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Obsidian 1.0 – Personal knowledge base app (obsidian.md)
1329 points by ericax on Oct 13, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 565 comments
Cofounder of Obsidian here. We're excited to announce Obsidian 1.0 is live!

Obsidian 1.0 introduces two big changes: a UI overhaul and an new tabbed interface. We've put a lot of care into making the app more approachable and more accessible. We've also prioritized using more native OS features for menus, windows, and many details.

We got our first private beta users from a comment under a HN thread about org-roam [1], and our waiting list was an innocent Google Form. Good times!

Our initial launch on HN was over two years ago [2], when terms like "second brain" and "tools for thought" were still in their infancy. Since then, the landscape has continued to evolve and new ideas are sprouting in the space every day. Obsidian has always embraced its "hacker" nature and thrives off its community of tinkerers. We now have over 670 plugins that push the envelope of what's possible in the app.

We want to continue to foster that same hacker spirit, but at the same time, we want to provide a polished product that can stand on its own. In the last several months, we've expanded the team and refocused ourselves on providing a product that's polished and easy to use.

We have big plans to continue making Obsidian the best and most refined thought-processing app for decades to come. Obsidian 1.0 is just the start!

Special credits go to Stephan Ango (@kepano) for the redesign and Liam Cain for tirelessly polishing this release.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22767658 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23324598




Love love love obsidian. The tool is aesthetically pleasing, built-in vim mode surprisingly well (a few minor glitches with the cursor blinking) — but above all else, the plug-in community takes the cake.

Finally, a note taking application with a decent API that's allowed me to extract metadata and publish metrics into CloudWatch, allowing me to track key metrics and graphically[0] review historical trends of my "second brain." Previous note taking applications I've tried in the past (e.g. Zettlr, Bear) lacked the vibrant developer community that Obsidian has cultivated.

Hats off to the founder and the Obsidian team!

[0] - https://digitalorganizationdad.substack.com/p/stop-zettelkas...


Did you try https://logseq.com/? I've had not reason to pick freemium Obsidian over open source Logseq.


The biggest fundamental difference is that Logseq is an outliner whereas Obsidian is more flexible to any kind of text you throw at it. So if I am trying to write prose it feels constraining for everything to be a bullet.

That said Obsidian and Logseq are interoperable since they both run on a local folder of plain text files. Meaning you can switch over to Logseq for your outlining needs and use Obsidian for everything else.

(slightly biased since I helped on Obsidian 1.0, but I am a lover of all plain text tools)


I always feel like the term “outliner” misrepresents the approach to note-taking that tools like Logseq, (Org-)Roam, RemNote, etc. have chosen. I don’t really have/know a good alternative label, but there is so much more to it than just “outlining” your thoughts in a list of bullet points.

Often when I write down my thoughts this way, it is more like following associative threads. I focus on a particular thought and relate something to it, which now becomes my new focus. Then I defocus and focus on something completely different. Kind-of like these threads here on HN. I wouldn’t call this outlining, it is more like spawning local contexts, nested textual environments to think in.

This is something that I miss the most when working with linear text structures as in Obsidian. I know you can indent and fold indentations in/out, but for me it doesn’t feel natural the way it does in notebook apps that organize text in block-trees. I also cannot reorganize or reference those indentations easily. I feel liberated (in thinking) with those bullets rather than constrained, but of course it is a matter of personal preference and habits.


I like this approach too, just drilling down and fanning out as needed as you research or think.

I’ve used dozens of outlining and mind mapping tools from FreeMind to Logseq to OmniOutliner and more… But for me Obsidian, still wins because of the plugins. Check out the selection of outlining, link management (in particular link graphing) and crucially the refactoring plugins.

At the basic level the outlining plugins give you shortcuts keys to rapidly realign, reindent, fold and navigate a large tree of indented text, and when you combine that with the ability to take an entire level of that tree and just slice it out into its own document, leaning a link to the new document in its place (which other plugins can use to display an inline preview of that document) … it’s just amazing.


I've been using Obsidian for a while and have some plug-ins, but nothing like you're talking about. Would you make some specific recommendations on the plug-ins you're referring to?


Happy to share some of what's been working for me. Some of this is stuff I'm actively using, some of it hasn't quite made it into the "day to day use" yet, but I've been experimenting with. (Random personal advice: Never let your note taking tools feel like using them is work, that's the first step towards not keeping notes!)

- For fans of "outline workflows" Outliner is excellent. A whole bunch of outline/indented text movement and manipulation commands: https://github.com/vslinko/obsidian-outliner

- For easily refactoring notes that are getting too large you want to have Note Refactor. It gives you tools to easily take blocks of text and quickly cut them out into new notes. Its not magic out of the box, but its a powerful tool you can use when building workflows with other plugins. https://github.com/lynchjames/note-refactor-obsidian

- Local images is another good one, working with online content can get messy when you copy notes and then want to be able to work any where you have Obsidian synched. I've got it on my Laptop, two desktops, phone and tablet... I want to carry as much of my related content with me so having an easy way to convert remote images to local copies is a big productivity boost when making notes about content from the internet. https://github.com/aleksey-rezvov/obsidian-local-images

- For analysing the content for some useful stats there's: https://github.com/SkepticMystic/graph-analysis but this is for a relatively specific sort of analysis.

- More general and flexible analysis and graph visualisations are available from the combination of https://github.com/zsviczian/excalibrain , https://github.com/blacksmithgu/obsidian-dataview and https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin ... in short query your notes and note metadata like its a database, build reports and data visualisations, and then excalibrain is a whole thing built on top of that power.

- Dynamic embeds of outside content are available from https://github.com/dhamaniasad/obsidian-rich-links and https://github.com/Seraphli/obsidian-link-embed depending on the style and use you like. While there is a built in functionality to preview the links to other notes when you hover over them https://help.obsidian.md/Plugins/Page+preview which has a demo here https://youtu.be/dmnVml_jbsQ?t=222

- And a real force multiplier is adding https://github.com/Taitava/obsidian-shellcommands to your setup. It lets you run scripts and prompt for information and really invest time in procedural automation without having to build your own javascript plugins. So you can setup your system so that when you use the refactor to cut out a new note, the automations will trigger, ask you to give the note a new heading, tags, and you have a little script that checks last modified time of the folder tree of text files, and looks at the folder of the last modified time and asks you in that popup if you want to move the new note to the folder the note you cut it from is located in. Or anything else you can imagine using outside automation and scripting tools on your plain text markdown files.

These are just a start and if you haven't already browsed the plugins at https://obsidian.md/plugins I wholeheartedly recommend it, people are adding new cool things pretty often and other plugins add new functionality that makes them worth checking out if they were previously not something that you found interesting. I do a read through of the plugin list probably at least once every month or two just to see what's new, and more often if I'm experimenting with changes to my workflow.


This is great! Thanks for taking the time to write it up and share.


org-roam or more generally org mode in emacs is less fixed in it's page structure than logseq. I think outliner is in fact the correct choice for logseq. You cannot move outside of the structure logseq provides for you for the files. org mode in emacs allows you to use any structure you want.

So I think while outliner might be misplaced for emacs it is not for logseq.


Oh I forgot that Org-Roam is different in this regard than Roam since it is based on Org-mode. I don’t have much experience with it, but you are right, it is less fixed like Obsidian.

However, I think Org-mode’s headings (*, **, …) have great nesting and folding capabilities that are more similar to the structure Logseq or Roam provide, but I don’t like having to create a heading hierarchy for my thoughts, so its not really the same.

My critique was more that the term “Outliner” does not really describe how I work with tools like Logseq and Roam, since I don’t really outline my notes/thoughts but use nested bullets more like a focus hierarchy that helps me to “anchor” them in the context of a previous note/thought (I hope this makes sense).*


there's a document mode (shortcut: td) that allows you to write long paragraph


I tried both and am using Obsidian now.

I wanted to use logseq (I felt good about "Obsidian, but open source") but when I tried to find some text in a page I was writing it didn't work. I'm a total logseq noob but as far as I could tell I needed to install an extension/plugin to search through the page, which was weird. Plus, the plugin didn't work for me (I typed in the thing to search for, clicked "go find it" and nothing happened, I think - it's been a while and I didn't use it much).

I kinda boggled my mind that logseq wouldn't have a 'Find' feature for finding text in the page I'm editing.

Please tell me that I missed something obvious so that I can feel dumb for missing that obvious thing but happy that I can take another look at logseq :)


Ctrl+K or the macOS equivalent provides a universal search dialog with a toggle for page-only search.

The UX is extremely lacking, but it's open source, gaining steam, and they recently closed $4mil in funding so I expect it to massively improve over the next two years. Notably, page search should function without needing a dialog+overlay, and should support highlighting/navigating every match.


Thanks!

I'm excited to hear that there's support for expanding it.

And I'll definitely go back and take another look at it! :)


Cmd-K to find any line in your notes and Cmd-shift-K to find any line in your page. Starting with 0.8.3 there is also a native find-in-page feature, https://docs.logseq.com/#/page/Find%20in%20page, which can search anything that is visible including results of queries


Its already lost me with nonsense keybindings and I haven't even installed it.


Thanks!

I think I tried Control+F, and maybe looking through menu items (it's probably there & I just missed it).


Pretty sure search works, used it mang times. Anyway the major logseq power from my point of view is the ability to tag every bullet point, and then query it. Granted I never needed to write a query, I just search for the tag and find all references to it.

First note taking tools where I actually *read my notes*


Logseq strongly encourages you to represent all forms of information in the form of checklists or bullet points... which is great if you're making a grocery list but terrible for longform documentation.


I loved Obsidian to death, but felt a bit of friction. As nice as it was, I wasn't getting sucked in and resorted to writing my own bespoke bash program for organized note-taking.

Enter Logseq, and after a 20 minute learning curve, ideas just fly off of my fingertips. I reach for it daily. Can't recommend Logseq enough.


I’ve read similar narrative before on Reddit (while I was trying to decide Logseq vs Obsidian a few weeks ago). But I don’t get it.

When you open Logseq, you start with bullet points. Is that the only thing that pushes you to create more? In Obsidian, you can just start bullet points on your own.


Same experience here. I was die hard fan of obsidian till I used Logseq. Obsidian doesn't have proper outlining as they have another commercial app called Dynalist. They probably don't want competition between their own products. Lack of folders in logseq is a feature. It force the user to follow zettelcasten style which results in serendipitous encounters with older notes.


You can do exactly the same with Obsidian, just don't create any folders and voila!

Nits aside, I use both and sometimes folder structure came in quite handy (like having separate notes for course modules and having 15 topics). I wouldn't remember even the names of these topics to come by when I need to.

But I agree also that the magic in Logseq happens more often than in Obsi (rediscovery). I think what contributes to it is the atomic nature of blocks as opposed to pages and daily scroll of all topics encountered recently.


Completely agree.

While waiting for Logseq to come to Android, I've been using Zettel Notes by Dev Rohit. It's been great so far!


I definitely also like logseq better, but find that it doesn't sync well between desktop and iOS app. Have you found good solution for this?


None, because I'm still waiting on an Android app... :(


They do have an Android app now, though? You can download the apk from their github releases page[1], if you don't mind sideloading apps.

[1]: https://github.com/logseq/logseq/releases


I actually wasn't aware of this, you've made my day. Thank you!


Also in fdroid if you add the github releases as a repo.


I sync my journal directory using syncthing and it works reasonably well.


I had the opposite experience with Syncthing + Logseq. The way Logseq is designed, refreshing the entire graph is a must before you even consider editing your pages in another device. I forgot to do it once and after some time editing my pages, I realized that I lost a good chunk of my notes from several days back.


>resorted to writing my own bespoke bash program for organized note-taking.

what? why... also emacs is really good for reproducible terminal logging of experiments/commands/output.


Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools https://thesephist.com/posts/tools/

org mode has been too time-consuming in the past to adapt into my workflow. Logseq is a fantastic compromise.


Oh my that is beautiful. Just looking at the GIFs with the / shortcuts for TODO status, linking to headings using curly braces, the beautiful highlights on "dynamic" areas. I tried Obsidian and didn't feel the same "pull" to keep using it, will definitely try Logseq out.


I checked out logseq, and pdf internal linking is amazing! I tried to find the equivalent in Obsidian, but pdf highlights/annotations extensions on it do not seem to have the same functionality. I'll definitely look into switching to logseq maybe in the future if not now.


Down at the end of the Demo, I was informed that I should be using a Chromium 86 based browser. Humph.


I have not yet tried Logseq. Checking it out now!


Another metric idea for you:

"Time taken after creation to search for and open this note again"

This can show how useful your notes are and which are most useful.


> how useful your notes are

While I think it's an interesting metric, it wouldn't capture the utility of my notes for me (emphasis on "for me", since everyone's probably different when it comes to notes).

Often, the act of writing the note helps better commit what I'm writing to memory. At a super rough estimate I'd say that 80% of the utility of note-taking is the act of producing the note itself, and only 20% of the utility is being able to refer back to specific facts.


That's definitely an exponential distribution. I'm a data scientist and I keep going back to a few key notes over and over and adding little bits. I tried to track things like ideas, tasks, and just journaling, but it just didn't fit right. It's unbeatable for my work related stuff though, and the key things for me were mathjax support and being able to paste screenshots directly onto the page. Fantastic product.


I agree there is value in just creating the note and distilling your thoughts even if you never revisit.

I'm not quite sure how I'd use the metric or if I'd use it to purge notes.

Searchability or recall can be a problem sometimes though, so "searches where I had no results or didn't visit anything" could be interesting.

Especially if I try searching later and find a note answering my question with bad "SEO".

Another idea I had was to make a Firefox extension that searches my notes and displays results before search engines since I reflexively search things in browser sometimes.


Oh, I 100% agree that there would be some kind of exponential falloff in which notes I go back to.

I just, again, for me personally, gain a lot of value from writing the notes even that I never go back to revisit.

So for me personally, the metric is interesting, like I said, but doesn't capture "how useful" a note is, because I have most of my utility outside of that use case.


I don't go back to notes because:

1. I have it committed to memory. 2. I never needed it.

I have no way to discern whether either (1) or (2) will happen as far into the future as you care to specify; so it's mostly a moot point. In any case, I will sometimes just do random walks through my notes, wikipedia style, and find a lot of value in it.


I used to set this manually on Tiddlywiki with a "touched" field. I'm thinking of incorporating this into Obsidian using the templater plugin.

I found it very useful to organize research papers like this.


Would be interesting to see how to capture this metric within Obsidian. I can imagine a similar metric: "elapsed time between note created and first time note opened." This data might help answer whether or not we are creating notes that are never revisited, an opportunity to purge the note itself.


Wow, CloudWatch for note metadata metrics. Notebook organization systems are serious business!


I'm very very very disorganized by nature. Some people I know seem to be organized at birth. All the systems I put are really just mechanisms are really aspiration, ways for me to emulate their behavior, keep me accountable, and gamify it a bit.


That's awesome. Personally I found that I end up spending too much time on configurations and tinkering with the notes, so I end up going for the simplest system I can.


There it is! I am with you 100%. All of these massive plugin systems are a giant time suck. You spend soooo much time just setting things up only to forget the little stuff you need to do when something breaks. Every plugin I have installed requires some level of configuration. The more feature rich plugins (with no surprise there) are basically apps in and of themselves.

I keep hearing praise about this being a simple app, but I found it to be very fiddly if you want more than just markdown rendered in your editor. Lots and lots of time to get things working/configured.

Sync has been a massive PITA for me with Obsidian. Unless you are willing to pay, there is going to be pain there eventually. I had similar problems with OneNote, but those sync problems have mostly disappeared. Further, OneNote's handwriting experience is really good. It is very easy to export all notes from OneNote to Markdown with Pandoc, so while I may be "locked" in, I can "get out" if I want.

Edit: So thank you Obsidian for helping me convert my notes in OneNote to markdown to try you out! I now have a verified escape hatch if I should ever need it. However, I am not sticking around. Too much trouble for little stuff and OneNote is just a really good all arounder.


> Notebook organization systems are serious business!

If that's what it takes to make someones system effective so be it.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well and all that.

What's a better alternative in your opinion?


If it works, it works. Just surprised by the infrastructure involved.


TIL that obsidian has vim mode... I love it even more now.


even better, it asks you to type a specific vim command before enabling it. Great "here there be dragons, are you a dragonslayer?" UX choice, and fun easter egg too ;)


That's brilliant and super fun.


Between Obsidian, Roam, Amplenote, and Reflect it has certainly been a golden age for note taking over the last few years. It's hard to remember that it was only 5 years ago that second generation note apps like Evernote, Notion and Bear were the only viable options unless you wanted a 1st gen app like OneNote or Workflowy.

What might be most interesting about the new set of fast moving note apps is that all seem to be built by teams of 3 or less people. Obsidian seems to have ascended to the top of the heap with a team of three and no apparent VC funding. Anyone that roots for small companies and passionate programmers should appreciate Obsidian proving that the best tools don't have to be built by the biggest teams. More the opposite.


Seems more like a dark age. Obsidian makes the fans on my 4 ghz laptop go crazy. And in some ways (integration with email and tasks) it has less functionality than One Note 2010. And Obsidian has a PDF view and PDF annotations, but you can’t search in it?

I’m using Org mode with emacs just so I can have cross references into PDFs and emails in my notes.


There is very little criticism of Obsidian here, but you definitely pointed a few out. I am a OneNote user and Obsidian doesn't really compare to OneNote. If you read a lot of papers, you can have OneNote OCR the text and make it searchable.


So, there is this tool: <https://pypi.org/project/ocrmypdf> OCRmyPDF adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDF files, allowing them to be searched or copy pasted.

This mentions cross-platform usage and seems simple. Is there some way to use this with Obsidian through a plugin? If so, please create a GitHub project and send us a link! :D

Just for reference, I found it with a list of a ton of other tools: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/301318/how-to-ocr-a...

I have messed around with Tesseract a bit, and at some point, I was able to turn a PDF into a text file. I was thinking of doing that and having them as markdown files which are tiny compared to the original. Then keep the Original elsewhere. I've been playing with another PDF system I'm not willing to give up on. :D

Point is, I think I can bring more dimension to my Obsidian or Markdown library by having 'txt' copies of pdfs. The search and tagging alone would be so handy.


OneNote's PDF support isn't really for PDFs, though. It just literally prints the PDF as images onto a OneNote page and OCRs it. Makes for a really heavy page and none of the normal PDF amenities like doing highlighting within the file itself.


It's strange how inconsistent Microsoft's PDF support is... Edge is essentially the best-in-class PDF markup app on Windows, but OneNote PDF support is soul-crushingly rudimentary.

I guess expecting consistency from the org with 3+ mutually incompatible video call apps and 5 volume control panels was always a fool's errand, though.


I guess it is because Edge is using the one that comes with Chrome while OneNote has its own implementation.


No, the Edge PDF viewer has a much larger feature set than the Chrome viewer (although, I think sometimes for reasons I can't place PDFs opened with Edge do end up using the Chrome viewer instead of the Edge native viewer).


> I guess it is because Edge is using the one that comes with Chrome

Is it? As far as I can tell, Chrome just has a plain PDF viewer with none of the annotation/highlighting/commenting/read-aloud features that Edge has.


I missed Old Edge EPub reader. It was the best.


One note 2010 is the holy grail for me, nothing can beat that simplicity. Tho … the purple color stil bothers me

The fact runs super fast on any computer makes me wonder why did they downgrade into the current version which is absolute crap


For personal notes I use Google docs. I want the experience to be a bit average so it becomes about the notes not the tool. I tried notion and most of my brain was going into notion. Once I had to upgrade to do something basic I left: I am jot against paying but I don’t think it is good enough a UX to pay for.

With Google docs 99% BPU (Brain Processing Unit) goes into writing the thing or searching or reading the thing. As it should be.


I'm not sure about the issues with your computer, but there are a ton of plugins for tasks and boards. What type of email integration are you looking for ?


I've been trying it for half an hour now. Processor didn't go over 1% usage. Are you sure it's not a plugin somewhere causing this?


My issue is that it feels like none of these tools do anything significantly new, and are all so obsessed with wonky features like node-graph views and backlinks that are only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them.

That's why I'm working on creating https://visible.page because I want a tool that isn't just for markdown organizational obsessives, but rather for organizing and visualizing ALL kinds of information the way regular people do. None of these tools handle things like dates, locations, numbers, and other data of various types well. With Visible if you add a date or a location to some content, that content is now accessible on a calendar and a map side by side with all the associated text and media you added to it as well. No worrying about what table column it goes into or what metadata row or plugin you need to render it well. Just add the location, and add a map view, boom done. Want more than one date associated with some content? Just add it, you don't have to figure out to add another "Date type" metadata section the way you do in Notion for example.

It is not offline first. It is not file based. It is not catered to the needs you see so often here on Hacker News but don't actually hear when talking to regular people who just want to plan a trip together or keep track of an apartment/house hunt without spreading information across a half-dozen tools.

Does no one else get frustrated that even Google can't show you a map of your week's upcoming event locations? That when you are doing research online you have to tediously copy and paste each address one-by-one into Google Maps and then copy an embed link for that into another tool, and even then the addresses are isolated with no relevant information like photos or notes attachable to them?

We have so many amazing internet powers that are simply unavailable in any of these note taking tools. I'm sorry but markdown and backlinks are boring. I want to see my information the way it was meant to be seen and in a way that my parents can understand it as well.


I'm sorry but markdown and backlinks are boring

That is the intention. I don't want excitement with my note-taking, I want plain, boring, open-standards that will survive the test of time.

Chances are high that your startup will: 1) Fail 2) Get acquired and gets shut down 3) Aggressively monetize leading to poor UI/UX (i.e. Evernote)

The whole advantage of Obsidian is that it relies on an open format, and makes it easy to transition to a new platform

I want a system that I know 20 years from now I can still use (or can transition to a better one).

Maybe I'm in the minority but I've tried at least 10 different note taking apps over the last decade, and none of them have staying power because they all fall into the three issues I outlined above.


I personally want something that allows me to work with things spatially, to draw things, to dump a bunch of images into it, and move things around in at least a two dimensional space. I want to be able to embed maps, images, audio files, music, draw connections between them, move them around. This cannot be accomplished in plain text.

I think notes should use a database so it can effectively obfuscate data like the spatial relationships between objects in a note. An open specification and utilizing an open source database would be better. Plain text objects could still be used and easily exported, but you gain so much over simply plain text. Portability is important but it's not as important as having tools that meaningfully improve how you perform the task you're trying to accomplish.


Portability is important but it's not as important as having tools that meaningfully improve how you perform the task you're trying to accomplish.

I'm sorry but until you've experienced a startup shutting down the product that you built your whole knowledge repo around, you won't really understand the need for portability.

I could care less about the shiny features, because I know that in 10 years this product will be defunct, while markdown will still exist.


> I'm sorry but until you've experienced a startup shutting down the product that you built your whole knowledge repo around, you won't really understand the need for portability.

It is not hard to understand why portability is important and I do not need to lose anything to empathize with people that have. I think it is important but it doesn't matter how important it is if the tool you're using to secure portability is insufficient for the task you're trying to accomplish. That is backwards thinking.

> I could care less about the shiny features, because I know that in 10 years this product will be defunct, while markdown will still exist.

I'm not speaking in favor for this person's startup, I'm speaking in favor for better tools for note taking, thinking, brainstorming, and managing knowledge. Plain text is not good enough, in my opinion. This is coming from someone who uses plain text for all those things because there isn't an existing adequate alternative. If plain text is genuinely suitable for your needs, that's great. I just really doubt that anyone that uses plain text can genuinely say that they aren't held back by the limitations of the format at least in some way.


> I want to be able to embed maps, images, audio files, music, draw connections between them, move them around. This cannot be accomplished in plain text.

It can be accomplished in plain text, by hiding it behind a fancy interface. Which is exactly what Obsidian enables people to do with plugins. And with the new live-editor this allows a pretty well-made mix between plain text and rich content.


Neat concept. What's the security story? The local-first architecture that Obsidian et al use is really valuable to me. In a world where everything lives on somebody else's server, I crave experiences that I can exercise some control over. Nothing hosted in the cloud feels private.


I totally understand and sympathize with that feeling which is not uncommon here on Hacker News, but when I speak to the average internet user they do care about privacy, they just don't have the same anxiety over cloud services. We are following a similar path to Notion or Paper who have millions of users who trust that their data is secure, private, and accessible.

Also many features like realtime live collaboration are incredibly difficult to do with a local-first setup, but provides a user experience that lets Visible pages be useful for families, friends, and communities.

We do want to make your data fully available to you via export, and we don't view or use the data in your pages for anything. We have basic event-based analytics to see how people (anonymously) use Visible, but that's just at the level of button clicks and seeing how many pages people create on average.


Notion or Paper who have millions of users who trust that their data is secure, private, and accessible

Until those services are inevitably hacked, as we've seen most of these companies play fast and loose with security.


> only useful to a niche audience of obsessive note-takers who in many cases seem to care more about playing with their notes than actually using or sharing them.

This describes me perfectly. I use obsidian to 'feel productive' but not actually do any work.


I was pretty invested in the "tools for thought" space for a little while, but my interest cooled as I realized that I was using zettelkasten tools like Logseq to try and recreate simple folders of documents, because as it turns out that's all I really needed to begin with. I use Obsidian, because wiki links can be handy from time to time, but my notes these days are mostly just plain markdown sorted into folders by topic, and that's plenty for me.


I fall into the same trap. We want Visible to be somewhere you create pages that are genuinely useful, not just info dumps. Millions of young people now use Notion to organize their lives, but as you can see from their marketing page it is a tool catered towards business knowledge-bases and not the variety of awesome uses these people have jerry-rigged Notion into.

With just the map + calendar views alone you can address so many planning and tracking frustrations that simply aren't solved by the calendar invites and embedding Google maps into other information documents that we are limited to today.


It sounds like you're going for a completely different type of user than those who like Obsidian. That said, I've signed up for your Beta rollout, as what you're building sounds appealing for my use case, that of a kind of family planner.


Definitely targeting a different core user, although I think the simplicity and power that we will provide out-of-the-box may eventually sway some users caught in Obsidian/Roam land to try the Visible way.

Thank you for signing up for the beta, we will start rolling out invites soon! "Family planner" is exactly the kind of early user we want. Daily life involves so much information that goes beyond text, and we feel there should be a tool that can handle any information you throw at it in an elegant way without tediously configuring and managing it.


A friend and I used Notion to plan an overseas trip. We had a table of potential places to visit (with cost, how long it might take, etc.). I was disappointed to find out that Notion had no way to render those locations on a map.

I'm also frustrated by the typical notes apps inability to store data in a way that it's convenient to retrieve. One example: I'd like to be able to just tag some string (think a UUID or other opaque thing) as a "blob" and then be able to click the "blob" just once to copy it to the clipboard, to be put into other tools.

Your app looks much more up my alley and I'll be signing up.


Are there _any_ ways to uniformly put a geolocation in a Markdown/note/txt file?

Seems like there should be a general answer for this, as sometimes I'd like to put a geolocation and notes in a file, and some uniform way to parse this later, whatever the tool.


There are two Obsidian plugins for this: Map View[0] and Leaflet[1]. You can store the geocoded locations using YAML frontmatter or Dataview inline fields.

[0]: https://github.com/esm7/obsidian-map-view

[1]: https://github.com/valentine195/obsidian-leaflet-plugin


I'm still waiting on one of these upstarts to implement the most essential features of the "first gen" apps, like inking/handwriting.


Not everyone considers that essential.

I had onenote once, realized my handwriting was shit, and never tried to hand write notes again.


Handwriting I find completely useless, but drawing on a display can be quite OK even for me


theres a plugin for that - https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin


Unfortunately, I find the delay unacceptably high with this extension compared to first class support from apps like Goodnotes, Onenote and Apple Notes.

Still love Obsidian - just wish drawing on it was a viable option.


Yep, Obsidian's latex support makes it almost ideal for writing math notes.. but because you can't quickly drop in quick sketches from a stylus (something like the Bear notes app.. which misses too many other features) it kills Obsidian for this usecase :(


That's a great plugin! It even lets you create links to docs from within the drawing. And you can embed one part of a drawing in one note and another part in a different note. I also highly recommend checking out the creator's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/VisualPKM


This is one reason I can't stop using Goodnotes with an Apple Pencil: I like to handwrite. It's particularly helpful when I'm taking notes in multiple languages; switching keyboards every time I want to write a word in another language is a pain.


Try the "Excalidraw" Plugin for Obsidian.


I think the Excalidraw plugin solves a different problem. It’s great for creating diagrams, especially with a keyboard+mouse. What I’m looking for, though, is something like Apple Notes on iPad, where you can seamlessly write in your notes with your Apple Pencil. The Excalidraw plugin adds a lot of friction and complexity if all you want to do is write.


There's an excalidraw plugin that helps with this to a degree.


This plugin misses mark big time. I tried it and tried it again. Trying to love it... just couldn't compare with OneNote.


Likewise. I love Obsidian, I love my Apple Pencil - and the Excalidraw plugin just does not get me there, unfortunately.

Goodnotes, Apple notes, and OneNote still leagues better for Apple Pencil support.


I absolutely love this plugin. But I'm probably using quite differently from you since I barely use the pencil/draw tool at all.


There is one in Apple ecosystem. That is called Muse


Thanks!


Excalidraw works pretty well in obsidian. I didn't like it the first time but I'm increasingly getting used to it


What's your secret? I find it... icky (maybe too long of a delay?) compared to Goodnotes.


This is what keeps me coming back to apps like OneNote or Apples Notes. Obsidian and their ilk, for me, just encourage endless bike shedding and metrics that get in the way of the job to be done — taking and finding notes.


FWIW I only use Obsidian for note-taking, not metrics or graph views or bike-shedding. Markdown with two-way links and the occasional image, code snippet, or Mermaid diagram. Doesn't need to be more complicated than that!


Adding my voice to the cacophony. I don't use Obsidian but I do use Foam in VS Code. Daily notes and wikilinks is all I need. I've toyed with adding more metadata but it's just not worth the maintenance cost


I have been using scrivener as my note taking app. It’s actually made for writers and for researchers to make their work (books, essays) but as a note taker it’s very versatile.

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/


I have Scrivener, but I've been using iA Writer much more for note taking. It has wiki links, decent-ish support for x-callback-url automation, and a dead simple filesystem layout that lets me write custom scripts for note mangling when I need to.


MacOS also has the FOSS app Notenik (https://notenik.app/)


I'd love to use obsidian, but the mobile app does not allow specifying the folder. As a result on iOS you can only use the official syncing method. Maybe it's so you pay for the app, but I would personally rather pay a few for that functionality.


Uh, this can’t be true cause I have my Obsidian mobile vault set to my iCloud and use that for syncing and backup and it works pretty much perfectly.


It allows iCloud or obsidian syncing. I tried to set it up with Dropbox because I didn’t trust iClouds conflict resolution and couldn’t get it to work.


This is due to an iOS limitation. On android you can pretty much use whatever syncing method you like (such as Syncthing)


This is one of my main gripes with iOS. Even with folder/app/device specific folders it's a massive headache.

As you mentioned Syncthing works flawlessly as well as other methods on Android.


I think that's a limitation of the Files API. In the least, I've yet to come across an app that allows syncing with third-party storage apps through Files. I've only seen one-way saving or using the file picker to retrieve a file.


https://apps.apple.com/us/app/keepassium-keepass-passwords/i...

In the app description:

"KeePassium can work both offline and with your favorite cloud provider.

There is no setup: pick your database through the familiar Files interface — and that's it. By integrating with the Files app, KeePassium supports almost all storage providers, including..."


Interesting. I don't have a chance to mess with the app, but I wonder if it works because it's syncing individual kdbx files that the user gives access to one at a time rather than a whole directory (including subdirectories). Logseq and Obsidian, for example, would require syncing an entire directory along with subdirectories. My assumption is that they work with iCloud because they're given their own app-specific folder to do as they wish.

If that is the limitation, I wonder if they could get around that by using some type of bundle or archive. Regardless, thanks for the additional information.


I can't vouch for it because I don't have any iOS devices new enough to support it, but supposedly you can also set it up to sync via git:

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mobile-setting-up-ios-git-based-...


One thing to note is that this requires manually pulling and pushing in Working Copy as well as paying to unlock pro features ($20 one-time payment) to push to a remote repository.


You can just save to a folder on your iOS device and push/pull changes with the app “working copy”, which is a full gift client. It costs a pretty penny though.


This is presumably a limitation of the iOS client, as I've certainly been able to store my vault in a Dropbox folder and sync it to my Android device with DropSync.


I ended up paying $20 for the 'working copy' git iOS app and then setup an iOS shortcut to sync my repository to a private github repo. So everything is manual when I click the button for the shortcut it syncs.

On the desktop the git extension does the same thing, but is automatic. Conflict resolution is as detailed and I want.

Yeah lots of non-opensource components in that flow, but it works well and is perfectly happy when I am totally offline.


Is this a common theme on HN that when something is a negative critique of a product people love, people hysterically act like they were personally attacked instead of trying to research the problem?

The iOS client does not allow choosing the folder. You can specify either icloud sync or not, but you cannot select a folder.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ObsidianMD/comments/s4kw0k/set_fold...


I've been using iCloud sync with Obsidian for a year, and it has worked perfectly. Correct, you don't get to put your folder anywhere you want. It has to be in iCloud Drive, but so what?


If you only use it on a single ios device, it screws up your whole syncing method. Google drive/dropbox works on every other platform seamlessly.


If you need to sync it to anything non-Apple, then yes. If you don't, then iCloud Drive is just fine.

In my case, Obsidian syncs just fine between my laptop, iPad, and iPhone. I use Sync.com for everything else.


Just checked and that's the first thing I'm asked to do on the Android app. Maybe it only works when creating a vault?


Android is different (i.e. better) than iOS in this regard, since it has much more robust filesystem support. You can easily use git syncing via termux:

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/guide-using-git-to-sync-your-obs...


You can use it with any cloud storage - iCloud, Dropbox, etc.


It’s not often that I see a mention of Workflowy in the wild. I know there is better out there, but Workflowy and Apple Notes are the ones I already use and I’m unsure whether the others are better enough to be worth the switching costs.


I find with extensions I can basically replicate the Workflowy experience in Obsidian.


Which extensions are you using for that?


outliner?


Granted it might not be as good as the original depending on how deep your notes go.

I know that the team behind Obsidian also created dynalist which iirc is a workflowy competitor.


I still use workflowy till this day.


ELI5 What ever happened to Evernote?

because I have a thoughts been killing me in the back of my head:

Need a family version but self hosted + cloud which allows for an auto push of notes, pics and calander to your own thing..

basically a family planner.


TLDR- the founder quit, a bunch of suits took over, they gutted the dev team and put the app on life support for years. Bugs piled up and nobody could fix them so they outsourced to a new offshore team who rewrote the whole thing in Electron... which of course was waaay too little, way too late.


Remember the whole copy paste debacle where they literally couldn't figure out how to allow for pasting with formatting versus pasting without formatting?

That went on for practically a year until I finally just jumped ship and ported all of my notes into markdown.


You sound like someone i need to talk to email via profile.


Congratulations, and also: holy fucking shit!! no app has changed my day-to-day life to this degree in many, many years.

I use Obsidian every morning on my roof deck for my journal (automated with the plugin, of course) and then at my desk all day long for my daily WTF blah blah info-capturing tool.

Sure I wish it had more features (persist collapsed/expanded state, even in a best-effort, might-not-last-forever kind of way! build in git support because apple makes it too hard for plugin guys to do on mobile!) but the fact that it is all just "standard" markdown and image files washes away all almost my complaints.

I use the paid Sync plugin, too (even though it's standard files and folders; could totally do it myself! could totally just use SyncThing! etc!) so that it is on all my machines and virtual machines. Perfect for sysadmin logs of things you touch only annually, e.g. Dad's iMac.

To HN readers who haven't tried it: it's the millennials' VisiCalc, basically, except for words.


there's a plugin for folding persistence.. it has a silly name like pants or ironing or something but it works welll


I think you’re looking for what some pants have - Creases https://github.com/liamcain/obsidian-creases


What plugin do you use for automatic journaling?


Automatic journaling is a built-in plugin called "Daily Notes".

You just enable it in the "Options → Core plugins" pane in the settings.


What other plugins do you use besides the Sync plugin?


Only the Calendar one.


A few tips for those new to Obsidian:

- Don't rush to install a bunch of plugins. Start with the defaults, learn Obisidian and add only what you need. It is easy for some to spend more time tweaking Obsidian than actually using it.

- If you're a macOS user, check out the Minimal theme, which will make Obsidian feel more native. -> https://minimal.guide/Home

- When you are ready for plugins, you may want Omnisearch[1] to be one of your first.

I used to organize stuff into folders, now I pretty much just create a note at the vault's root level and use tagging and good semantics and use Omnisearch to pull up notes.

1. https://github.com/scambier/obsidian-omnisearch


Great recommendations! I definitely agree with running the app without too many plugins at first, especially if you're new to using wikilinks.

I wrote Minimal theme. BTW, I led the redesign of Obsidian 1.0 so I brought a lot of those ideas into the core app. We've also made a big push around using more native components. I'm still improving Minimal, but hopefully the "out of the box" experience feels a lot more native.


> I led the redesign of Obsidian 1.0

Wow! It’s a shame it’s not highlighted in release notes! Great news, and thank you for your work!


it's in the last paragraph :)


Your redesign is a fantastic improvement in terms of both ergonomics and aesthetics. Thank you for this!


Wow! I just disabled minimal because I found the default theme to be perfect. Amazing work!


If you're also responsible for the improved mobile support with the new redesign, great work! It's a joy to use.


I just installed your theme. Great work! Thank you for this.


Awesome work my friend!


"Start with the defaults, learn _______ and add only what you need."

This should be universal advice for everything.


I wish the minimal theme didn't get rid of switching to the finger cursor when hovering over links.


The cursor is a pointer for links. Do you mean buttons?

Also, you can change the cursor by going to Style Settings > Minimal Advanced Options


I think they mean like the macOS-native functionality where you hover over a URL and macOS changes the cursor from an arrow to a hand with the index finger pointing.

This might be the CSS? (I am not a CSS guy, sorry.)

    cursor: pointer;
https://www.w3docs.com/tools/code-editor/2404


Yeah, that is what I meant. And specifically for the UI buttons (although links as well, I was just mis-remembering what wasn't working how I expected it to).


That’s already how it looks though… I’m confused


Yeah I do mean for buttons. I strongly prefer having the equivalent of `cursor: pointer` for all buttons in the UI. This change is the primary reason that I didn't switch to the minimal theme before. Is there a way to bring back the pointer for buttons in the 1.0 default theme? Or will I need to create my own theme for this now?

Edit: Ah I see. You're suggesting installing the "Style Setting" plugin, installing and changing the theme to "Minimal" and then setting the "Cursor style" to "Pointer".


Definitely file an issue: https://github.com/kepano/obsidian-minimal/issues


Obsidian is great but I haven't had much luck with plugins. They often break after upgrades and most are not maintained. Perhaps that will change after the 1.0 release, at least the breaking problem


> They often break after upgrades

I mean. This is what v1.0 is for.


Yes ideally, we'll see. They jumped from 0.15.9 to 1.0.0 :)


There was a 0.16.x released in Insider channel (the beta channel) which already had this new interface.


I was an early user of Obsidian in May 2020, and have been absolutely blown away by how fast this tiny team of 2 people was able to build such a life-changing app. Using Obsidian fundamentally changed the way I think.

It's also been fun to see how rapidly the plugin ecosystem has grown. The community is so friendly and creative.

I have contributed a few things of my own, notably Minimal theme[0]. When I was asked to help lead the new UI for 1.0 it was a dream come true. I am really proud of how it turned out. We were able to make a lot of the app feel more native across platforms. I'm also excited to see what new themes pop up that use the new theme system which is much simpler and more flexible.

1.0 is an amazing milestone, and one you don't get to celebrate often. It's so much fun to see all the love in the comments.

[0]: https://minimal.guide


Two people who also had a baby in the middle of this app’s explosion. I can’t imagine pulling that off.


I'm a HUGE fan of Minimal Theme, and I really appreciate not only all the work you've put in to improve Obsidian, but also your thoughtfulness and skill. Minimal not only looks wonderful, but it has a really great array of options/settings, both through Minimal Theme Settings and Style Settings. I've tried dozens of Obsidian themes, and frankly, nothing else comes close. It's no surprise you were tapped to improve the default theme for 1.0 :).


It looks great, amazing work! One small issue is the way the filename is displayed at the top as if it's the title. It may or may not be. The way it is now is very confusing though because many other apps follow the pattern "first line is the title" but in some cases it won't be in Obsidian


Thank you for building Minimal and helping on Obsidian. I love the theme and it made me return back and really give it a fair shot!


Obsidian is my favorite app, and my only missing feature is to enable better PDF support, similar to Logseq.

Logseq allows me to embed the PDFs inside the app and annotate them with all the bells and whistles enabled by markdown. Area highlights, math notation, all these things are not possible with classical PDF readers, and I think Obsidian would fit well here.


Agreed, better PDF support would be great. The main feature I constantly need is search. But the 'open in external application' option gets me there pretty quickly, so it's not that much slower - but it would be nice to not have to switch apps.


What do you prefer Obsidian over Logseq for?


As an outliner, Logseq is too opinionated about how I am supposed to use it. Obsidian is less strict and allows me to follow whatever principle I want to which extent I want.

I can mix a bit of Zettelkasten here, some daily notes there, and some 'old-fashioned' folder structures for projects to my heart's content.


(not op) Logseq is open source and really great in the way it connects notes and highlights pdfs, but the sync part is too “asynchronous”. It works well if you use a single device, but as long as you add something else you have to manually reindex and refresh a lot.

Obsidian is less opinionated on the txt file format and folders too, so I consider it more future-proof.


The sync part I solved with syncthing.

I started with logseq and now obsidian doesn't work for me anymore. Tried to switch but I am into this small self containing bits now. Plus journal with timestamps


Syncthing is very good, but the best iOS implementation, Möbius Sync[1], is not comparable with the Android one (the OS limits the syncs, you need a regular notification and so on).

The great things about Logseq are his weakness for me. Everything is so interconnected (you can say: "here put the paragraph of this other note") that I sometimes lose confidence in the system. It becomes too complex. With Obsidian I know that a note is a file. Less convenient but simple and reliable.

Logseq really excels with his outlining mode, I miss it (but I don't like the way it saves states in the markdown file). It has some problems with the code blocks too.

[1] https://www.mobiussync.com/


Can you elaborate on the syncing part? Last I tried Logseq, syncing across devices via iCloud was very unreliable. So I gave up. Although I would have loved to replace Roam with Logseq back then. Now I stick to Emacs + orgmode and Obsidian for plain markdown files.


I have a folder in syncthing called "logseq". This folder holds the logseq files. I have logseq-sync on my phone so it syncs the folder. I also have a Cloudserver which is the spoke and all other devices (2 laptops, the phone) sync it.


Also not OP, but personally I have a few gripes with Logseq:

- No export to PDF. There's a community plugin, but it's not great. The workaround is to export to HTML and print to PDF, but there's no real iOS option there.

- Managing images and other attachments are a mess. Using the "upload an asset" method gives it a random filename that if the app fails to save the page correctly, you either dig through the folder structure to find the random file name to link manually or you re-"upload an asset" creating a duplicate with a new random name. This could be alleviated if it was more stable or with a file picker with thumbnails to find previously "uploaded" files

- Pages fail to save correctly more than I'd like. I have no idea what the cause is, but it happens frequently on every platform I've tried.

- Page title changes don't propagate correctly sometimes, causing orphaned pages where it's a coin flip whether the page with the older title holds the content or the new one, leaving the other empty.

- Each page needs a unique title. I like how Notion allows multiple pages with the same title and are organized based on which parent page they're embedded or created in. I imagine Notion randomizes the actual file name similar to how Logseq already does for "uploaded" assets, so this could be alleviated if Logseq did the same. It could potentially alleviate the previously mentioned issue and it seems to me like the most logical method of handling this particular type of non-directory organizational structure.

- Their E2EE sync service is not yet ready, so no real mobile sync outside of iCloud (I use DropBox).

- Their documentation is terrible. There's tons of undocumented features, like admonitions, and the existing documentation is horribly structured, which is ironic since the documentation uses Logseq itself and the whole point of the app is to structure content.

----

Side note, since we're on the topic of personal knowledge bases and note taking, my personal dream app is Obsidian with Asciidoc support instead of Markdown. A lot of the extra features they add to markdown are part of the Asciidoc standard, like admonitions and document-to-document cross-references, it would potentially make the backend easier and the content more portable with page attributes like specifying an attachment directory, and some features are simply more flexible/powerful like tables.

I still use AsciiDoc to create PDF documents that require more flexibility, like table spans and nested ordered lists (Obsidian's markdown uses just 1,2,... instead of changing to e.g., a,b,... for a nested level). My current workflow is typing it up in VS Code, converting to DocBook with asciidoctor, then converting that to a LaTeX PDF using pandoc. The result is a professional, academic-like PDF, but the workflow is a bit of a hassle and I'd prefer to do all of my document typing in Obsidian since it's so nice to use.

If I had more free time outside of my CS master's program and thesis work, I'd learn JS/TS to attempt to create a community extension that added AsciiDoc support to it and support for exporting to HTML and DocBook (and basic PDF since I'm pretty sure Obsidian uses an HTML-based PDF export anyway because CSS themes affect the look of the export), even if I still needed to use pandoc to convert to a more professional LaTeX PDF. I'm sure the VS Code AsciiDoc extension as reference and asciidoctor.js could get one pretty far.

Sorry for the rant. I've just been itching for a AsciiDoc-based note-taking/PKB for a long time.


Fellow AsciiDoc supporter. I want an AsciiDoc note taking app so badly too. So many awesome features in AsciiDoc that blow markdown out of the water. I use asciidoc-pdf for doc/report generation and the workflow is so smooth.

- Includes/embeds (reference your source code by line range(s)

- Complex table support + the ability to embed CSV (automatic headers)

- Frontmatter as a first class citizen

- Macros (Variables) that can be referenced across documents

- Numerous Diagram parsing libraries (embed pretty much any diagram-as-code language)

I've had the same thoughts on building a Dendron type extension for AsciiDoc (AsciiDoc vscode plugin is fairly robust). Really would just need to hammer out some front matter parsing to get basic functionality.


Thanks for the reminder to check out asciidoctor-pdf! I forgot about it because I was using macOS's default, out-of-date Ruby version for the longest time and the gem required a newer version. I've since figured out how to install and change the default Ruby installation though, so I need to check it out. It's certainly a pain getting my current workflow set up on a new machine (e.g. installing TexLive takes forever for the latex-pdf support in pandoc).


ReStructuredText seems like it would be a better contender because it's the standard markup language for the most popular programming language.

It's also natively supported in VSCode (unlike AsciiDoc).


I honestly haven't played with ReStructuredText. I'll take a peek.

AsciiDoc includes are very powerful though, being able to populate your tables/code blocks from external data sources (filtering for certain lines/ranges). Also Tables can have complex structures (merged cells etc).

I feel like AsciiDoc was designed around writing technical papers than code documentation. It's essentially an opinionated wrapper around LaTex but less complexity. reST looks like it can produce great code documentation. AsciiDoc lets me cover both code documentation and customer facing documentation/reports with one code base. But I'll definitely continue to take a peek at reST. Although I think it's use case is more for embedding documentation directly in code. It's probably just my "I know the AsciiDoc toolchain well" bias though.


I was also kind of sad that Logseq didn't really have a vim-mode.


Love Obsidian. My main problem with it and similar markdown apps for notes is the way they store images and attachments. I find it very confusing to maintain multiple files per note and IMO the only app that nailed it is FSNotes[1] using the textbundle[2] format (with a custom implementation for encrypted notes too). I think it's elegant and future-proof.

But FSNotes is for the Apple ecosystem only and I can't tie myself to a single platform for something so important (I don't need another artificial reason to make OS switching so difficult).

I hope the textbundle feature request[3] gets some love soon. It would be great for Excalidraw files integration too[4].

[1] https://fsnot.es/ [2] http://textbundle.org/ [3] https://forum.obsidian.md/t/textbundle-support/3585 [4] https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin


I'm having high hopes for Bear notes v2 (called Panda in beta). It does the textbundle format which makes complete sense, and also has native pen support on iPads. So actually it is simple, and a joy to use, and also you're not locked in to anyone.


Wow, textbundle on disk instead of the database, right? It would be huge.

Another great feature that Bear and FSNotes share is the ability to insert hierarchy tags like #parent/child For some reason, I find it perfect to organize notes without too much thinking.


Absolutely agree. Very confusing to see a folder full of attachments. Ulysses app (another exmple) does this better via textbundle.


Have been using Obsidian for organizing and running a tabletop RPG session for a while and and it is fantastic. I have whole folders of monsters, encounters, player backstory, world notes, and state blocks. Being able to drop them inline for ‘today’s session’ and then viewing it all together has been monumentally useful.

It’s also been good enough to replace Sublime + directory for my day to day development note taking. Its fast and just gets out of the way for writing and organizing - which is exactly what I want in a note taking app.


Congratulations! Starting to use Obsidian has made me much more productive at work. I never forget anything now, since Obsidian is my second brain. I use it for logging, tasks, study, spaced repetition (with Dataview and tags), learning new things and even blogging.

I sync manually using Git, using a Work-repo, a Home-repo, and a Shared repo that is a Git submodule of both Work and Home. I never edit notes on my phone, but I can read them on GitHub or Dropbox. I have more than 1200 notes in Work ∪ Shared, and some more in Home.

Some of my essential plugins are: Dataview (Like inline SQL for querying notes), Natural Language Dates (entering current date easily), Minimal theme (just looks better).

Some builtin stuff that I love: Frontmatter metadata, Mermaid charts (graphviz-ish), inline \LaTeX rendering, daily notes and syntax highlighting.


On your phone you might want to try GitJournal. It plays really well with obsidian + git, for traditional markdown.


For anyone thinking that this "home page" is light on explanation, the actual home page is likely better for those who are new to this (excellent) product:

https://obsidian.md


I have no idea what Obsidian is and their frontpage does nothing to tell me what it is.

All I can see is that it's been updated, but WTF is it?

edit: ahh, it wasn't the frontpage...


Markdown editor that lets you add links to other files. You basically have a "project" consisting of a folder with various .md files.


So what is difference to vscode here? I can see a cool graph view of my links. I guess the target is not directly developers when looking at their paid sync addon, because I would simply put this into a free closed gitlab repo. I will definitely try out the free version this week :)

Edit: Found md-graph that also has the same neat graph: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ianjsike...


In my opinion links and images work much better. If you move a Markdown file or an image file to a different subdirectory, links gets fixed automatically. Absolute timesaver over a custom script I had to use previously.

And plugins! I can put a search query right within Markdown and it works. I have a unified interface over Markdown's to-do syntaxes I've left in various files. I can put a button that triggers some internal Obsidian command. I can have templates that pull from APIs and auto-populate some fields. I have variables I can easily query over. There's a git plugin you can use to auto-push/pull. There's a fully-featured mobile app (nearly feature compatible with the desktop app, plugin support and all). I have some subfolders that automatically get published on multiple websites that use a different CMS/SSG.

It's nothing you can't achieve with some custom bash/python scripts, but I don't like to spend my free time maintaining custom scripts, and Obsidian is truly a remarkably extensible product that allows me not to do that. It's easily in top 3 software products I use the most (next to a browser and a terminal emulator), I can't praise it enough.


It is mainly easy of use of the links and being backed by .md files (easy to backup anywhere and future-proof). I think of Obsidian as Org mode 90% there and easier to use.

Two example of easy of use:

- You can type "[[" anywhere and start entering the title of a new or existing note (and follow that link). If the note already exists it will fuzzy match inline as you write.

- While on a note, you can change the title and all the references get updated.

There are also plugins with extra feature like note of the day, which creates and opens a file in the format 2022-10-13 so you can easily have a file for each day. Vim node also works very well.


Plugin community - stuff like pulling tasks from notes, helping with various organisational systems, etc.

Editing in a somewhat rendered markdown - it's not quite full wysiwyg, but e.g, your heading blocks are sized right, your lists are rendered as bullets until you're editing that line, etc.

Notes first UI: Stuff like the rendered view toggle, links, inline image previews are more acccessible than in vs code due to their higher relative importance.


One big difference is that it works on desktop and mobile.

> I guess the target is not directly developers when looking at their paid sync addon, because I would simply put this into a free closed gitlab repo.

You could, and people do, but there's a bit less friction with the built-in sync.


How does it compare to wikis, eh? Isn't that what they do.


It's basically a wiki but running locally that you can sync with a remote, and based around normal (well, almost "normal") markdown files.


It's trying to be a wiki without a server. Or at least, that's how it started. It's a note taking app that uses markdown and plain text files. Gives some nice organizational views.


That requires setting up a server, which filters out 99% of the population.


I used TiddlyWiki for a while, but it was too fiddly. E.g. saving to google drive was a hack. Obsidian, at a very low price, gives me a reliable app -- Tiddly wiki, running within the browser, often got slow when I had a few hundred diary entries.


I’d start with the plugins. It allows for easy integration into my current workflow.


There are plugins and extensibility that can be added as well.

https://github.com/search?q=obsidian


It's a note taking app that uses markdown and plain text files. Gives some nice organizational views. That's it.


1st 2 sentences: true. Last sentence: not even close. It integrates w/ a Calendar, with Excalidraw for notes in images and vice versa, and via Dataview and DQL supports querying... its featureset is incredible.


As front page says, it's a tool for building a knowledge base. Organizing your stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_base


It’s a fantastic markdown editor. Have been using it daily for a year now as an organization and note tool and couldn’t be happier.


I installed Obsidian and did some initial testing, but two things completely threw me off:

1) Basic synchronization is a paid feature and you cannot (or at least could not) set up a private synchronization server.

2) Synchronization depends on the cloud. I simply cannot trust all important information of my life going to an unspecified location in the cloud for synchronization, even if it promises end-to-end encryption. The fact that the source is closed and it is a small company aggravates that immensely.

Which is why I'm using Trilium now. It's a bit more limited (no app) but has a web clipper extension and it is open source, so I can do changes or quick fixes if needed. I also synchronize with my own server, running behind a VPN.

For mobile, I'm pulling all tabs using adb and a couple of scripts, and it has been working nicely for my use case (mostly archival/planning).


Obsidian is just a folder of plain text files on your computer so you can use pretty much any sync service (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc) — you can even use Git if you want to completely control sync and version control.

Also for web clipper check out this bookmarklet I made: https://stephanango.com/obsidian-web-clipper


You can also syncronize Obsidian with your own hardware/software solution. I've been doing it for years and it's the simplest thing:

- Set up Syncthing to sync your vault folder

- Share with your devices and you're done

If you're already using a VPN and syncing with a home-server, you could also leverage Nextcloud or whatever your current syncing solution is. I don't see any reason to get mad when Obsidian is effectively saying "we don't want your data unless you pay us to handle it right".


Wait I can synchronize with nextcloud just fine. It's just a folder on my drive after all. That said, it's janky on mobile.


That's an understatement. The mobile app is... frankly, kind of a garbage can of usability issues imo, but I love the desktop app, it's pretty great. But until they fix the mobile app I just can't use it.

I'd like to see the mobile app bridge the gap between typical mobile note taking apps and the desktop Obsidian app. Make it easy to create a new note like you would in any other note app, save it where it makes sense to save it, make sync easy to setup, etc. Probably asking too much, but ugh... the mobile app is so bad.


Did you try the 1.0 version of mobile app? It's much improved compared to past versions. What are the issues you are running into?


Just downloaded. Seems a little better. I wish I could easily create a note in whatever folder I am in currently. I have an inbox folder. It’s where new notes go until I can deal with them. This always drove me nuts in both apps, but I can’t just go into a folder. Look at Apple Notes for instance as a simple example of how this works.

The sidebar is just a tree in Obsidian. It doesn’t really act how I want. This is less an issue on desktop, but on mobile my expectations are different.

Hopefully sync setup has improved in mobile. That was awful last I tried it.


I agree that version 1.0 is a huge improvement on mobile, and what convinced me to start using Obsidian. But I also agree that usability on mobile is still not on par with Apple Notes when it comes to navigating folders and searching. The way the desktop UI has been translated to mobile doesn’t work well enough. Would be great if the Obsidian team could spend some time playing with Apple Notes on mobile and see if they are some UI concepts they could imitate :)


> I wish I could easily create a note in whatever folder I am in currently.

That's easy. Go to:

Settings > Files & Links > Default location for new notes: Same folder as current file

Note that the file explorer is a plugin like any other, so you can also create your own file explorer plugin that works the way you want it to :)


Great, I’ll give that a look. Thanks!


While Trilium have a very good web version. It also have cross platform app (Linux, MacOS and Windows) [1]

[1] https://github.com/zadam/trilium/releases/latest


Any reason not to put the Obsidian folder in git, and sync via push/pull?


There is a plugin that helps automate that as well :) https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git


this is very common


I've had not reason to pick freemium Obsidian over open source https://logseq.com/.


Congrats on hitting 1.0! Props to the team for adding digraph support to published vaults early on.

Anyone can check out my public Obsidian vault here: https://notes.recursion.is

And I made an introduction video for it here: https://youtu.be/tTFK-V3hdAw


This is one of the best uses of Obsidian I've ever seen. Thanks for sharing


Hi Erica and congrats to you and the whole team! Super excited for a 1.0 release. I hope this means we get some official API docs soon. ;)

In terms of your journey, what do you think the main challenges were? I'm sure a big one is adoption and another performance but curious to hear what the team's thoughts are.

For me personally, the community has been absolutely stellar. Lots of folks always willing to help out. Just a year and a half ago, I found dataview and after avoiding frontend for nearly a decade, I've finally begun my journey with React. The entire experience was kickstarted by my finding Obsidian and trying to contribute to plugins that I loved. A special thanks to everyone from the community: shabegom, joethei, koala, blacksmithgu, pseudometa, Eleanor, Fevol, aquaman, metruzan, and many many others whose name I'm blanking on right now but I promise I'm grateful!


Among other awesome plugins, there's obsidian-wielder [1] for using Clojure (via sci).

[1]: https://github.com/victorb/obsidian-wielder


I see this as "Joplin, just not nearly as free (speech or beer)." Why would I pay monthly for sync and have no control, when I can already sync to my own s3 buckets and only pay for AWS storage and transfer?

Is there a compelling reason to switch from Joplin to Obsidian? Honest question.


I have tried Joplin a little bit and found the UI of Obsidian much friendlier, also the plugin ecosystem is very active. Another main difference is how Obsidian works using the 'bunch of Markdown files' vs. the database approach Joplin uses. Also see this earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808003.


Joplin stores files as separate markdown files, and the database is just an index for search and metadata.

I'm not a huge fan of Joplin's UX, but not having to pay for sync (and being able to choose the backend for sync) is important enough to me that it is a differentiator greater than the overall UX. I can point all of my Joplin installs to the same S3 bucket and boom done.

I'm hearing that with Obsidian you can use OneDrive/iCloud/Dropbox/etc for sync but that is all based on the sync provider. To me that brings ambiguity about how concurrency and conflict resolution are dealt with, since the app kinda capitulates that to the external storage engine right?


I'm not sure how conflict resolution is done with Obsidian, but i have used both Dropbox and iCloud and with both i never had any sync issues in the last year that i've used Obsidian. Before Obsidian i used NvAlt which gave me sync issues all the time.


I have just setup Obsidian with syncthing and works like magic.


Joplin takes a traditional approach to notes: there's notebooks, pages, then notes. Obsidian is more focused on zettelkasten - creating a network of smaller but refined notes that are all tagged and interconnected, which ends up looking somewhat like a bunch of neurons (hence _second brain_). It's also much more extensible. I've seen Obisidian extensions that add kanban and moodboards to notes, for example.


I'm really struggling to understand how Obsidian isn't free. Maybe I'm simply missing your point.

There is no expectation that you use sync, it's simply an option for those that want it and are likely less tech oriented.


> I'm really struggling to understand how Obsidian isn't free. Maybe I'm simply missing your point.

I think they mean free, as in free software. Obsidian is not free neither open source software.


+1. It's pretty easy to setup your own syncing using iCloud, Dropbox or whatever you want.


Sync offers E2E encryption though. Definitely not getting E2E with iCloud (Apple says you do, however iCloud backups aren't E2E encrypted) and I don't believe Dropbox offers E2E either


You can do your own encryption using something like Cryptomator.


From their licensing: "You need to pay for Obsidian if and only if you use it to contribute, directly or indirectly, to revenue-generating, work-related activities in a company that has two or more people."

I imagine that applies to many of us. How many people are looking to use Obsidian purely for personal use?


> How many people are looking to use Obsidian purely for personal use?

The overwhelming majority, if the Obsidian message boards are anything to go by.

I wouldn't want to use a product that only now reached v1.0, for a business. It's not Figma, or a Google Docs type app where corporate use cases are very apparent. At best, Obsidian would be good for a knowledgebase, but there are better wiki tools out there for that.

Obsidian does personal knowledge management best, because of its customizability.


That's cool to know. It's definitely not what I expected! I made the assumption a markdown-based tool would primarily be used amongst tech workers for tech-related knowledge. All that being said, the cost for a license is nothing compared to other tools I use daily like JetBrains products.


$50/user/yr is about $4/mo.

I struggle to understand the mentality that deems that unreasonable. It'd be a bargain at 5x the price.


This is the reason I don't even try it. I would never be able to get my company to pay for a software that's not in our catalog, regardless of the price.


> Why would I pay monthly for sync and have no control

I'm not sure what you mean by this, I use github to sync across devices, you could technically use any solution you like.


Joplin doesn't use flat files, last I checked (tried it in late 2021).


I just tried Joplin - but found out very quickly that it's just another Electron "app", sluggish performance, heavy resource usage and not security sandboxed.


The paid sync service is only really needed for the mobile app. Otherwise you can sync the vaults however you like.


Love the respect for privacy that Obsidian brings. No tackers and no shit. It's beautiful to find such a great app with a respect for something so important.


It's still a proprietary and closed source application, so you can't be sure what it's actually doing. You can monitor which files it accesses and the network traffic it generates, but you can only trust that they're respecting your privacy according to their policy.

It seems like a great program; it embraces open formats and is very extensible. But I don't think privacy should be a reason to use it while it's closed source.


Huge fan; Obsidian is at the center of my personal system for PKM / TFT (note-taking, todos, journaling, devnotes, bookmarks, sketches... ). It's like an OS for .md files. It's so powerful and extensible, via eg WYSIWYG editor, Excalidraw integ, Readwise Reader integ, home for my Remarkable2 notes and drawings, etc. Amazing community too.


I'd very interested to hear more about your workflow, because lack of inking/handwriting recognition in apps like Obsidian is what keeps me on OneNote (and from going fully Linux). Can you edit any of these ink based formats later in Obsidian, or are you limited to only viewing static images of things you've drawn/handwritten elsewhere in the past?

EDIT Searching around the web indicates that you can only draw on top of images of the writing later, not edit it. Alas.


That's not exactly my workflow but I think something like it wld be doable.

I export pdfs (and rarely, svgs) from my Remarkable 2 e-ink tablet.

SVGs can be converted to Excalidraw data.

The Remarkable 2 also supports OCR but I don't make use of that.


Thanks for the reply. I've been eyeing the eink devices with pens for my next ereader, but I've worried about interoperability.


Do you need to be able to edit ink on your computer? If editing ink on-device is all you need, e-ink tablets that use PDF as their native file format (like the DPT-RP1 or Quaderno) fit well into an Obsidian workflow. You can sync/roundtrip the files back and forth to your device for editing.


How are you integrating your Remarkable2? So far I have the two separate, and sometimes have to cross-reference. It would be nice to find a way to integrate them better.


I was quite proud of myself when I brought Simon Welker's obsidian-remarkable[0] plugin back to life a few months ago. It's one-way screenshot sync, but the experience is stellar (single shortcut, sub-second later you have a cropped, transparent screenshot of what's on your remarkable screen with no toolbar etc). I find it really useful for both staging meeting notes into Obsidian before summarising them, and for adding monochrome 'brutalist hand-drawn' graphics to my personal documents.

[0]: https://github.com/cobalamin/obsidian-remarkable


Hi @boomskats, kudos for your recent work on obsidian-remarkable!

My current workflow is pretty suboptimal (manual desktop Remarkable.app to extract/export notes as pdf -> obsidian vault fs) and I was stoked to set up your plugin. Unfortunately it looks like it's not yet compatible w obsidian v1.0.

I created an issue https://github.com/cobalamin/obsidian-remarkable/issues/9 in hopes of confirming it's not just me. Happy to help debug if I can.


I have nothing to add to the heap of praise here, apart from my own thank-you. I'm a fairly new user but exploring the tool gives me the childlike glee akin to coming home from school and continuing a video game or project.


I was using Obsidian pretty hard for a year but I eventually switched over to https://www.ticktick.com/

It turns out I prefer having lists as my primary interface, especially for the mobile side (insert text and press enter, instead of typing "- [x] item").

It does 3 things (all integrated together): lists, notes, and calendar. The "Notes" section is like a mini obsidian mixed in with the lists, but you can also add markdown notes to each individual 'task'. So I use it like a personal knowledge-base, not just for expendable lists.

The calendar integration is also nice. I've combined Obsidian, gCal, and Omnitasks/Todoist into one app.

That said, for pure note taking Obsidian was the best. Especially for coding/work.


Congratulations on the 1.0. Just installed it and everything works great.

Obsidian has been a core part of how I go about my day to day ever since I installed it a few months ago. Using it in conjunction with my Dropbox account has been a smooth operation too.

I tell everybody about it at this point. Keep up the good work.


The app experience is totally ruined now. It's insanity for me to see 1Password 7 to 8 transition level of nonsense again.

Block-quotes are no longer quotes, just text with a strip of light on the left with no option to make it more obvious.

File name is now H1 header at the top of the file with no option to hide it.

Performance sucks so much, and that is on an eight-core x64 mobile CPU running Windows 10 Pro. Everything is sluggish 15fps mess. Shame.

Markdown links are ruined too. The previous UI was light years ahead, using different colors for the text and the link. Now the color is the same.

Most extensions don't care and don't render properly. Fckn great, man.

The tabs are by far the only good thing in the update. Everything else is a downgrade.


> The app experience is totally ruined now. It's insanity for me to see 1Password 7 to 8 transition level of nonsense again.

I really, really don't think this kind of catastrophizing is appropriate. A lot of your complaints are incredibly minor things, and are resolved through configuration.

> Most extensions don't care and don't render properly. Fckn great, man.

This absolutely has not been my experience and the level of vitriol is completely inappropriate. Extensions are developed by third-parties in their own time, and provided for free. Have you made sure all your 'broken' extensions are up to date? Have you verified they are compatible? Have you checked to see there are issues opened in the extension's git repo? Have you submitted PRs to fix the issues you've come across?

I've been using Obsidian for about a year, and about six months ago, I paid for Catalyst to have access to insider builds and to support development. In that time, Obsidian has gotten significantly better.


You can turn off the inline title under Settings > Appearance

It will likely take a few weeks for plugins/themes to update to the new theme system, so I would encourage a bit of patience!

See theme migration guide: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/0-16-0-theme-migration-guide/425...


Wait, I recognize your username... Thanks for the tabs, but please, please do something to the links and quotes. They are completely and utterly messed up, now that they look the same. 10 hours ago there was a difference between the text and the URL in a hyperlink. And now there isn't.

Perfomance is something we never had to begin with, at the very least I can live without it. But we had double colored links! We had quotes, highlighted out of the text by grey colored blocks.

Why? Why would you take that? I mean, 1Password team has moved to Electron and lost features, that is partially understandle. Forgivable, at least. But Obsidian just got comically worse with no explanation provided.


I am not 100% sure I understand what you are describing but it sounds easy to fix.

If you can share before/after screenshots of issue on the Obsidian forum or in Obsidian Discord, that would help!


I'll be glad to help on the weekend. It was a huge relief to know, that you didn't just drop a color from the hyperlink


Been using Obsidian for the last year or so, following LYT etc. Life changing software. So, basically everything feels exactly the same to me. I don't understand what this comment is about. Is something light years ahead just because there is a different link colour? For some reason this comment is at the top? HN pessimism has gone too far. Sorry.


> File name is now H1 header at the top of the file with no option to hide it.

Have you tried adjusting the option: Appearance › Show inline title ?


That actually worked out for me, thanks. Looks like some settings like font size, UI scaling and showing inline title have been reset.


That's funny, I could swear my Obsidian got faster from the update.


I've been using Obsidian since last year, and it soon became my primary tool for taking notes, keeping up with projects, proposals, etc...To keep business and personal life separate, I utilize two separate vaults, which is really simple. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to create their so-called second brain.


Looks like the help docs [1] are an example of what Obsidian looks like when published?

I found it strange that what I would consider to be the help site's table of contents (on the left) is in alphabetical order, somewhat like an index, instead of being arranged in a logical outline like a book's table of contents.

Meanwhile, what's labelled as the "table of contents" on the right is actually just the headings in the current page.

[1] https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/Index


I just can't keep up with all the note taking apps; I sometimes go through a Phase of "I need a means to organize my things", but invariably just go back to a folder with text documents. The note taking apps are fine, but they will either have a web/electron based interface that is too indirect, or their data storage is not open (like text documents), or they try and upsell you cloud storage / sync, or they offer no benefit over a plain text editor (with global search).


This is precisely why I ended up on Joplin several years ago... Being able to sync for free (I just pay for S3 costs) means I got cross-device/platform support and know I will never lose my notes.

I'm trying to understand the use case where it would be worth it to switch to Obsidian and pay monthly for the sync and no longer host the data myself, which doesn't sound like an improvement to me.

The way Obsidian organizes notes sounds intriguing though, I can see how some might find that worth the additional cost (or loss of sync ability).


Obsidian stores all the notes and attachments as normal files in a folder, you can sync it however you like.


> Being able to sync for free (I just pay for S3 costs) means I got cross-device/platform support and know I will never lose my notes.

This is also the case with Obsidian! Because the files are just loose `.md` files in a folder, I personally use Syncthing and Git to keep them synchronised across devices for free. Sync is another option to complement those, for people who don't want to roll their own solution.

By default in Obsidian you own the data (and it never leaves your hard drive), you pay for them to host it for you so that it 'just works' across devices


fwiw, I just use a syncthing folder for obsidian and I've never had an issue


That's where I used to be for years, first in Tiddlywiki, then away from that as it was having trouble with browsers (it's good again now, I gather) and into a Dropbox folder of pseudo-markdown text files.

That said, I've stuck with Obsidian so far, specifically because it doesn't lock me into a format. I was able to drop it on top of my folder-o-markdown & go from there. We'll see if it sticks, but so far so good.


This is the reason I ended up on Obsidian, it's data model is a "a folder of markdown files on your local filesystem", which was already my prior system when I used VS code as an editor for notes.


Surely a website advertising a “brand new look” would have a screenshot of the interface, right?

Am I missing something?


Screenshots are visible if you're on desktop but not on mobile yet. We need to improve the mobile version. We're a small team! That said, you can see screenshots of the mobile app by tapping through to the app store.


It looks like they made it work in the meantime.


Love obsidian, thank you for building!

My only dream is blocked by Apple. Would to have the ability to switch the default notes client in iOS, similar to how you can with browsers and email.


The sync pricing is frustrating. You can choose between free (single device only), and surprisingly expensive for a low-volume file sync mechanism.

Of course I understand there are good reasons for it. It is so difficult to find a paying customer for anything, that it's impractical to price below a cost threshold. LTV > CAC.

Would love to see something like “$200 to enable the a peer-to-peer sync engine forever”, i.e. no ongoing hosting costs for Obsidian.


I pay for Obsidian sync largely to sync my work vault between my company provided laptop and my company provided tool as installing a general purpose sync tool apart from the company managed Google File Stream makes the IT security folks nervous of data exfiltration. Maybe even Google File Stream would work, but I will admit the lazy file downloading makes me nervous

For my personal non-work vaults between my personal devices, I used Syncthing without issue for months, only switching since I was paying for the sync license for work anyway.


It's markdown - could DIY a sync via git pretty easily


lots of folks use syncthing or something similar


This tool is so expensive. I want to use it but for this to be an alternative to Notion you'd have to pay for Sync and Publish, which would come to $24/month. That is very pricey for many people.


While I encourage supporting the Obsidian team by paying, there are ways that you can get the same features without paying.

Sync - On iOS, you can use iCloud to sync your files between your Mac and iPhone. I imagine that there are more configuration options for this on Android.

Publish - lots of different ways to deploy your notes to a site. There's one repo that helps you publish with Mkdocs [1], and I'm sure there are other tools the community has created to solve this problem.

It may not be as simple to set up as Notion, but that's the price you pay for wanting a solution to be cheap, private, and let you own your own data.

[1] https://github.com/jobindjohn/obsidian-publish-mkdocs


Realistically if you care about privacy and owning your stuff you'd go with one of the many open-source options. Especially if you have to bring your own syncing anyway.


Thank you. This put me on the path to some research and I got mine setup with Google Drive and mkdocs.


If you put your notes in a Git repo you can make a pipeline that deploy your notes online using a static site generator and e.g. GitHub pages. Of course Sync/Publish is smoother and easier, but don't let the price of Sync/Publish stop you from trying Obsidian itself (which is free for personal usage).


Good luck accessing Notion offline. Not that it happens often, but its a bit apples and oranges.

Use iCloud/gDrive/dropbox for synching instead. Never had any issues.


Obsidian is free, and you can bring your own syncing and publishing.

You can choose to sync via pretty much any sync solution like Dropbox, iCloud, Git, etc. For publish you can static site generators like Jekyll, Hugo, etc.


It's just reading/writing a directory of files. If you set it up to save into a synced directory, whether that be Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, whatever, you can point all your Obsidian installs on various machines to the same synced directory and it'll give you the same effect.


Is there a good way to sync between Mac OS, Windows and iOS? Seems like you can only pick 2 out of 3.

Edit: Today I learned there is iCloud for Windows, so you can point Obsidian to the iCloudDrive/Obsidian folder.

Going to give it a try.


The Windows version of iCloud causes file duplication and corruption with Obsidian, unfortunately.


Checkout logseq. Fully open source


logseq is cool, but it's not portable like obsidian. markdown files ftw!


Logseq uses Markdown files for all of your pages and journal entries. However, it doesn't support nested directories, choosing to embed "%2F" in the filename instead. That is quite ugly. The only thing Logseq doesn't use Markdown for is configuration files, AFAIK.


Thank you for Obsidian! I really like it and I'm learning Zettelkasten with it! As a consequence I am leanrning things more deeply.

The only thing I miss is a more acessible price for brazilians in Obsidian Sync (1 USD ≈ 5.50 BRL, that is too much). I know I can sync it using other tools, but I feel the native tool would be the best of the scenarios).


Congratulations on the launch! I downloaded Obsidian for the first time last night and spent all morning customising it, so the timing for me couldn't be better.

Quick note, on the website the download button for MacOS is delegating to "https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/dow..." despite the button saying "Version 1.0.0", I believe it should be "https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases/releases/dow..." instead?


It's a caching problem. You should be directed to the correct version in the next few minutes.


Shame -- I cannot seem to download it.


If I use obsidian to take personal work notes, do I need a commercial license? Right now I use a giant append-only markdown file but I'm curious about the linking.


My understanding is yes, and honestly, this was my biggest sticking point with Obsidian. I'm happy to pay for software. I pay for Dynalist pro (same team for anyone who didn't know), but the separate commercial license on top of paying for sync just felt like a lot. Especially with commercial use being defined so broadly.

Fourteen days to trial just isn't enough to see whether it would be worth the cost to use for my own personal use at work. The Dynalist freemium model where I could use a smaller feature set for a longer time and then decide it was worth upgrading was just much easier.

Erica, would you consider a discount on add-on services for commercial subscribers? A 25% discount would put the price a bit closer to Dynalist pro and make it feel like I was actually getting something for the commercial subscription other than just permission to use it for work. Or maybe a discount for existing Dynalist pro subscribers?

I really love the work you all are doing, here and on Dynalist, just a bit hung up on the cost here.


$50/year is not exactly onerous is it?

I kind of agree that having to pay it on top of the sync fees feels off, but you could just as well sync with onedrive.


This is my use case and after reading the terms, I came to the conclusion that the answer is yes. It's an honor system setup though.


Congrats! Been following Obsidian here and there and I'm finally giving it a spin.

Side Note: If you folks would like a portable version for Windows (non-installable version that can run from a cloud folder, portable drive, etc), let me know. PortableApps.com has a few Electron-based apps now.


Yes. Please.


Demo and HN reaction make this promising congratulation on the launch. The only thing that will drag me any my years of OneNote notes is Grammarly integration and support for using with Remarkable. For the last five years I have been on the look out for free form writing tool that I can use with any E-Ink tablet writers. My pesky OneNote + surface sort of works but code highlighting and typo corrections always drive me nuts. I have tried notion, OneNote and recently a direct graph note taking competitor anytype.io to no avail.


Just converted all my completely random unsaved (30+ permanently open) note taking tabs/windows from sublime into an obsidian document structure, synced to android with syncthing. Took about 10mins total. Love it.

If anyone's interested ... two very (very) minor things I've noticed in my 20mins of usage (apologies if these are solved - I haven't got to the literature yet):

- same-same appearance of sub-list markers (I prefer alternative icons for tiered lists)

- Headline / filename special characters conundrum. Many of my docs had headlines in them that weren't suitable as filenames, I found myself repeating the non-filesafe headline on the first line. I wonder if there's some kind of front-matter setup that could resolve this?


I should add, obsidian value add here is the android client which IMO needs a lot more focus due to input / storage considerations (constraints). If just syncing across desktops then sublime/similar with it's folder display would likely suit my needs.


Out of curiosity, can you share more on your pricing strategy? What is actually paying for your development? It looks like you give away a lot for free, do you do that cause the server costs are nil without e.g. sync?

Can you share the rough number of users in each tier/service?


Love the 1.0 on iPad! The tabbed interface (and weird history behavior when working with splits) was one of my biggest hiccups with the old version. The new one interface has smoother animations and behaves better. Wish you added multiple window support on iPad, but that's super minor.

I know that Obsidian has roots as "database is a directory of markdown files", but I will say that the last remaining feature request I have for the app is about versioning: I want to browse my vault at a point in time, not look at old versions of files. Specifically, I want to delete a file, then do a text search in 6 months, find a match in the deleted file, and browse my notebook at the date before I deleted the file.


You can do something like this with Obsidian Git. If your vault is synced to Git then you can roll back to any commit in the history and return to that overall state of your vault.


Out of curiosity, why is Obsidian closed source? It doesn't look like you charge for anything, and with the size and type of following you have, you'd probably see some really cool stuff get sent your way.


> It doesn't look like you charge for anything,

https://obsidian.md/pricing

https://obsidian.md/sync

https://obsidian.md/publish


Gotta love that the tile for the $0 personal plan has a link to their refund policy :D


They seem to be particularly against it (https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/1...) which has always been my own worry about using this product. A knowledge base is something that takes a long time to start producing results and the idea of being locked into using a closed-source piece of software that I can't depend on being functional 5+ years from now is very scary. At least with open-source, a community project is likely to form a fork if the original maintainers disappear.

I realize they are just markdown files, but they use a proprietary "Obsidian" markup that will require painful conversion if I ever need move to another app. I've been through this before and it has always been a massive headache.


I recently switched back to Obsidian (from nothing). It doesn't solve everything the way i want, but it's the closest. The biggest thing for me is it's very open to plugin development, so my goal is to heavily modify it myself (and a few community plugins) to do what i want in the short term. Saves me from forever yakshaving my home-rolled solution lol.

Also the fact that i can easily use syncing with E2E encryption (though not sure if it's been reviewed yet.. would be nice) is awesome.


I've been using this for a few months and it's great. The wiki-like connections, vim mode, and several different ways to look at how things relate make it my go to for notes


Congrats! Been using the insider builds, so I've used the overhauled UI for quite a while. What I've been waiting for is the mobile app, and as expected you folks delivered. Hands down the best note-taking experience in mobile platforms, and it's not even close.

I'm still using Logseq as my PKMS app by default, but seeing how active you've been with pushing genuinely new (and useful) changes, I might just reconsider this.


I stopped using it due to the fact that it is like Vim for Microsoft Word, it takes more time to use, has less features than the original and hurts your sanity


If you just want a knowledge base in Vim, have you tried Vimwiki[1]?

I use Vimwiki in vim and Obsidian outside of Vim -- they can be configured to use exactly the same pile of Markdown files as a vault/wiki.

[1] https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki


Obsidian is a tool like no other: a "second brain" that you have complete ownership over. Being able to link together knowledge or concepts across contexts is a superpower. A recent example: the AlphaTensor paper comes out with a new approach to optimizing matrix multiplication algorithms: as I jot down some thoughts, can I seamlessly refresh my memory on every paper or talk or offhand ML finding I've come across on "matrix multiplication", "deep RL", "Strassen’s algorithm", etc.?

I use it for every aspect of knowledge management, building a personal wiki, personal logging and writing, task tracking, reading notes, academic paper notes+metadata, planning, and more. Other tools offer similar features, but they all seem to have tradeoffs on data ownership or offline support or lack of extensibility or non-standard text format (i.e. not markdown). I wrote last year in another HN post that it's remarkable that the Obsidian team has delivered a superior product in a _very_ crowded note-taking / PKM space, and 18 months later it remains the single tool that I couldn't imagine abandoning.


how do you organize your notes? I find it hard to decide between a hyperlink, a tag, a new note, a folder, etc.


I'll have to give 1.0 a try, I installed Obsidian last time it came up on HN but unfortunately it won't run on my phone.

E: Dang. Same thing. Installs and launches, but when I go to create a vault I get "Failed to create vault. Unable to create directory, unknown reason." Both on internal storage and the SD card.

I granted it permissions upon install, so who knows. My phone might just be too old and busted.


If Obsidian ever added some good inking/handwriting recognition stuff, it would be a contender for the best note taking app out there.


Can you explain more about what you would want to see? There is the Excalidraw plugin that allows you to write handwritten notes inside of Obsidian. It should also be possible to add handwriting recognition as a plugin.

If you're on macOS/iOS a lot of this is now at the OS level, and has gotten really quite good.


Couldn't you just use your preferred inking app, then export as image?

I ask this as someone who much prefers atomization with good interoperability to bloated everything applications (and who has a phone and laptop with active stylus.)


Is there a note taking app/knowledge database that auto-magically tags + adds metadata to everything and is searchable?

I've tried many different tools in the past and I find I can't stay organized. I don't want to sit there linking stuff together, I just want to jot down a quick note or thought and have it link up with enough stuff that I can find it easily later.

I was thinking of making a personal tool based on some kind of database like datalog. Where I can dump a bunch of facts and have the computer automatically tag and link items.

I'd love something that knows I'm currently in a meeting with X,Y,Z persons while I took a note and automatically links it with them and any keywords etc from my note to other notes and topics.

I saw a demo for outreach? I think that did some cool stuff for sales, listening to phone calls and making notes linking people etc. I want that but for _everything_ haha. Have it link in with JIRA, slack, GitHub, Gmail etc. One stop shop.


The problem with automatically tagging/ linking is that everyone has a different categorization system (for good reasons). A note that only needs to be tagged “meeting” for one person might need to be tagged as “casual one on one meeting” for another —- just imagine the difference in granularity for IC vs management.


I love Obsidian because it puts everything in just a file that I can see live on my filesystem. Craft, Bear, Notion are all good tools, but I get uneasy knowing that so much of my knowledge base and documentation lives on their backend somewhere.

I happily pay for Obsidian Sync even though I could use iCloud or OneDrive to sync my vaults because I want to support them


Am I mistaken or are all the note taking systems optimized for isolated usage? Some allow some form of communication by publishing notes but the last time I checked, there was no public pool of notes that were open for discovery.

I would love to have a system where my notes are automatically linked with notes from other users who have the same ideas or goals.


I’ve had so many epiphanies from journaling. I wonder what society would realize if all our thoughts were linked.


I might give it another go. I tried switching from Evernote a while ago but was a bit underwhelmed. I don't really see the value of bidirectional links yet, the search feature in Evernote has been working fine for me. But will try it out again, and maybe give it a week this time.

EDIT: The Sync feature is far too expensive. I pay about $22/year for Evernote: https://evernote.com/compare-plans Syncing is a core feature, and I'm not going to use any notetaking tool if it can't sync my notes between mobile and desktop. I don't really want to switch to a tool that will cost $96/year. I'd be comfortable paying up to $25/year.

Even better if there was a self-hosted database that I could run on my own server, or a way sync via Dropbox or Google Drive (that also works on mobile.) Maybe iCloud is an option.


Questions for users - if we work in an environment where we cannot install applications (and no this wont be approved) are we able to use this still, or is it only going to be viable for a "personal" machine.

I ask as i can think of several times ive been stuck with just a work laptop or similar and it would suck to not at least have a browser version or something.

Thanks


If you can't install applications locally, Logseq is a good alternative. It can operate entirely locally, with nothing installed, if your browser supports the localstorage API. Edge does, for example. (There are a small number of features that don't work in this mode.)


This sounds interesting - but I've never heard of it, what is it?


There are a few posts in their feature requests forum asking for a portable version to run via flash drive, but so far I don't believe that request has ever been acknowledged, though some hacky workarounds exist.


This is very cool! Thanks for sharing.


I think you replied to the wrong comment!


I absolutely did - apologies.


a few people have set it up in Docker, so if you're that technical it might be doable


I've been wanting to play with your software for a while, and I happened to have a moment this time, so I loaded it on my Android phone.

If the bracket notation is a commonality among note taking systems like this one, then I may just be too much of an outsider to jump in easily to this app. But I, as someone who was interested in using the app enough to press every button I could see, couldn't figure out how to link notes until I exhausted my possibilities in the app, looked at your Web page, scrolled through the comments here and finally found someone linking to the page I needed. I knew that linking is the main feature, but I couldn't find it.

Filtering out dumb users like me may be a design decision, but if not, I would encourage something upon app installation that offers to tell new users how to link notes, even if it's just a link to a YouTube video ("new to Obsidian? Watch this 1 (2?) minute video to get you started.")


the help/default vault contains exactly what you're describing


I am still looking for a note editor that has good support for tables. Might as well use Excel for note-taking from now on.


How about Emacs + org-mode? Org-tables are plain text tables on steroids. You can quickly create, rearrange, modify these tables, and do even basic (or complex) calculations within them.


If its good or not can be discussed, but Obsidian supports tables. Obsidian also supports mermaid flowcharts. And there are plugins for mindmaps, GANTT charts etc. There really are an amazing range of functions in Obsidian.


What I want from a note taking app:

* Takes pages from my browser

* Uses github to sync across platforms

* Has offline reading on mobile

* Tagging and a todo list for triaging notes.

Haven't found one yet.


Here is a way to capture pages from the browser in Obsidian https://stephanango.com/obsidian-web-clipper

https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git will help you sync across platforms

Obsidian has all files locally so can be read offline

I use a mix of tagging and two plugins (dataview and tasks) to accomplish the last one.


Use Obsidian and MarkDownload in the browser. Alternatively, route your web clippings via Readwise.


For people who use a personal notes tool like obsidian, how would you deal with notes that turned to work related later? I always find myself end up with half-finished notes in multiple different places. First versions in personal notebook and refined ones in company's google doc/etc. Thanks


Not entirely sure of your use case. You could maybe use backlinks for this. Say have a summary document within obsidian for a work project, and backlink to your existing notes which are relevant. You can even link specific blocks of text in a note.

Another option is to write a document up in Obsidian, then upload the markdown to google docs. Or there are obsidian plugins converting obsidian notes to Word format.


It varies for me. I’ll often write a draft of something in obsidian, then put it onto a doc/wiki and update my obsidian file to a link to that with a list of keywords for if I ever search it again.


1.0 broke making the cursor not blinking in Vim mode. Is it possible to fix it back?

Specifically this CSS snippet stopped working:

https://forum.obsidian.md/t/how-to-stop-the-blinking-cursor-...


May I ask some video materials which show creating of Obsidian tree with really rich using of its abilities?


I found that in my role I was task switching into different domains and have a lot of trouble remembering the details a various deep dives and at first tried OneNote, Evernote, etc but had issues with each, mostly the concern that the storage formats were incompatible and so I would be held hostage by whichever app I chose.

I went searching for something I could store in the cloud and locally and could understand markdown. Lo and behold Obsidian kept coming up in recommendations. I've been using it for 3 months now and I love that it uses simple filesystem heirarchies to store the .md files. I can put it into a git repo and fit it neatly into my existing workflow. It is basically the perfect note taking app for me. Well done and keep up the good work!


I love Obsidian's editor - it hides markup when you're not editing but shows you when your cursor is over some text. The fact that you can just drag an image into a note is great and something terminal note apps will never be able to do.

And then there's [[hypertext]]. Love it!


Is there a way to disable the hiding of markdown? I don't like when text moves around


yes, use Source mode


Thank you, that's exactly what I was looking for.


All I'll say is that I'm a huge fan and Obsidian has been life changing, so thank you.


First I’m hearing of Obsidian, sounds cool. Can anyone comment on how it compares to org-mode?


Current org-mode user here, former Obsidian user. Although much more extensible than apps like Joplin, Notion or - god forbid - Evernote, Obsidian comes nowhere near the freedom you have in Org-mode. You can customize Obsidian to fit your workflow to some extent, but not by a whole lot. Then again: for most people that is enough. Most want to drive a car, not build it.

There is afaik no such thing as an org-agenda in Obsidian, which is a deal breaker for me. Also to do list handling is shoddy at best (it would probably be a perfect app if that got integrated, e.g. via a todo.txt format with a calendar) but alas.

If I weren't an org-mode user, Obsidian would probably be my pick. It is very nice in everything it does, but it just doesn't have that "edge" of creating a setup that is ugly, complicated an unrecognizable from its default. It may be ugly, but at least it's _your_ ugly.


Not an org-mode user.

Would this be a set-up that creates an agenda that works (by using 2 extensions)?

https://medium.com/geekculture/how-i-track-my-tasks-in-obsid...

Dataview is such a great extension.


That definitely gives you the basics. But it's worth noting that core org comes with a lot more functionality, e.g., calendaring, scheduling tasks (this is distinct from deadlines), blocking and ordered tasks, priorities, repeating tasks, timekeeping and time reporting. Some of this could be cobbled together in Obsidian by combining various plugins and some query code.


this is great, thanks!


Obsidian vs. org-mode is pretty much like VScode vs. emacs. Obsidian has a more immediately accessible interface and a big community of plugins, but the available plugins tend to operate at a higher level of abstraction. Obsidian is also document-centric rather than outline-centric, although org-mode can be used either way. Calendaring isn't native in Obsidian and there is no org-agenda, but you can cobble together something similar with queries depending on your needs. Functionally, there's no real reason to switch from org-mode, but if you primarily want Roam-like features and find org-roam too confusing or awkward, you might consider it.


Obsidian is neither Free Software nor Open Source.

Source: https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-releases


I used Obsidian for about 2 years. Unfortunately I found that I only ever used it as a database to store information. I didn't often use it productively, and when I did it felt like something was off. As to not appear like a product I will not share what I use as my main program instead, but will say it is much more "press check box, and you're done." I did move everything over to Org Mode using a convenient conversion script I found on GitHub, and find using Org Mode to be much snappier than Obsidian, which is one of the key things that led me away from Obsidian.


Obsidian has made so much of my PhD process easier and smoother, and I've increasingly depended on it in real life as well. Amazing team but absolutely stellar community of passionate and kind people. Bravo!


Hey, mind sharing your workflow? Where do you read papers? And do you annotate them?


Woohoo! Kudos for building what is a pretty awesome application!

Use mine for Zettelkasten style knowledge tracking, Zotero and Vim plugins are awesome ... I guess I should donate some money because I am pretty happy with Obsidian!


Congrats!!

Honestly the beta version was already stable and feature rich enough to consider it it a v1 :)

If one of the key features is a new UI, can I advise to put a couple screenshots in the announcement?

Will this be retrocompatible with plugins on v.15?


As someone using insider build and a bunch of 3rd party plugins, they're fine, but themes are a bit of a bumpier ride due to UI changes.

They've marked them all as legacy and are removing the legacy label as theme developers are updating them.


Congratulations for the achievement! Been using obsidian for over a year as my daily driver. Found the graph view quite gimmicky for my workflow but the rest of the features are super polished.


>It means we're proud enough to drop the word "beta".

Huge milestone. Congratulations! I will be trying out the flatpak on my Linux build and keeping an eye out for your progress. Well done!


Ive been a paying customer (off their Sync feature, the rest is free) for more than one year. I love this software and use it everyday. Congrats and keep up the great work :)


Newbie question:

Which tool would be the best for assembling distinct documents from a large of pre-written paragraphs/sentences. I frequently need to write a set of docs with extensive cross-referencing, however, (a) the exported output docs needs to have referenced paras/sentences 'inlined' into the final version, and, (b) 'locking' the exported output docs should lock all the paras used by that doc while leaving the remaining ones editable.

Thanks.


Obsidian has a way of transcluding files, so you would have a bunch of logical paragraphs and transclude them together. Updating the individual paragraphs would update each instance they appear, since tranclusion is at view time.


Nice! Can I also lock edits on some of the views resulting in locking of all transcluded paras/sentences but no others?


When they are transcluded you have to click through to the source file to edit it. I think that accomplished what you mean.


Awesome, I've been waiting for proper tab support.

A tip that people on HN will probably enjoy: add --disable-smooth-scrolling to your shortcut to make scrolling more responsive.


Also can try this All-In-One but still lightweight app: https://mdsilo.com/


I use Obsidian for a very simple use case compared to everything it can do. Synced markdown across all platforms, simple lists in named files, share those files to other software to perform actions against those lists.

For this use case it is the absolute best of the bunch. I've used a lot of these sorts of complex second brain things and I've settled on a very minimal approach wherein Obsidian was the clear 'best in show' for what I needed.


I use Bear notes and have used notion, coda, notable and others in the past. Help me understand why I should switch. Is there something that’ll get me hooked?


Not having used any of the graph based note taking/knowledge tools like Obsidian, logseq, Athens Research or Roam -- I was wondering if anybody has tried them for collaborative knowledge management?

Obsidian seems to be single user based, Athens is "collaborative" and "for startup teams". But does anybody actually have any experience using a graph based knowledge tool for your teams knowledge management?


I think Notion is more aimed at teams. I haven't used Athens or Roam, but certainly Obsidian and loqseq are much more single user focused. You could use a shared sync but it requires the end user to have the same sync program as you, so it's not like sending a link to someone involved


I started using Obsidian Sync and I’m quite impressed. The sync between my Windows laptop and my iPhone is almost real-time. Conflicts are handled nicely by merging changes from both sides and the user is notified about it. And of course, everything is still stored in a local folder of Markdown files. Would be interesting if someone from Obsidian could share some details on the implementation.


I'd also be interested. It's surprisingly robust. In case you weren't aware, they also have version history[0] with Sync.

0:https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Version+history


Is Obsidian Sync end to end encrypted?


Yup, it is.

https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Security+and+privacy


I'm sorry if I sound stupid, but this is an honest question.

What would I use Obsidian for? Is it just for writing stuff down? And if so; how would I access these notes on something like my phone? I tend to just write down things and store attachments in "Saved Messages" on Telegram. That way I can access it all via my phone, home computer, work computer or the web.

How would Obsidian be better?


it has a bunch more features. links between notes (sort of like hyperlinks on a wiki), tags, calendar, reminders, todos, you can structure your notes in folders, daily notes, etc. There's also a ton of plugins for features from other note-taking apps.

They do provide mobile apps that work well but it's just markdown files so you can really access them however you want. I just have the entire vault in my Google Drive.


What would be the absolute best tutorial to quickly learn how to use Obsidian, as a power user? Asking for a friend :)


Recommended LYT: Intro - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3NaIVgSlAVLHty1-NuvPa9V0...

Advance - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3NaIVgSlAVIDaYB0yeH3lnB9...


Is there a way to toggle / collapse bullet list? I find that it’s one of the most useful features when organizing my thought as it allows me to explore one nested branch very deeply while still keeping the doc easy to deal with. You can hide the unnecessary details when you want to keep think a higher level.


Yes, Obsidian does it out of the box.


I recently started using Reflect[^1] and I rather like it, especially after trying the task management feature, which is now in beta.

My usage of Reflect has made me very curious about other apps that do similar things (e.g. Obsidian)

Has anyone here tried Obsidian _and_ Reflect?

[^1]: https://reflect.app/


Interesting decision to have zero images of the new design on the landing page. Could you share why you decided this way?


Wohoo! I've been using Obsidian for 2+ years and even wrote some personal plugins [0] to automatically backup my vault on GH, import all my Pocket.com highlights, etc. Highly recommend it :)

[0] https://github.com/fanahova/fana-os


Good news. I wonder if it can deal with deeply nested folders and get metadata from standard Markdown frontmatter already?

(I have a fair amount of content already in plain Markdown, as you can see here: https://taoofmac.com/static/graph)


Did a quick test. Still seems to not support storing images alongside Markdown files (at least it breaks in mine), nor support having a default file (index.md) per folder and have the folder path be the actual page path.


Not sure what approach you're stumbling with re: images, but they definitely support them, but you can literally just drop an image onto the editor and it'll embed it, including locating it where you've specified that attachments should go.

The default file per folder is not built-in, but there is a handy community plugin[1] which does it.

[1]: https://github.com/xpgo/obsidian-folder-note-plugin


Right. That's the problem, it insists on storing images in a single folder, which doesn't scale or make it easy to manage complex notes as a single unit (it's the reason why my notes are folders and not single files).


No, you can put them anywhere, it just defaults to putting them in a single folder for ease of convenience. There's even a setting, "Default location for new attachments," which allows you to choose:

- Vault folder - A specified folder in your vault - In the same folder as the current file - In subfolder under the current folder

But again, that's just the default location; you can put it anywhere and reference it wherever it is using relative paths.


Well, I am looking at a very simple Markdown file with a single image reference and it's not working. The image file is in the current folder...


Interesting – possibly normal image links don't work but their embeds do?


You can store images anywhere. Can you share what syntax you are using for your image links?


Just tried the plugin in "Index file" mode, set the index file to index.md and it doesn't seem to pick up nested paths correctly for some reason.

(Also the rest of Obsidian seems to not be aware the plugin is there, the notes graph is still referencing the wrong things...)


Those two are actually a must for me. My team at work needed a wiki and I would only accept one with such features, eventually we found it. Still looking for something to self note taking. I'd also need something that can sync to phone cheaper, as currently I don't pay for Google keep


I had to build mine: https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy


Can I store the data on my local windows machine on a google drive i.e in a folder that is synced to Google drive.

I ask because there was one other note taking app that couldn't cope with the semantics of Google drive's write activity (been a while and i've forgotten which one) and consequently I lost data


Yeah you can I am using Google Drive to sync my notes between my pc and my laptop, no problem so far.


I love Obsidian and has been using it for about two years and I am a paying supporter. But at least on MacOS obsidian-1.0.0 is a forced update that automatically happens when you start (restart) obsidian. It broke my v0.15.9 setup and made it almost unusable. Really NOT nice at all.


Interesting. I'll be switching from Logseq to Obsidian as the outline-only mode in Logseq felt limiting.


I love Obsidian so much. It's the only note-taking/knowledge base type app that I've stuck with. It's so flexible, performant and nice looking. Everything I care to document or commit to long-term memory goes in my Obsidian vault and I push it all up to a private git repo.


I appreciate what Obsidian is and how it works, and congrats on 1.0!

On the personal side, I dislike aesthetics and wouldn't ever use it 'cause of Electron, tho. I'm spoiled by native note-taking apps like Bear and Noteplan on macOS which have much nicer UX and UI, especially on mobile.


Has Noteplan's performance improved over the past couple years? I really liked its model, but last time I tried it (early 2020) it got pretty slow as soon as you had a non-trivial amount of data/notes in it. Ironically, given the sentiment (which I share!) about Electron, Obsidian trounces Noteplan for performance.


I stopped using Noteplan as developer doubled the subscription price over the night. Performance was perfect for me, though.


You can try minimal theme, it makes it a look a bit more native.


The aesthetics of all three of these apps seem almost the same?


Bear's aesthetics are definitely a bit nicer. I have switched to Obsidian for extensibility and its use of local files… but Bear has a level of polish that is hard to put into words and which screenshots alone don't quite capture. It just straight-up feels better. (It also has the problem of getting updates very slowly and is really committed to keeping everything in its internal DB, which makes it much less useful to me.)


This update looks amazing. Kudos to the entire team! I love Obsidian, using it for couple of months now.


I found some threads mentioning sync so just my 5 cents - it is possible to create a vault on iCloud drive and thus having a content synced across devices. I am not sure if the Sync feature provides more functionality, but I personally would not need anything else.


Yes, you can sync with the external file sync tool of your choosing with no ill effects


Obsidian is among the best note-taking apps out there today. Backlinks make it more useful than other note taking apps, and this helps me uncover connections even if I don’t use the graph feature that much.

One plugin I am wish will arrive soon is Google Calendar integration.


> One plugin I am wish will arrive soon is Google Calendar integration

For what use? There's an obsidian-ics plugin to fill a daily note with events from a calendar, ans obsidian-google-lookup to put Google Calendar events and contacts as objects in notes.


This is so exciting, congrats!

Obsidian has completely changed my notes workflow over the past year. It's so lightweight, and has just the right amount of structure for me. Thank you for building it! The new interface looks fantastic.

Does this include an update to the iOS app?


Yes, the update got released on every platform


For anyone wanting to try something similar but with a better graph view, check Tangent: http://tangentnotes.com/

Also more performant and less plugin-dependent.


I moved from Google Docs to Obsidian in a process of de-Googling my life. With Obsidian, my notes are only stored on my machine and my storage syncing service. Files are just text, so my notes can outlive Obsidian itself.


Fun! I just moved over to Obsidian because of the simplicity. I love that I can use the local folder just as easily as the full app.

Tip for anyone wondering: if you need encryption, gocryptfs works great.

Now I just need to wait for Flathub to update…


Could you expand on how you do encryption with gocryptfs?


Oh, sure. Obsidian just reads from whatever directory you give it, so I set up an encrypted directory with gocryptfs, then mount it decrypted and point Obsidian at that. Sounds like a pain, but I have a separate "vault" (folder) for secrets and I don't have to get in to that one very often. But if I did, I could have the folder mount at boot or something.


The description sounds interesting! Can anyone comment on how this compares to or integrates with Anki? I've found SRS to be really powerful, but I'd like to integrate it more with note-taking.


After years of trying around multiple markdown tools like Standard Notes, and loads of open source I finally landed on Obsidian. Still trying to wrap my head around it but it seems like such a powerful tool


I need to put [ and ] in text. Please don’t make the text inside them blue unless it’s actually a link.

Also I really want the file name to be independent of the heading, like it used to be.

Also it is great and I gave you my money.


I used obsidian for a long time. But the problem for me was that it's "granular" enough. The basic "atom" is a markdown file. There's nothing wrong with that of course. But I wanted to have the freedom of simply writing something, without worrying in which "file" it would go. After that I started working on my own "roam-like" app, I took inspirations from Spacemacs(The SPC key concent) and use HTML as the "final form" of things. if you want to look at it's at: https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook


I just realised Obsidian is built by the same folks who built Dynalist wow. I enjoyed using Dynalist for a while (before discovering Notion) and even built a chrome extension for it (Dynalist Allstar).


WOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Obsidian has changed my life. Everything about this software is chefs kiss.

Thankyou.


Looks nice and based on my initial quick tests seems rather lean, and yet it is cross platform. Can I ask what the tech stack looks like? development language(s)? Cross platform UI library?


It's an electron app


Interesting - it runs rather nice for an electron app IMO. Also, the memory utilization isn't terrible (so far that I have noticed).


Not sure if this is for me. I use one large text file where I put all my notes. Organizing everything into folders and files with formatting seems to be just too high friction.


You can use as many or as few folders and files as you want in Obsidian. Try saving your one large text file as .md and open it in Obsidian. Voila, superpowers.


I'll try to get used to it.


> over two years ago [2], when terms like "second brain" ... were still in their infancy.

Funny, that was the exact title of my personal wiki that I started in 2006 or so.


I tried Obsidian and just couldn’t use it.

After using Roam I can never go backwards to plain text, I need a block based editor with infinite nesting. I’ve recently switched to Tana.


I use Sublime Text as a simple note taking app (love the speed and tabs). Didn't know about Obsidian and was exited to try it after reading about it today, but the simple fact that Obsidian loads a fraction of a second slower than Sublime, may be a deal breaker for me.

Here I recorded a comparison https://imgur.com/a/6QzpwYw

Will give it a chance, looks so good and has several interesting features that I may didn't know that I needed. Kudos to the Obsidian team.


Does anyone know any writeups that describe how someone solved a difficult problem they couldn't previously solve, using a note-taking app?


The sync feature is kinda overpriced. What about a family subscription and collaboration/sharing features?

Also, from what I can see, there is no 2FA, am I wrong?..


You can sync using any sync solution, e.g. Git, iCloud, Dropbox, etc.

There is no 2FA because there is no authentication necessary. All the files are local to your device.


For those just getting started with personal knowledge management and/or Obsidian, check out my starter kit: https://developassion.gumroad.com/l/obsidian-starter-kit

It's both a pre-configured knowledge base (with a structure, plugins, templates, etc) and a detailed user guide with theory and practical how-to guides.

It's not free but might be a good investment if you want to spare time when diving in.


Anyone have any thoughts on Craft[1] and how it compares to Obsidian as a note-taking tool? My primary work machine is a Mac (I also have an iPad and iPhone). I'm looking primarily for a note-taking app with support for images. I don't necessarily need the more "glamourous" publishing type features that craft has.

Things I like about the app:

* (Generally) good keyboard support

* Syncing (but I'm paying for it)

* Good native apps on mobile

Things that aren't so good

* Editing code blocks

[1] https://www.craft.do/


Two reasons why I’m using Obsidian instead of Craft:

Craft uses a proprietary data format. Obsidian is more portable since it just uses folders of Markdown files.

Craft for Windows doesn’t work offline (only online).


New UI looks nice I wish it felt faster (it still doesn't). I made that Windows 98 UI theme which is totally broke now :(.


I would love to see Obsidian for teams. There is no knowledge app as elegant as obsidian, it could change team wikis forever.


I absolutely love Obsidian, and have been enthusiastically recommending it to everyone I can. Congratulations on hitting 1.0!


It feels like I've been using Obsidian for years. Really like most of all functionality and especially the community!

Kudos to the team!


Man pages. Very simple, yet more power markup language, already installed on your system, just make a new section and go.


Obsidian has been an amazing tool. I keep all my notes in it and love the WYSIWYG editing and plugins - keep it up!


Honestly surprised by how much support this is getting, despite the devs' absurd views on open source[1]. Why anyone would choose this instead of Logseq is beyond me.

[1]: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/open-sourcing-of-obsidian/1515/2...


Many reasons: * in logseq, everything is a list. In Obsidian, prose is first class citizen as well * The plugin API is simple and discovery of plugins is super well inregrated * I don't like Obsidian's business model either but it's a bunch of commited indie devs actively engaging with their community and the efforts are visible. Kudos for that. * The community of practitioners and contributors of plugins is just incredible.

Maybe some of it is true for logseq, but finding articles, tutorials, guidelines and examples for obsidian certainly contributes to it's success.


I was considering Obsidian, and your comment worried me enough to investigate.

Looking through that link, though, I don't see anything too absurd. It's a closed-source app, which isn't ideal but is common enough. It looks like they have a Github repo that explicitly does not have the core source code but hosts some secondary files, and that's spelled out in the first couple lines of the readme.

Seems fine to me, overall. Maybe there's something objectionable I missed in there?


Have you considered that your personal ethos which appears to stipulate 'views on open source' as a prime criterion for choosing software may not actually be a human universal?


Does anyone use obsidian with any of the e-ink note-taking devices (remarkable/supernote/etc.)?


Congrats on reaching v1.0!

Does anyone have any experience with their Android app? How well does it work these days?


I wonder if Obsidian can support using Apple Notes as a data source/back end/sync source?


Wasn't expecting this release to be 1.0! But I suppose I should've seen it coming.


For an explanation of what changed see this forum discussion [0]. I’m not a fan of the tab metaphor in general but the implementation could’ve been worse.

[0]: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-release-v1-0-0/44873


Could someone tell me if the ability to export standard markdown has been implemented yet?


Is standard markdown a thing? What is now called commonmark [1] was called by thar name originally, but the name was changed after John Gruber objected. Other than that, there seem to be a plethora of markdown dialects, none of which is very “standard” as far as I can tell. Perhaps variants of the github flavor are most widespread, though.

[1] https://commonmark.org/


Can you explain more? The files are already in Markdown format, and you can use standard notation. You don't actually need to export them, they're just in your vault folder.


Obsidian uses non-standard Markdown for things such as block references, wiki-style links, etc. Since very early beta "export to standard Markdown" had been on the todo list so that notes taken in Obsidian would not be "locked in" because they were reliant on app-specific markup.


Have you checked out the Obsidian Pandoc plugin? I think it might meet your needs:

https://github.com/OliverBalfour/obsidian-pandoc

That being said standard Markdown does not provide notation for certain things, so it is somewhat up to interpretation how to convert certain features to standard Markdown.


It appears that the feature in question is still on the roadmap, but moved to long-term:

https://trello.com/b/Psqfqp7I/obsidian-roadmap


Gotcha, check out the Obsidian Pandoc plugin as I think it can be modified to suit your needs!


Will do, thanks.


Is Obsidian open source? I couldn't figure it out from a quick perusal of the site.


Obsidian is not open source but it uses plain text local files with Markdown support, so you are not locked in. All plugins for Obsidian are required to be open source. Also Obsidian contains no tracking/analytics, and the Sync product is E2E encrypted. The Obsidian API is also very flexible and allows you to do almost anything if you want to modify the app.


How do you know that it doesn't contain tracking/analytics without the source code?


You can inspect network requests and see that nothing communicates to Obsidian servers. Since the app is Electron based you can also open up developer tools and unminify the JS code if you want to actually look at the code.

You can also check out the privacy policy here: https://obsidian.md/privacy


you don't


hey! Don't have anything serious to add, but just want to say thanks! Obsidian is a great tool and I use it every day.

I don't even use half the features/capabilities but as a simple markdown editor w/ links it's fantastic.


I will stick to one note. I like the ability to locate things arbitrarily in space.


I’m surprised there’s only one other comment talking about the open source Foam.


I moved from Obsidian (big fan) to Foam because I already do most of my writing and coding in vscode might as well keep my notes there as well. Loads of vscode functions and plugins (like asciidoc) carry over to note taking world perfectly!

Have to say though - it's quite a bit of work to get the whole Foam ecosystem working compared to obsidian but once you get it done it's very freeing.


Just wanted to drop by and say hi. Such a f*cking great app! Thank you so so much!


Looks cool! Might try it out one day if I ever become unhappy with Notion.


Looks interesting - is it a proper / native app or is it Electron?


Update - just tried it out, it's VERY much Electron, with no notes it uses about 350-450MB of memory, after importing my markdown notes it used over 1.2GB! (and broke a lot of their standard formatting)


Why new apps still using electron, instead of tauri?


I am tired of apps with 400mb weight. It's almost the same as windows 2000 or two times more then win98 os. With tauri they could get rid at least 200mb of electon and use system builtin browser.


Including most useful plugins, does it work offline without issues?


Yes. It has been designed to be offline first.


Tried Obsidian, wanted to save a note that had an url in the title, can't do that, not able to have special characters in titles(am on Linux btw where there's little limitations on what chars you can use in file names).

Delete, good bye, auf wiedersehen!


I'm not aware of any commonly used linux FS that allows `/` in a filename


What about other note taking tools that allow `/` in the title? How aware are you of them?


Not quite what you are demanding for, but you can use ∕ instead of / https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2215


Insane performance as an electron app. Impressive job indeed.


I spend a lot of time in vscode. So I started keeping notes in vscode. I push my notes to github to access them from my phone. I change file extensions from .md to .old.md to hide old notes. What am I really missing here?!


You can use GitHub plugin in VSCode and use "Gists" instead of having push and pull notes from a repo. I find it a lot easier, and the quick scratchpad is really nice.


This is great. As an Obsidian user, this update adds a lot.


So, without clicking, what does this app do? What is it?


In brief, an extensible, syncable tool for making lightweight personal Markdown wikis. Emphasis on being very smooth and stylish. Emphasizes giving you a lot of tools that can suit a lot of writing/note taking workflows.

If I were to need to start writing a book this week, this is probably where I'd organize the research and composition.


It's a note-taking app that emphasizes non-linear writing.

You can use it as a journal, personal wiki, knowledge base, task management, or just a Markdown text editor. There are hundreds of plugins that make it easy to tailor the app to your needs.

It's also focused on privacy and future-proofing your notes. All your data is stored locally in a folder of plain text files.


(Advanced) note taking, often used in the Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) & "Second Brain" community.


It’s a note-taking application like Evernote but open source. Has native apps. You can sync using a self-hosted sever easily. Works great on mobile too. Update: Oops. I always thought it was Open Source. I started using it after learning about it a HN thread some time ago. Downloaded and started using and it worked so good I didn’t have to look back about it.


Common misconception, but Obsidian itself is not open source


> You can sync using a self-hosted server easily

Do you mean using a third-party sync application (Syncthing for example)? All I could find is a feature request: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/self-hosted-sync-server/20975/13


It's NOT open source


Love Obsidian! Congrats. The new UI looks awesome!


Love Obsidian, keep up the good work


Open source it and I'll care.


Is Obsidian venture-backed?


Fantastic update for me.


Obsidian.

My epiphany of the decade.

Thank you SO MUCH!!!


Congrats on launch !


It's awesome!


what separates this from sublime?


Obsidian is a note taking and knowledge management tool whereas sublime is a text editor.


so far all things I've read obsidian can do are doable in sublime


Is it me or am I the only one who took a good 3 mins to figure what this app is for ?

Sorry I don't want to sound disrespectul but I didn't found an quick and easy parsable description. If I would show this my parents, I wouldn't be sure if they could guess. :/

"Obsidian is a powerful and extensible knowledge base" ?????


The other replies aren't very helpful imo

It's essentially an app for taking notes and jotting down ideas, and you write them in markdown. You can link references to other notes within a note to link up ideas.

Here's a 12 minute demo that should give you an idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgbLb6QCK88

I'm not that quite in-depth with my usage of it. I essentially use it as a scratchpad for a few notes for work. But it does the job


The reason for this is these "second brain" and "personal knowledge management" apps are rather cultish and aren't really intended for an audience outside of those already in the know - that is, the circuit of cycling through all these different apps and "productivity" games.

A similar app, Roam Research, is the same story as Obsidian, only a few chapters ahead. Roam's marketing campaign actually referred to itself and its users as a literal cult.

Ultimately, like self help, it's all just more of the same - cashgrabs that make people feel like they're improving or achieving, with every self help quip they consoom, with every "second brain" note they take.

Ultimately, they're just games for wasting time - "tool games" [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33135227


Agree, I've also seen this is a rising sentiment on Twitter these days.

These tools are technologically great, but they are not 10x better than notepad.exe

The marketing and hype around these tools are self perpetuating. Some twitter guru will post about these tools and get kickback or an increase in followers. People who pay for tools post about their experience online so they can signal to other people who have paid for this tool that yes, they now belong to the cool kids club too.

And there are content creators who's income depends on these tools. They will 'review' these tools, post a review online and unknown to most people, they will be getting some money for this review under the table.

I've also seen that this is all mostly limited to tech folks who consume too much of their info from Twitter and Youtube. None of my offline friends know about Obsidian, Roam, or the zillion productivity tools that are being produced.


"These tools are technologically great, but they are not 10x better than notepad.exe."

That's cap. Obsidian is many, many times more powerful and useful than notepad.exe. It's a completely different class of product. It's virtually an operating system unto itself.


We can only aspire to be as perfect as you, and your:

- blanket admonishment of others' efforts towards creativity and developing insights

which you already have and that can come only from inside your great mind.

Please fluoresce and share your brilliant illuminating light of self-made intelligence and inspiration upon us, the sheep-like, turf-sprawled, vibrating masses.


Have you even tried using it?


I'm very aware of Obsidian, having used it on and off since the early days, but I would agree that the wording on the linked page (for the 1.0 release) seems to make an assumption that the reader already knows what Obsidian is:

> Obsidian 1.0, the all-new Obsidian.

> A brand new look. A fresh way to browse. An exciting new start.

You could also be misled into thinking this is the home page.

The actual home page does a better job of getting to the point of what Obsidian is:

https://obsidian.md

(And BTW, I recommend Obsidian, it's excellent)


is it a browser


No


No it wasn't just you. The best I could understand was that it was a note-taking app that outputs in markup.


Yes, it is a markdown notes application. This is the core, think Notion but local-first (Sync is a paid extra, or you can use Syncthing or Git to DIY sync).

You can build much more complicated systems with it (I also have it as my todo app and have it pulling out todos from all my notes and prioritising them), or you can use it as a slightly nicer version of using vs code with a folder of markdown files, which was my precious system (there's also Dendron, which is the same idea but as a vs code plugin).


haha, thank-you for trying to help, but ALL of the examples you used are nothing that I'm familiar with.

So I'm thinking that this is a _ME_ problem and not necessarily a 'Product Description' problem.

After installing it, and typing in a few things I notice that it's similar to ZIM (another desktop wiki app) on the surface.

I also appreciate that you corrected my misuse of "markup" when I should have said markdown without making me feel like an idiot.


You weren't wrong in your use though. Markdown is one of the markup languages.

Also yes Obsidian is pretty much a wiki.


Obsidian is a "personal wiki". Why we might need a personal wiki? Because installing a local MediaWiki instance is quite a hassle and organizing your personal notes by using [[WikiLink]] structure is so wholesome.


My thoughts exactly. It sounds cool and I will try it, but even at this moment I'm not sure how is this different then for example OneNote.

Again, don't want to sound disrespectful and I will definitely try the tool.


As a former OneNote user who moved to Obsidian, I would say it's like comparing a go kart and luxury sedan. They both technically get you where you're going if you try hard enough. And if you're not going very far maybe all you need is a go kart.

My obsidian has turned into a personal Wikipedia and it's crazy how much it's improved my efficiency.


Can you explain what it has that onenote, evernote, notion etc doesn't?


Never used Notion. I only toyed around with Evernote years ago and remember it being a cluttered mess. One Note worked alright for basic notes but I noticed I rarely referred back to them. With Obsidian, maybe it's because I put the time into my configuration but I have templates for different types of notes, a tagging system that works great for grouping and reference, and the internal linking really ties everything together.


Mind sharing your setup and process ?


> I'm not sure how is this different then for example OneNote

The main difference is that your notes are stored in a readable plain text format.

But if you are interested in an open format, you may as well go the full route and use the similar open-source app logseq instead.

[1] https://logseq.com/


I feel Dendron is practically the more equivalent open source tool, logseq is a more opinionated tool, being focused on the bulleted sequential use case that it actually feels relatively different to use


It's basically a Markdown editor, except not for a single document, but a collection — which might be all your documents.

Or some subset(s) sure, fine. It's flexible. But the huge value is more readily apparent when it is all the documents (for some meaningul value of "all").


It is pretty straightforward - tool for creating personal knowledge base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_base


If they would simply move "An IDE for your notes" from the "About" page to the top fold of the front page, we'd all have had a much better time.


its not just you, I think they could have written an about page that explains what it is more clearly. Seems neat though, maybe could replace my "stickies" app


Interesting - the homepage is pretty straightforward.


No, it really isn't if you're not already into this type of app (and the recent trendy buzzwords around them). What it is: A note taking app using plain text files and giving great organization views. Nowhere on the main page does it say note taking app. Nowhere. You have to scroll to find "tend your notes like a gardener" as a clue that this is a note taking app. Anyone who hasn't looked at this space for more than 1-2 years will not know that "knowledge base" is investor-speak for "fancy note taking app".


Not that it makes much difference, but "knowledge base" is a much older term than 1-2 years. The Microsoft knowledge base is the first thing that came to mind, which started in 2003. Tools like Lotus Notes were using the term before that, but I can't find exactly when.

This google trends graph confirms my suspicion that it was a more common term back then: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=K...

Out of curiosity I tried to find older references. There are references using this definition back to at least 1995. Beyond that it's trickier because apparently "knowledge base" was used to describe the knowledge available to an AI system during the expert systems era, which is a somewhat different definition. e.g. Lehnert 1977: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED150955.pdf


Think a journal / notes application on steroids.


What part of that sentence don't you understand ? It seems straightforward to me.


knowledge base is buzzwordy. it's a very elaborate (and good!) note taking app.


This recent breed of note-taking tools (Obsidian, Notion, logseq, Roam Research) are aimed at enabling a style of personal knowledge base known as networked thinking, which attempts to facilitate the emergent creation of new knowledge by connecting related ideas in your notes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Vester#Networked_Thin...


Of those, Roam and Logseq definitely are, but Obsidian and Notion are much more open-ended in how they can be used, although I think the Obsidian community online does tend to overindex for that kind of usage.


Would you call a private wiki a note taking app ?




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