I split those out into many small files in with one recommendation each.
This is my main complaint for Bases. It forces you to split your data into many many small files.
I don't need entire files for each individual book/movie/task I want to manage.
They'll have maybe 4-5 properties at most with not much content in them.
File system, and syncing operations will take a massive hit if I have to manage that many files.
How many files do you have? At what scale did you see this being a problem?
I'm a fan of Obsidian, not affiliated with them, but my experience with basic file syncing like syncthing or git is that you should be able to easily get up into the ten's of thousands of files without an issue.
The Obsidian Sync (official) plugin isn't very clever with its syncing, it does one file at a time, seemingly new requests for each file.
I recently had to sync a new Obsidian vault from scratch, a vault with thousands of files, and it took minutes to complete because of this, even though most files are a couple of KB at most.
Easy to fix and low hanging fruit, but still an issue for us with many files in our vaults.
I don't want to manage that many files. I'll fully admit that I'll hit my limits before the computer cares.
Same here, but the problem is bigger than that. Having to manage a ton of tiny files makes it easier to lose tiny bits of data. What happens if a file changes, gets overwritten and you don't notice? It's much easier to 'version' a single larger file than many hundreds (thousands?) of tiny files containing 4-5 lines at most.
The popular Obsidian Dataview plugin enables that and much more (instead of using Bases)
Welcome use org-sueprtag, a package with org-mode and Eamacs. It's feature org-sueprtag-view-table provide similar function.
And it design for a big document, with many nodes in it, it will filter this nodes by tags and properties.
I'll be checking this out. I've used Dataview in the past, and while it has some great functionality, it's a bit too clumsy for my taste and it has a learning curve. Hopefully this resolves some of those issues.
I've been using bases (in beta) for a month or so for the vault I keep for the notes for each of the (many) D&D/ttrpg campaigns I play in, and it's really made it a ton easier to get an overview of e.g. the many different NPCs we meet and interact with, and the relevant info (name/pronouns/pic/race/class/etc) all in one place.
The Obsidian dev team has been really responsive to feedback from those of us in the beta, and I'd encourage people to look at the changelog to see that in action (e.g. changing the syntax to be more object oriented, smoothing over UI issues, etc)
I also made pretty heavy use of plugins to manage PCs, NPCs, encounters, items (!!), custom tables, maps, and setting details in a single campaign. Led to a lot of bug reports for the D&D-specific plugins, but Dataview worked like a charm.
Having a more Obsidian-native interface for managing all of that is. Like other commenters, would definitely watch a video of you sharing your Obsidian "build" for that use-case.
Man, you probably gave me the only use case that could push me beyond my basic usage of Obsidian. [i wait for your YouTube demo. #PROOOOFIT]
Lol, I'm not much of a "content creator" (though I'd recommend wanderloots' intro series on bases[1]), but here's a quick gist of what I extracted from my for one of my campaigns:
https://gist.github.com/LordDragonfang/d826cb686c64d582afbe2...
This is a combined view of the players and npcs from one campaign with the portrait gallery in the second view.
I've got the official template plugin bound to ctrl-shift-2, so I just hit that to pre-populate the frontmatter whenever I create an npc/pc/etc note with the appropriate template.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWhMzDKA7vJ4NDvVhlZMk...
I found one previous thread. Others?
Obsidian Bases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44058972 - May 2025 (13 comments)
(May 2025 was from when the donor-only beta was announced, the current thread is the official release many changes later)
Wow, I remember when this feature was planned/announced. It's great to see first class support for the Dataview-type workflows.
I hope the API has support to allow extensions---I see that it is on the Roadmap[0].
I'm particularly interested to see how this integrates with Canvas and other note types.
I am curious about how this compares to dataview. As a dataview user, I'm not immediately seeing something bases does that dataview doesn't, but I am not a power user.
Dataview can be used for queries that output tables, but its strength is letting you write essentially custom imperative Javascript code that renders stuff in notes dynamically (dataviewjs mode). Whereas "queries to tables" is more or less what Bases does, the dataviewjs mode will probably always be unique.
A feature I have always missed in Obsidian is the continuous journal view from Logseq. How hard could it be to display the journal all on one page.
I even started just writing the daily journal all in one file because that gives me that but it's starting to get a little big.
Daily Notes Editor plugin (https://github.com/Quorafind/Obsidian-Daily-Notes-Editor) does exactly that. Might do the trick for you.
I see a lot of complaints about scope creep and vision drift here, so I'll add a different perspective: I use Notion right now, but have been considering a switch to Obsidian for a while now (variety of reasons, chief among them a desire to reduce my own dependence on US-based tech platforms and tools).
The lack of something like Notion databases / tables was the last thing stopping me from migrating over; I found this feature really helpful for organizing my thoughts and tasks as I want them organized, and not having it would have been a noticeable UX regression for me.
With this launch, I'll take a deeper look. It's that simple: it provides a feature many want, largely because it's seen as a killer feature of comparable closed platforms.
Have been using Obsidian for a lot of stuff ( https://bryanhogan.com/tags/obsidian ), from writing posts for various websites of mine to personal knowledge management.
Very happy that Bases is officially launching. My experience so far has been great. It can definitely replace the "Projects" plugin for me, maybe the "Dataview" plugin as well? Hope it can rival Notion Databases in the future, e.g. by adding a Kanban view.
A little off topic but I've always wondered why Ms office doesn't allow embedding of excel cells within word/powerpoint and then allowing reference to certain cells within word with some syntax. That would unlock a lot of new ways to create reactive presentations and word documents.
Didn’t they promise this with “Fluid Framework”? https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/microsoft_365blog/i...
I remember being a bit spooked when they announced this and their Notion clone Loop (I’d been at Notion for a year or so). Where are they now? Idk.
I tried to do it with first powerpoint and then wotd, and finally pounded excel to accept update from word and power point using VB. It was ugly, until someone made a python library to build spreadsheets in excel, now it just throws everything in, and plays it in excel like a power point.
So where does the data "live"? I was looking at the syntax, it defines predicates for filters and views and so on, but I don't see the "rows". There is this `file.name` and `file.ext` thing - but where do you set them? What type of file does it point to? CSV? JSON? Something else? The docs seem incomplete.
The rows are individual Markdown files and the columns are YAML frontmatter properties in those files.
There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension.
The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to a Markdown table or CSV.
See also: https://help.obsidian.md/bases/syntax
Hmm... so I can't use this to render and filter a table with 10k rows without having 10k markdown files?
If I understand correctly, the intention seems to be "curated list of links" which the user can sort, filter, etc when viewing. I guess that's cool, if you use Obsidian lots and have many notes/links - but when I clicked the article and saw the table I was hoping for a "dataframe" plugin for .md (much like how mermaid works, defined in a codeblock) that references a nearby CSV/JSON/etc file.
I often have a lot of .md files floating around "data" projects and a lightweight tabular renderer (with filtering, sorting, possibly editing) would be absolutely killer. Does such a thing exist already?
If you have 10k rows this isn’t for you, but 99% of use cases have less than 100 rows.
For example, book list, movie list, customer list, invoice list, asset register, key register… once you hit a certain point, obsidian probably isn’t the right tool anymore. But no reason to go to the monthly SaaS “right tool” at the POC stage.
Obsidian is the pre-step for a larger database: cheap, fast to customise, easy to backup (git), self supported. It’s probably not going to run a company, but it will suit an individual or small startup.
And 99.99% of discussions about scaling are premature optimisation (cit needed). A lot of people spend more time thinking about scaling then entering their data, which probably means the data is smaller than they think! ha
Yes, it relies on a Markdown note file for each row and the “columns” are YAML frontmatter and cached metadata for each file.
I am with you on this, I wish Obsidian would optionally allow you to use YAML or some other structured data directly in the fenced code block or base file.
I really, really want something that kind of takes an Obsidian-like approach to local databases, sort of like Excel/Airtable but with flat, human-editable text files that live on your filesystem with a schema driven property editor. It’s kind of a bummer that this gets so tantalizingly close but doesn’t take it to the logical conclusion. I hope they do it eventually or make it possible with plugins.
I guess there is a convergence of ideas going on here because I've actually been tinkering on something like this, a Notion-database-like that just uses flat CSV files (and internally reads it into an in-memory SQLite for filtering, grouping and displaying) then schema files for interpreting the data and displaying it nicely.
Here's a little demo of what I've got working: https://youtu.be/LCR9pAc_xn0.
It's currently still very rough and I'm just using it myself but hoping to open source it at some point.
Yes exactly. In fact, I'd prefer it by built more like mermaid as a _markdown_ JavaScript plugin thing that supports different data formats (not just YAML frontmatter - bare CSV for example) and have it available outside Obsidian (the github .md renderer, VS Code Markdown Preview, etc).
I think what you're trying to describe is a Jupyter notebook but in a slimmer package. Maybe marimo or quarto? Maybe there are already notebook viewers out there (on GitHub?) that only allow view or edit without code execution, if that suits your needs.
Have you ever tried the Dataview plugin?
It allows inline blocks in the `key:: value` format, as well as frontmatter-based data (sort of what Bases are doing) and probably even more.
Is this essentially an official replacement for the Dataview plugin? Last time I used Obsidian was 2 years ago
Yes and no. It's not meant to be as "kitchen sink" comprehensive yet, but it's a like 90% replacement and it's a ton faster and more responsive. (And I suspect once extension support comes in the dataview team will fully change over)
I just started using Obsidian. What is the best way to use Obsidian both on your phone as well as your PC/laptop? I use it within git and google drive. How can I sync it most easily to my phone as well?
Obsidian has a git plugin that works on all platforms I tried it on (Windows, Linux, Mac and iOS). So I just have a private repo that syncs all the devices through git.
For iOS, the "hard" part is getting the initial git clone, but after that whenever you open the app you can pull/push any changes or set it to automatically do that on a schedule.
To setup a git repo on an iOS device you need iSH[1] but you can delete it the initial `git clone`. The plugin can handle it from there. Make sure to use https and a token that doesn't expire as part of your git clone url. Here is a guide[2]
The only thing to keep in mind is to have a .gitignore that excludes some of .json config files in .obsidian folder as they often cause conflicts. I exclude workspace.json and workspace-mobile.json which just define what tabs you have open on a given device so I think it makes sense to keep that device specific and not commit it.
[1] https://ish.app/
[2] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mobile-sync-with-git-on-ios-for-...
I use Syncthing to sync between multiple devices, it works without issue.
You could also pay for Obsidian Sync. This has the added benefit of being officially supported and it funds the development of the software.
Obsidian Sync is the best way, as others commented. If you're just trying it out and you use Apple devices, you can also save the Vault in the iCloud Drive, which is what I used to do at the beginning.
I'm using Google Drive to sync between my Windows laptop and desktop, and Android phone. It works very well.
In general you can use many cloud provider, SyncThing Fork or GitHub.
I wrote about all these options in more detail here: https://bryanhogan.com/blog/how-to-sync-obsidian
The easiest way to sync would be with the official Obsidian subscription, which costs the most amount of money from the options mentioned here.
This is slick.
Does anyone know what JS library (presumably) they are using to display, filter, sort the table?
For the grammar: Lezer For the editor: CodeMirror
Everything else is custom as we generally don't use existing frameworks and the large amount of baggage they carry. CodeMirror and Lezer we already used before Bases.
Any chance the entire table layout, filtering, etc will be open sourced?
I can see plenty of SaaS apps, especially indie made, that could benefit from such functionality.
Neat! Does it use a library like React? Or perhabs Lit?
Nope, that's not the Obsidian way. We don't use frameworks
We include very few dependencies, see: <https://help.obsidian.md/credits#Third+party+acknowledgement...>
This is beyond slick.
I'm finally able to kill Notion (good riddance - I never liked it!), and if it can handle larger tables then I'll stop using Google Suite as well.
My last request of the Obsidian team is a better git plugin. Their official built-in sync product is fine, but I'd still like to manage my own versioning so I can use automations.
The currently available git plugin is extremely dangerous (!!!) if set up incorrectly. I would consider myself an advanced user of git, and Obsidian's git plugin has on several occasions blown away my history and notes. It has frustrating and opaque behavior for how it consolidates change sets and diffs.
The Git plugin is great for single-device backup IMO, but not great for device sync or collaboration.
I've been working on making Obsidian "work for work" with a real-time collaboration plugin called Relay [0]. We use CRDTs for conflict resolution between users/clients and it also happens to remove a ton of headaches for device-to-device sync as well.
Our collaboration server can be run on-premise and we also just open sourced a Git Sync connector so you can do google-docs style collab via Obsidian+Relay but still have the merged documents end up in git (and plug into (Markdown + git)-centric publishing workflows like Mintlify and Quartz.
The whole Obsidian ecosystem feels really electric right now.
[0] https://relay.md
Can you expand on when the git plugin is dangerous?
I've never had it wipe anything before[1], but I do have a stretch of 200+ commits in my personal vault where my laptop and desktop were fighting back and forth on the contents of one setting file.
One caveat is that the obsidian android app DOES NOT seem to save files to storage until the note unloads, which can break things if you pull in the middle of making changes.
[1] Though I have had to fix my termux clone of the vault enough times that I now just nuke it and re-clone instead of bothering with git - but that's more of a "termux likes to break git" issue than anything
For better/worse, I've noticed save seems to be triggered when moving to a new line. Plenty of times I've unloaded (swiped away the app) only to have a missing last line later when I get on desktop. Building a habit of adding a few trailing newlines seems to have mostly resolved this for me
I know this won't work for some and is no replacement for a good git plugin, but have you tried using an Obsidian terminal plugin to manage git and the git repos yourself?
Speaking as a superficial git user, can you say why not simply git init on the vault is enough to use it?
Why is a plugin necessary?
Plugin commits and pushes the contents of the notes as they are being updated - from within the Obsidian app.
I prefer not using git the plugin, but still commit to a repo.
Sometimes you'll have to push a big ugly commit.
But other times the manual diff review can save you from a headache, like if you have some obscure syncing going on, like syncing READMEs and other markdown files to external repos to manage all markdown with the same Obsidian interface.
Also if you need to maintain a high-standard for the contents of your notes while still utilizing AI tools, the manual diff review can prove invaluable in ensuring trusted resources don't turn into slop
Obsidian is great, but it's no substitute for a text editor. It's more like a power user's Microsoft Office suite which operates on folders rather than files. Case and point: you can't even open plaintext files (.txt).
Also, I'm still waiting for the org mode comment from a seasoned emacs user. :)
One of the nice things about Obsidian is its extensive plugin ecosystem for people who want additional features. Case and point, there's been an extension to do this almost as long as Obsidian has been around:
Thought this could be a full replacement for Dataview but it’s just not there yet.
I love the dataview flexibility and multiple display options.
I’ve moved my Chinese vocab list to Bases (I already had all data in front matter so it was easy) and it’s much much nicer and faster than Dataview
However, for task lists, Dataview still works better imo
As much as I like the idea of Obsidian, I just can't get over all the additional functionality that Notion provides due to the integrated nature of it.
In particular, I love how you select text/blocks in Notion and how every line is a "block". I really wish other editors did that as well. In fact, it's probably the main reason why I haven't moved away from Notion.
What do you think of Logseq or SiYuan?
Logseq[1] is also markdown based but also has a block approach.
SiYuan[2] is more similar to Notion, but self-hostable.
[1]: https://logseq.com/
I haven't heard of those, thank you.
I think my issue with the smaller players is that I've been burnt too many times where they've just stopped development or cancelled the product because it wasn't profitable. So I've generally steered away from them.
On the other side of course, what happens with the big players is the enshittification of the product which I think is slowly happening to Notion, though it still ticks enough boxes that it's the preferred option.
Notion always felt painfully slow and fiddly. I have convinced myself that they have manufactured their entire perceived popularity through YouTube sponsorship. It seems like there is a better tool for every job.
I agree that it's slow, but it's because of the amount of functionality it provides.
If you just want to take plain notes, then yeah. Notion isn't what you want. However if you want sprawling databases that all inter-connected, amongst a variety of different formats, then Notion is amazing for that.
Without Notion the Notion influencers would be unable to organise their very busy influencing schedules.
That seems such a minor gain to me. Are you not concerned about notion a) being online only and b) not letting you be in control of your data?
I'm a strong proponent of File over App: who knows how long Obsidian or notion will exist - at least I know I can work with my Obsidian notes as long as text editors exist
I am concerned about those things, but what I've personally realised is that it's more important to use a tool that you really enjoy using + provides the functionality you want, as opposed to a tool you hate using and doesn't resonate with you.
I hate making notes in plain text. It's too inconvenient, not to mention doesn't provide me with the functionality I want. On the other hand, I love organising things into databases i.e. Notion.
So either I don't take notes (net negative) or I take notes (net positive).
IMO they're for completely different customers. Obsidian constrains itself to working on local text files that you can sync yourself. Notion is just another complex website where you turn over all your data and they sell you AI services.
The complexity is what makes it valuable to some people. Put simply, it does more than Obsidian.
Do you need that complexity? That's a personal question.
Neat. I haven't been using Obsidian for a couple years now, but this will probably get me to give it another try.
One thing I still need is the ability to paste screenshots in-line in notes easily, like how OneNote handles it.
Admittedly, I don't know how OneNote handles it.
But as an Obsidian power-user, I regularly paste screenshots into notes
There is a plugin that allows templating the screenshot file name, so naming the pasted screenshot, using the same as the note where it's being pasted, and a timestamp, for example, is easy.
Are there any good LLM plugins for Obsidian, beyond just throwing Claude Code / Codex at your markdown folder?
I put Claude Code in MCP server mode, then use it as an MCP server for claude desktop to interact with that folder. Works better for me since Claude Code desperately wants to edit things instead of chat sometimes.
Copilot, Smart Connections and Text Generator are all popular LLM plugins in Obsidian
There's no decent RAG functionality, AFAICT, but the Text-Generator plugin has been fantastic w/ larger contexts and a template that pulls either/both links and backlinks into the inference query window.
Hands-down my most productive interface to LLMs for [years since GPT3.5] years running.
> There's no decent RAG functionality
Do you have any examples of what decent RAG functionality might look like? And where the current plugins fall short?
I simply haven't gotten Smart Connections to index my vaults successfully, for whatever reason. So I can't give them a proper review.
I'd hope that any inference performed in a given note would take as context not only the full text of the note, but its nearest neighbors—although, frankly, what I really want are the implicit definitions of proper nouns, ie links.
I also frequently generate articles based on the subject's backlinks, ie mentions in other notes.
Both of those functionalities are provided by Obsidian's core featureset, so all that's missing—and what might provide outsized value—is indexing notes based not only on the embeddings of their literal text, but on meta-text such as: the questions they might answer; the definitions of their principle subjects; counterfactual statements they falsify.
All of which would allow the editor to bring up a relevant note when writing/reviewing another–ie the "unknown knowns".
I think this technique is akin to "knowledge enrichment", or "meta-embeddings," but I think actually those terms have lower-level meanings.
Of course, generating these embeddings would make the indexing process slower and more failure prone, and so I'd be even more likely to fail to get it working and call it a dud.
> is indexing notes based not only on the embeddings of their literal text, but on meta-text such as: the questions they might answer; the definitions of their principle subjects; counterfactual statements they falsify.
That would be perfect!
Smart Connections does seem to have improved a lot recently.
The fact there is no app to do "RAG on localhost for my own notes" really makes me wonder whether the tech works at all.
Great idea, but the feature is poorly implemented. Cannot select multiple cells/rows. I have no idea how to extend past 20 or so rows. I regret having started transferring one of my documents to Obsidian Bases.
I've used obsidian for years but if you want more db in your PKM then Siyuan is honestly a much better (albeit newer) option
It's also open source, unlike obsidian which is proprietary
I've been using the 'DB Folder' and 'Dataview' plugins, I'll definitely look into this new option. Does it work with Dataview at all?
How does it compare to the table view of a Logseq query? Is UI the main added value? Is it possible to build a base of content blocks rather than notes?
I hope more programs use ".base" files for database views – it runs a lot of workflows in Notion that would benefit from a diversity of implementations.
That isn't going to happen. Just like there isn't going to be a bunch of people using .canvas files for canvas views.
This would really benefit from a 10-15 minute video demo building up a simple example use case in a similar style to how dhh previews rails.
Thanks for this submission. I use Obsidian but I wasn't aware of this feature.
Obsidian just being markdown files
Pepperidge farm 'members
I believe the Bases are Markdown files that contain filters for other Markdown files. So it's still all Markdown. Amazing actually.
I really want Obsidian with Neo4j as the backend storage and full cypher query support.
Neat! Is the 'import from notion' functionality able to convert Notion databases to this?
You can import all the underlying data from Notion using the Obsidian Importer plugin, however I believe that Notion's Databases export only includes a CSV. So you'll need to recreate the views to be able to interact with them dynamically.
I see. I just tried the Notion import on the latest version of Anytype, and they now seem to be able to import Notion databases, which is useful.
They use the Notion API though, not any export option that Notion offers.
I want to build a fully round-tripable semantic HTML “microformat” for Notion data so both backup and take-out workflows can depend just on exports, but right now I’m too focused on scaling offline mode to work on it. Sigh. The first version of the HTML/PDF exporter I built as part of my interview process in 2019, I think we could do a much better job
I tried Bases out but it's not suited for my uses. One issue I have with Bases, for any useful piece of information to be tracked underneath one subject -- you have to shard the data into tiny files which can then be used in the table.
Say you're setting up a media log of your engagements and you want to track completed season for a show-- if you're doing a handful of shows, this isn't a big deal. Over 100 shows, averaging 4 seasons -- that's 400 "completions", one file each. Plus another 100 files for the media metadata itself. That's 500 files that can be simply represented by 500 lines of a spreadsheet, even if you're duplicating title, year, etc. over and over.
The sharding of data into tiny files is what makes it difficult to use anywhere outside of Obsidian. If Obsidian Bases used the full power of YAML front-matter data properly, that'd be SO much better.
It's still faster, more efficient to use a spreadsheet. For anything more than what a spreadsheet can handle-- I would use SQLite.
This one-file-one-record approach to databases somehow makes me feel strange.
Notion does the same; every database entry is a separate note/page. As someone working with databases often it “freaked me out”. Over time I’ve learned to accept it…
But notion doesn't work on the file system. And nobody knows what file system on what kind of disk.
Yes!
No more need to evaluate AnyType or similar apps.
Obsidian rocks.
Hm I was hoping this would be about Obsidian-based Wikis.
I hope Obsidian has a headless SDK running outside Obsidian that allows devs to read the vault and do various analysis and automation. With this kind of structured data there are a lot of potential use cases. The obsidian binary limitation is a roadblock there.
Because the data is front matter you can get it into other systems pretty easily but an sdk for executing the views seems really key
There’s a plugin that exposes a local api, which folks use for this type of access pattern. Obsidians sdk for plugins is not external, but it does exist and is used broadly.
So obsidian is now notion is now airtable.
Interesting to see how well this scales.
Yes, but their kicker has always been that you own your data in a readable format even if you don’t use their app and can self sync it if you prefer. I imagine they’ll keep adding functionality of notion and airtable while still keeping this underlying premise
I create .md files programmatically based on my calendar. One day, I'll figure out how to take my copilot notes and paste them in automatically, but for now I know that a note and metadata are already there. its great to be able to do the front matter.
I haven't really looked into what Airtable does, and I shouldn't be surprised at how much AI nonsense I had to dig through on their website to get any real info, but I still was.
It's a shit internet spreadsheet for managers who think they can use it to "no code" code some feature or other that some poor sucker has to painfully migrate off of sometime down the road.
I wonder sometimes how managers became managers of people who use spreadsheets all day without figuring out how to use spreadsheets.
Super interesting to see this.
Are things like Kanban views (a la notion) planned?
Obsidian is amazing
is there any easier way to manage bookmarks with Obsidian? With Bases, I would get a nice UI as well
I’m not using Obsidian atm, but my approach is simply to store them in normal notes. So if I have e.g. a topic.md file I’d make a section called `# Links` there which I can click on. That makes it easier to rediscover links in the right context.
(I’m currently using Org-mode, but the approach is the same.)
You could use Obsidian Web Clipper to save pages from your browser and then make a base that filters based on the folder or tag you use for your bookmarks.
Is there an Obsidian alternative, that is snappy and loads instantly?
Slightly off topic but why is everyone switching to these really wide fonts?
This is awesome. It’s exactly what I needed at the right time.
Is it possible to embed `Bases` in existing notes? Or do they always have to be standalone files?
Currently I have lots of files with embedded Dataview queries in files. I’d like to replicate that with this new functionality.
It is unfortunately not possible to have a Base exist without its own file, even if they can be embedded using the standard `![[]]` syntax.
The documentation tells me that it is possible to create a Base using code blocks, similar to how you'd do it with the Dataview plugin: https://help.obsidian.md/bases/create-base#Embed+a+base+as+a...
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Is Obsidian desktop app still an electron app?
Why is this a core plugin? It’s interesting, but seems a bit niche. How do you decide if it’s a core plugin or a regular plugin?
Core plugin is first-party closed-source plugins the Obsidian team created and maintains. Regular (community) plugins are third-party, open-source and vetted only at the submission time.
This is a core feature of Notion which is a pretty popular app (I’m biased tho I work at Notion)