I Use Obsidian (2023)
stephango.com68 points by hisamafahri 8 hours ago
68 points by hisamafahri 8 hours ago
Having tried different systems since the days of Evernote, the _only_ thing that is consistently useful like obsidian is... emailing myself whatever info I have to look up later. I even used to do this for reminders.
Google search in Gmail continues to just work.
But also I want something better than email, so I've been a happy obsidian user for a while now.
Just for context, Steph Ango is the CEO of Obsidian. His approach to notetaking in his own app made the rounds in the PKM (personal knowledge management) community for how _counterintuitive_ it was.
He eschews a lot of the common wisdom pushed by influencers in this space who tout "the one true way™" to stay organized. File splattered in the root? Sure. Unresolved links to notes that don't exist and probably never will? Why not! Blank daily notes that aren't carefully manicured journal tomes? Heck yeah.
His point is "perfect is the enemy of good." You could carefully curate and perfect your pkm...or you could have a life.
Half of my tasks are in my people folder and half my people are in my tasks folder and it all works out fine in Obsidian.
Obsidian is very flexible, and what a lot of these "how I use Obsidian" tutorials miss is to give a reason why the person is actually using it the way they are using it. Seems like this guy is using it mostly to store meeting notes or journaling. Of the many influencery Obsidian tutorials on Youtube, 99% of them seem to be using it to keep notes for creating Obsidian tutorials.
Would be interesting to have differing perspectives from people with different problems and how they use it for those cases.
People who do lots of work and ship lots of projects tend to have a certain level of mess in their workshops. Creation is repeated cycles of trial, play, reflection and tidying.
For anyone thinking about trying out Obsidian, here are some problems I have solved with it:
- Remembering where I met someone, what we talked about and then connecting up with them at a later date. My ability to remember names is easily 10x because of obsidian.
- Seeing who in my family's birthday is coming up soon and their address so I can send them a card.
- Graphing how far I've run for each day/week and any quick training notes.
- Showing me friend's restaurant suggestions on a map when I've got a free evening and I want to try something new.
And all of this stored locally and synced onto many devices.
If you're curious I highly recommend starting simple. Don't worry about plugins, just write a quick daily note every day about the information that is important to you. When you feel like you're outgrowing that, adopt a structure that fits you and solves your problems.
I tried Obsidian a couple of years ago when all those „Hack your brain with Obsidian“ videos were flooding YouTube, I even had a subscription.
Turns out my brain is beyond saving, while the program was pretty neat, having to have an extra window open was just beyond my attention span. Now I use a notebook, it is chaotic and has coffee strains but I actually use it.
I ~like~ love Obsidian. I also like Steph Ango and his philosophies. In fact, a lot of his ideas shaped and improved mine. His approach is opinionated.
So pick the good ones you like and make your own.
For instance, I’m pretty well-organized, and I like it that way. This leads me to native organizations using folders and some patterns that I learnt aloong the way. Nothing more complicated. One day, if I have to walk off Obsidian, I can, and I will still know where things are.
Right now, my organization is a loose combo of PARA[1] and Johnny Decimal.[2]
Obsidian is another tool; it just happens to be one hell of a good tool.
I tried Obsidian to build a “second brain”. But eventually just reverted back to notes on my iPad (handwritten) and Vim (markdown) for typed notes.
I actually think Obsidian is a great tool, but I just need something as low friction as possible to quickly jolt something down. Vim and Goodnotes does the trick for me.
I tried it several times and the one thing that got it to stick for me was having a structure to the markdown. I have an AST parser for markdown body grammar and validate the frontmatter. The structure helps me keep things sane and organized because my brain is all over the place. Beyond that, unlike OP I attach these schemas to folders in my vault per schema.
Obsidian is amazing on my desktop environments but I shared the same sentiment with you, on mobile I use Apple Notes and transpose to Obsidian if its worth doing so...
Similar to mine. I use Apple Notes for quick, ephemeral notes and for Shared Family Notes. If they are the ones that are more important, they go into the plain-text notes in the Obsidian folder.
The Notes folder(s) is sync with a Cloud Service. So, I use iA Writer[1] (a brilliant Notes App) to have a pleasant writing experience on other mobile devices. They are just Markdown, so I can open them in any Notes App that supports Markdown. I paid for iA Writer once, like 10+ years ago.
I like the desktop app, but the android app is such ass. It's bad enough that I wonder why they even bother.
Same, all projects get a .notes folder where plain text goes. Home directory gets a .notes folder also. It helps to have good command over text based search tools.
There was an exception though, where text just didn't cut it, which was a brief period where I was importing vehicles from Japan and needed lots of images, documents and comparisons up on a big digital whiteboard. I used LogSeq for that.
This is a project that's always on my mind that I never take the time to flesh out. I can't put my finger on the scope. I don't know if I want a full, Johnny Decimaled PKM platform for my entire life, or topical, dense information about things that interest me.
FYI, firing up Claude Code or Codex inside your Obsidian repo location is a game-changer
Curious how people here are using obsidian when taking notes during meetings in the context of AI note taker. I find myself incapable of using features like links as I'm interacting with say a client. I've found AI note takers to be really powerful to help free my mind during meetings though.
Either someone or I, of course, turn on a Note Taker that can transcribe the meeting notes. That file can go into Obsidian.
Unfortunately, most people don’t refer back to it and would wait for someone to do it as part of the spec or project tasks assigned by the Project Manager.
However, I love taking notes in meetings using graphs, arrows, boxes with text, etc. Sometimes, I use an iPad with the Pencil, but I prefer a pen on Paper. This one is usually the one that gets shared, and people seem to like it for understanding the context or for referring back to what they heard during meetings in a simpler, yet faster/easier way.
My methods are inspired by Dan Roam’s Books. I browse/re-read the books pretty often. https://www.danroam.comhe
How I use Obsidian
It’s a truly remarkable app you and team have built. I’m going to use the term _simple_ but please understand that that’s high praise.
To me, obsidian is a thought-taking app, not a notetaking app. Thoughts are amorphous and incomplete no matter how much you embellish them. They don’t belong in only one place with only one label or pinned to only one date. They reach out to each other. Merge and split. They sit inside each other sometimes.
Obsidian gets that. It offers _just enough_ structure and automation and operating system (of a kind) to force the binary file system on some silicon to work like our brains do...and not the other way around.
Don’t over complicate this everyone.
This is the best file-explorer GUI ever made hands down.
All your files map 1-to-1 with the OS filesystem. No double clicking files over and over again. No getting lost in endless unsorted directories. Launch any file extension type straight from the same explorer GUI.
I use this app less as a second brain and more as a personal document vault. (Markdown is ugly sorry about it) I get lots of pdf’s and such so it’s all in one place.
Cool, end of speech. Peace out
I didn't know that Obsidian worked that cleanly; I occasionally flirt with it but have been using https://zim-wiki.org for about a decade longer, so my muscle memory is there. I keep looking for reasons to switch but so far nothing yet has done that?
I use Calibre to maintain my PDFs. I've even got my taxes in there, but have been thinking recently that they don't belong in a library and probably should just be printed and stored with other important things like passports and birth certificates.
But every PDF I download, ebook, academic article, it goes in Calibre and out of my Downloads path.
> This is the best file-explorer GUI ever made hands down.
besides norton commander and its clones
Since it is just markdown files and a tiny bit of JSON meta data, it’s trivial to use Obsidian as the GUI for a static site generator. I have some thin ruby scripts that compile my notebook to HTML and upload to my blog via SSH. I removed my previous static site generator library and just use simple markdown rendering libs now. https://rickcarlino.com/notes/
Back when I was looking for a new PKM system, I remember a "competitor" (now irrelevant) of obsidian making fun via Quote tweet of the Files over app manifesto, saying something like "nobody cares about the way the notes are stored". Ironically, that mean-spirited tweet made me discover Obsidian, and I've adopted it since then as I strongly agree with the philosophy of sovereignty over the content by them being plain files.
I do care about how files are stored, felt trapped with OneNote proprietary format, and seeing what happens to Evernote, now care even more.
More recently, Andrej Karparthy succinctly captured what's great about Obsidian: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1761467904737067456
And with the new LLM powered, I find having tight control over files to be extremely powerful
Thank you kepano!
Love it. I try to follow an absolutely minimal process. Even more minimal than this.
I even built my own “second brain” tool to make my own writing absolutely frictionless.
A dump of all files in one folder is the only thing that keeps me sane. I do not want to sort.
I use yellow legal pads and 4x6" notecards... and probably ship more substantive writing than 96% of people on the planet.
I Use Workflowy. The features it adds over plain text/markdown are worth the slight added complexity. I wish it was cheaper and supported tables, but I'll never go back to non-outlined notes.
This was me until I discovered Logseq. I still use Workflowy to collaborate with others, but combining notes and todos with a powerful query system is what makes Logseq my goto note and todo management tool.
I really want to like obsidian but it’s just unusable (for me)
So I built my own thats a bit more lightweight. Think nvalt meets markdown. thats native, iOS and Mac with I cloud sync, and open source.
Check it out if it sounds interesting!
iOS app is still in review ;(
> a bit more lightweight
I don't want to be overly negative, but no plugins are mandatory, there's no "47 step setup guide" unless you want to heavily customize.
And as far as I can tell you mostly replaced some of the weight with AI?
AI "Search Notes", "Organize Notes", "List and filter, tags", "Clean up notes"
I guess I just see this as weight in a different area? You've pushed a lot of the weight and plugins to cloud-based AI?
I am, on principle, very much a fan of "native app, not another Electron view".
It’s a BYOK so the ai is optional. (And if you really don’t want it it’s a package in the open source app that can easily be pulled out) Since it’s markdown and on filesystem you can just edit your notes with Claude code if you want similar to obsidian.
By lightweight I mean it’s not a super heavy and bloated electron app on desktop and a slow and janky capacitor app on mobile that takes 10 seconds to launch and that the project can be greppable in a day to build on
I use Obsidian, but would never use someone else's Vault template; as these are script files, you neverknow what can be in there without reviewing this. Just a friendly reminder to be cautious
How does it compare to notion
No databases, views, nested pages, automations, or collaboration. It’s a flat list of files with folders. You can supplement these features with plugins but it’s not the same. Notion is objectively more powerful but if you care about data ownership or minimalism you might prefer Obsidian
offline first, so much faster, no terrible pricing model. Hugely better in my opinion
ever since I first heard about Obsidian, the vibe I get is that it's a solution in search of a problem. Every use case I get pitched, there's a better solution, or it's a "problem" that doesn't need to be solved.
If you aren't a researcher in a field, why do you need personal knowledge management? Even when I learn a subject, I find just...taking a flat note file to be way better than all these Zettelkasten stuffs. It all feels very pomodoro to me. It is useful for some people, but influencers have hyped it up into the Grand Unified Solution.
Same with mind mapping. I don't see the benefit. Maybe being AuDHD has something to do with it? Like...if it's an area I want more expertise, I'm already hyperfocused on it and remember everything. If I don't want expertise, I don't need PKM. I keep trying to use them, but it feels superfluous. Like I never have to refer back to it.
> Maybe being AuDHD has something to do with it
I used to live my entire life in emacs org-mode. My memory is shit, if I don’t have a reminder of a task I need to do it probably won’t get done. If someone asks me “hey, do you remember that thing we talked about in that meeting last week?” the answer will be “no, not at all”. If I go “damn, what was that recipe for those pork chops I made last month that were really good?” I will draw a complete blank about what even made them special, but I’ll be disappointed because they were good.
I miss org-mode but as my life became more mobile-phone-centric, it stopped working for me. I ultimately ended up replacing it with two things: Todoist for task management and Obsidian for notetaking.
Maybe the difference is that I use Obsidian for basically two things: keeping track of things that have happened (meeting notes, design decisions, debug sessions) and for things that are a work in progress (software projects at work and for fun, home renovation plans, things that temporally are going to evaporate from my brain before they’re done). It’s a tool that lets me remember what I was talking to people about last week, and a tool for picking up the project I was working on last month. And it syncs great to my phone and iPad Pro for when I’m out of the house.
I haven’t ever gotten to appreciate Obsidian’s task management stuff but Todoist tickles my brain just right for that.
It's literally just a folder of markdown notes with a handy search and file list if that's what you want it to be. That's all I use it for. I think the hyper-organisation stuff is more of a hobby. It's not about productivity it's enjoyable for its own ends.
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