[HN Gopher] Obsidian 1.4.10 Desktop (Public)
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Obsidian 1.4.10 Desktop (Public)
Author : l2dy
Score : 103 points
Date : 2023-09-12 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (obsidian.md)
(TXT) w3m dump (obsidian.md)
| IOT_Apprentice wrote:
| I find Obsidian to not really provide a usable experience. Adding
| images and having them often change while either mousing over
| them or inadvertently clicking can switch them to binary looking
| objects.
|
| I find using Apple notes for personal use and confluence at work
| to be faster.
|
| I don't think in markup and have tools like this get in my way
| rather than being quick to capture images & thoughts
| unobtrusively.
| runjake wrote:
| All, 1.4.12 is the current version, released today, with bugfixes
| for the new Properties features.
|
| https://obsidian.md/changelog/2023-09-11-desktop-v1.4.12/
| mirpn wrote:
| Tangentially related, I recently discovered this (quite
| entertaining) video which accurately matches my views on the
| subject of notetaking apps.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRpHIa-2XCE
| 7ewis wrote:
| What's the general consensus on Obsidian?
|
| I've been using Notion on/off for a while and remember reading a
| lot of people were migrating to Obsidian as I believe it had two
| features Notion users have been begging for if I remember
| correctly - offline mode and encrypted at rest (although I
| believe Obsidian is self hosted?)/
| Lacusch wrote:
| Obsidian is similar to Notion, except it's plaintext (mostly
| markdown, but there are plugins for other formats as well) and
| is an electron app it's, which admittedly some people are not a
| big fan of because of the performance reasons. In this case
| though I would argue it's a great strength, because you can use
| JavaScript to write plugins and ot has a good ecosystem
| already.
| rcarr wrote:
| I bloody love this program and use it everyday. I've been
| watching it since the early days, and the team behind it are
| incredible. It was a two person team back then and I can't
| believe how fast new features were flying in on a near weekly
| basis.
| mattkevan wrote:
| I've just started using Obsidian and absolutely love it. I've
| tried many many note apps over the years and it's by far the
| best.
|
| Today I found I could build an archive of meeting notes by
| recording and transcribing conversations with MacWhisper and then
| get a summary and actions via the integrated ChatGPT extension.
| So handy!
| MassiveBonk51 wrote:
| I use Obsidian a decent amount daily but I'm confused by what
| properties are. Are they like tags?
| input_sh wrote:
| In programming terms they're variables you add to the top of a
| note. Or if you ever used a static site generator, they're the
| same as YAML metadata. In fact, they _are_ YAML metadata with a
| prettier interface.
|
| You can't really do anything useful with them within Obsidian
| without some plugins (like Dataview) just yet, but dynamic
| databases are on the roadmap. So, _eventually_ you 'll be able
| to query, filter, sort notes without a third-party plugin, get
| the results as a table, and insert that table into some of your
| notes.
|
| Think "every book note whose author = John Doe, sorted by
| release date", "every note that contains #tag1 and #tag2, but
| not #tag3", things like that. And the result will be auto-
| updated whenever you change some metadata.
| bad_username wrote:
| > In programming terms they're variables you add to the top
| of a note
|
| If you have the dataview plugin installed, you can also
| define properties in the note itself, using the `property::
| value` syntax.
| kepano wrote:
| Properties are a UI for YAML frontmatter, with nice
| autocomplete and search syntax. Allows you to add structured
| metadata to your notes, e.g. dates, numbers, text, checkboxes,
| as well as links to other notes. It's compatible with other
| tools that use frontmatter, such as SSGs (Jekyll, Hugo,
| Eleventy, Astro, etc).
|
| https://help.obsidian.md/Editing+and+formatting/Properties
| daturkel wrote:
| Any particular reason to highlight this release? 1.4 introduced
| Properties, which is cool, but this is just a minor release.
| l2dy wrote:
| Personally I appreciate the fix for "Reveal in Finder" hanging
| a system app (Finder). I also wanted to see how people think of
| the Properties feature, which has not been discussed yet on HN.
| karlicoss wrote:
| It sparks a discussion around knowledge management, that's
| kinda nice :)
| Nekobai wrote:
| In fact, 1.4.12 is already out:
| https://obsidian.md/changelog/2023-09-11-desktop-v1.4.12/
| markab21 wrote:
| Yeah, slow news day.
| joshstrange wrote:
| I imagine that will pick up somewhat in about 20 minutes, or
| rather new articles will start to hit over then next 2 hours
| (Apple event starts at 1pm ET)
| btown wrote:
| To this point, if you're releasing minor-version changelogs,
| expect them to be posted on sites like HN, and make sure you
| link at the top of the post to the announcement of the latest
| major release, for those who might have missed it! It's an easy
| marketing win!
| pvg wrote:
| Minor releases (and plenty of not minor ones) are moderated
| away as mostly offtopic on HN since they turn into generic
| discussion of the project itself which is more often than
| not, a dupe. The saner thing is to just not post them/flag
| them.
| codemac wrote:
| Obsidian supporting properties is the beginning of it's attempt
| to replace org-mode for me.
|
| Something I do wish they did was take the plugins that are
| clearly ubiquitous, and just make them default. It's weird to
| think that Obsidian might be marching forward nicely, but the
| maintainer of the Tasks plugin decides to bail.
|
| Emacs has recently been much better about just including by
| default popular libraries/plugins.
| input_sh wrote:
| Fun fact:
|
| - The author of the popular Minimal theme is now the CEO.
|
| - The author of Kanban, Style Settings, and a couple more
| plugins has been hired.
|
| - The author of Advanced Tables, Breadcrumbs, and Leaflet
| plugins has been hired.
|
| Fingers crossed they also hire the Dataview developer, which is
| in my opinion by far the most powerful plugin available!
| thewataccount wrote:
| I happy for them that they were hired!
|
| I will say though, from my experience (with other software)
| what usually happens is the original plugins/software get's
| abandoned or neglected so they can focus on the official
| implementation. And the official implementations rarely
| feature match everything from the original.
|
| So hopefully that doesn't happen
| replete wrote:
| https://github.com/replete/obsidian-minimal-theme-css-snippe...
|
| This is a repo of my working obsidian UI improvements / plugin
| homogenizations for Minimal Theme users. The Properties autohide
| is pretty handy. Just a bunch of CSS. That's what I like about
| Obsidian, I fix anything I don't like.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I'm running out of patience with the built-in sync deleting
| paragraphs and generally mangling text. Is the standard fix
| generally to do something like git commit all via cron, and if
| so, can android do that these days?
| TheFreim wrote:
| I use syncthing with my phone as the always-on mediator between
| my other devices, works quite well.
| acuveg wrote:
| Does anyone know of a way to use Obsidian in a multiple-user
| setup? I want to use it as a department level solution (5 or so
| users) to share all of our personal knowledge ;) I was even
| thinking of and searching for a check in/check out solution.
| Asking about Windows.
| kepano wrote:
| The Obsidian team uses a shared Sync vault[1] to collaborate on
| making Obsidian. Since Obsidian runs on local files you could
| use any shared file storage like Dropbox. If you want more
| granular version history, you can use Git, there's a nice
| plugin for it[2].
|
| [1]: https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian+Sync/Share+remote+vaults
|
| [2]: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git
| adrienthebo wrote:
| Obsidian Sync may provide a partial solution but it's mainly
| targeted at a single user synchronizing vaults between devices.
| There's also the Obsidian Git[1] plugin if you're working with
| developers that are familiar with Git, with all of the pros and
| cons you'd expect. Finally, there's obsidian-livesync[2] which
| in theory would provide some very powerful functionality; it
| seems very cool but given that doing such livesync is complex
| and easy to get wrong exercising a great deal of caution
| (frequent backups and care when rolling out for production
| uses) seems prudent.
|
| Keep in mind that Obsidian requires a license for business
| use[3]. They're a very small shop that's entirely funded by
| licensing/sync/publishing income and are making a pretty
| fantastic product and they deserve some cash to keep developing
| Obsidian.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/denolehov/obsidian-git [2]:
| https://github.com/vrtmrz/obsidian-livesync [3]:
| https://obsidian.md/pricing
| runjake wrote:
| dang this should probably be dead.
|
| 1.4.12 (a bugfix release) was released today:
| https://obsidian.md/changelog/2023-09-11-desktop-v1.4.12/
|
| No clue why this post is here.
| 2bitencryption wrote:
| I use Obsidian daily and love it.
|
| However, I'm not very disciplined with it. I don't have a
| "process". It's just my scratchpad with daily notes that end up
| being disorganized and gibberish.
|
| Does anyone have a good process they follow with Obsidian? A good
| template, a good, disciplined strategy to stay organized? I'd
| love to hear it, please share :)
| someone321 wrote:
| I think I'm on my third Obsidian year. I can now say that I
| probably put too much effort in "organization" in the beginning
| and in effect, I notice that usually when I'm looking for
| something, I either check the file directly or I use search.
| And I figured that for me tags were not that useful, for now.
| Still, I keep tagging but I don't lose too much time bothering
| about that as I used to in the past.
|
| I would suggest not to worry about organizing too much.
| runjake wrote:
| 1. Create notes. Use tags and descriptive titles.
|
| 2. Don't care about organization.
|
| 3. Install the Omnisearch plugin and it's dependencies.
|
| 4. Find stuff with Omnisearch.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I tag a lot. Some notes still fall between the cracks though so
| recently I've been setting aside certain tags for dataview. I
| have so far a "review" tag and a "relevant" tag for notes that
| I need to reread to see if they're relevant and notes that I
| think are relevant to my current thought processes. Then I
| created a folder that just has notes that use dataview to list
| certain tags like a note that lists all my notes tagged review
| and tagged relevant.
| BigglesB wrote:
| I don't know about "good" processes, but I definitely have
| processes... mainly just templates for daily notes &
| call/meeting notes & a plugin called QuickAdd. Though tbf, I've
| been using more-or-less the same templates since 2018 but in
| Typora... It's nice being able to search back across several
| years of essentially plain-text notes for stuff :-)
| xcdzvyn wrote:
| I've struggled a lot with this too. I still feel like others'
| advice seems to fly over my head, and sometimes different note
| taking systems have wildly contrasting ideas.
| romesc wrote:
| I am approaching 3 years with Obsidian!
|
| What I have found works best is to basically forget about
| putting strong priors on the structure of your notes. Just let
| everything be flat - or at most, create one level of hierarchy
| for a specific project.
|
| When you have a new thought, use search. I have a command that
| pulls up the advanced search tool plugin and fuzzy searches my
| term. I then quickly scan (visually as cards) the notes I
| created already. If there is something related to my idea I
| open that note and continue that thread. If it's new, I create
| a new note.
|
| This can be improved even more by using tags liberally, but I
| find that just having a powerful search and taking the time to
| "check" before creating a new note works very well for my style
| of note taking!
| hotnfresh wrote:
| My "system" in Apple Notes is that I just make sure to
| include words I know I'm likely to use to search for
| something later. It's like tagging, but less work.
|
| Search does the rest of the "organizing"
| singhrac wrote:
| I'm at roughly 2 years, and I totally agree. If you make the
| friction to create a note high, you won't write anything
| down. I find tags sometimes helpful, but the only structure I
| really stick to is to create a daily note every day and start
| writing down what I need to do. It replaces a previous habit
| of creating a YYYYMMDD.txt file in Vim.
|
| I sometimes organize book/paper notes in a specific folder,
| mostly to keep things separated out from the daily notes.
| ryneandal wrote:
| I have issues with memory/retainment due to a traumatic brain
| injury from a car accident in high school, and am incredibly
| dependent on using Obsidian as sort of a "second brain."
|
| While I've only adopted about half of the methods outlined in
| Tiago Forte's book, Building a Second Brain [1], it's been very
| effective for me. I prefer hierarchical folder structure for
| organization, but I do use his overall PARA structure.
|
| I also use an "inbox" or intake folder inspired by Zettelkasten
| for newly created notes. I really believe significant cognitive
| overhead of sorting/tagging/organizing gets in the way of
| getting your thoughts/notes written down. I generally spend
| ~10-15 minutes after getting the kids to bed to organize any
| notes created throughout the day. This is part of my wind-down
| routine, involving quickly journaling an overall summary of the
| day on my daily notes and migrating any outstanding TODO's to
| the next day.
|
| IMO though, the most important thing is to use whatever method
| of structure/routine/organization works for you. Approach it as
| an iterative process and play with interesting ideas or
| methodologies.
|
| One thing in Tiago Forte's BASB that I _strongly_ agree with is
| that regardless of how much organization you put into your
| digital notes, search is often the fastest way to find
| something you're looking for, so spending immense time on
| organization is counter-intuitive to the reason to take notes.
| Spending some time to organize your thoughts can inspire
| connections between notes that you hadn't initially thought of,
| but it is a slippery slope: it is easy to get lost in the
| process of structuring your notes and end up with that as your
| sole purpose of your documented thoughts.
|
| 1: https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/book
| random3 wrote:
| Zettlekasten seems popular with the Obsidian crowd. I think
| it's interesting but only partially following some of the
| ideas.
|
| I use a single large note (log) with timestamps for each entry.
| Each entry is default h2 I use tags per entry Sometimes I split
| out a category in a dedicated log/note or even directory (e.g.
| math)
|
| Having a better search is great, but the process of organizing
| notes is for your brain (i.e. structure your knowledge).
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Tags help, but I am also used to folder structure, so I came up
| with this..
|
| Create a template for new notes, with an auto-populated
| frontmatter.
|
| I use the templater plugin with a script that adds tags based
| on the folders the file is in.
|
| Add this to the top of the template:
|
| ```
|
| --- type: note created: <% tp.date.now("MMMM DD, YYYY") %>
|
| updated: <% tp.date.now("MMMM DD, YYYY") %>
|
| collapsed: true
|
| tags:
|
| - <% tp.file.path(true).toLowerCase().split("/").slice(0,
| -1).join("\n- ")%> ---
|
| ```
|
| Also to lighten the decision making process of categorizing the
| notes, I use daily notes where I would throw all the random /
| current thoughts / information. The `Rollover Daily Todos`
| helps with persistence of daily notes. The only catch is that i
| need to structure the notes as a to-do list
|
| - [ ] but i do it more or less like that anyways.
|
| I will do a daily list cleanup once a month to keep things
| sane. Delete irrelevant stuff or move things into corresponding
| folders.
| thewataccount wrote:
| TAG EVERYTHING - I'm with the sibling comment. I highly
| recommend the templater plugin.
|
| Just choose a template immediately that has the creation date,
| and tags.
|
| Tag your notes, just attempt to be consistent with the tags.
| Obsidian has some crazy powerful plugins that let you build it
| to your workflow - but if you start by tagging everything
| you'll be set moving forward.
|
| I personally like the unique note creator to prepend dates.
|
| Quickadd+Commander lets you make buttons for individual
| templates. Dataview is also very useful.
|
| It took me two years before I really started personalizing it,
| I currently have templates for "regular notes", "weekly
| meeting", and "q/a notes". I'm adding notes to list my #wip as
| well
| [deleted]
| jug wrote:
| Obsidian is really flexible for all sorts of things, through and
| through. I personally use it both for work and personal projects
| within the same folder since it's residing within a OneDrive
| folder on my personal Microsoft account that is selectively
| synced (i.e. just that folder) to my work computer as well,
| together with the rest from my work Microsoft account. Works
| great! Everything is there from meeting notes, to reminder lists,
| to quick scratchbooks, etc. and it's always up to date wherever I
| am for free.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Closed source, right?
|
| It's unorthodox but my favorite notekeeping app has become
| TeXStudio, just raw tex files that I never compile, with macros
| to quickly insert sections, subsections and subsubsections and
| use the nav tree to quickly navigate.
|
| It works pretty well!
| sdfghswe wrote:
| I've recently started using Obsidian for taking notes and am very
| much enjoying it.
|
| For me the main things that matter are
|
| - it works on both desktop (for taking longer notes from reading)
| and android (for short notes on quick thoughts / things to
| remember)
|
| - the underlying file format is just plain text
|
| - sync can be achieved with syncthing
| Nereuxofficial wrote:
| Yeah and the Excalidraw Extension is just incredibly good
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Ah, I haven't explored any extensions yet!
| steveylang wrote:
| That's like at least half the fun! But seriously, there is
| a great library of community plugins.
| jjnoakes wrote:
| I tried it on Android and within the first few minutes I hit
| the following annoyances: - Changing the title
| of a note and then backing out of the note does not save the
| title change; I had to switch focus to the body of the
| note before the title change would save - Backing out of
| a note exited the app instead of bringing me to the previous
| view - Backing out of a sub-setting view exited the
| settings instead of bringing me to the parent settings
| view, so even looking for a setting that might help the first
| two annoyances was also annoying
|
| I'm hoping to give it another go, and perhaps even suggest or
| improve the app when I have some time, but it was definitely an
| underwhelming first impression.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Copying and pasting my a previous comment on obsidian syncing:
|
| Some options for syncing on mobile: Obsidian sells a first
| party syncing solution, which I hear works well:
|
| https://obsidian.md/sync
|
| I do git syncing on Android via termux (It works most of the
| time, except when git decides to shit itself every now and then
| on my tablet):
|
| https://forum.obsidian.md/t/guide-using-git-to-sync-your-obs...
|
| I can't vouch for it because I don't have any iOS devices new
| enough to support it, but supposedly you can use Working Copy
| to sync via git on iOS:
|
| https://forum.obsidian.md/t/mobile-setting-up-ios-git-based-...
| 0_____0 wrote:
| I sync via a third party app that syncs a normal filesystem
| directory to my Android device from Google drive. Seems to
| work well enough that I haven't tried the official sync
| feature.
| stefanvdw1 wrote:
| Also check out the Tasks plugin and the query language it comes
| with. Obsidian has become my one tool for so many things at
| this point!
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(page generated 2023-09-12 23:02 UTC)